Art is scary and art is hard.
Hey, folks,
I have been watching The Bear (no spoilers please, I'm about a third of the way through the second season and I'm not a binge watching type: attention span too short.) and anyway last night I watched the episode (S2E4, "Honeydew") where Marcus goes to Copenhagen and was struck by what a completely beautiful allegory for all kinds of art that narrative constructs. There's so much graceful and indirect dialogue and exposition in this show, and it's just lovely.
Two of the lines that caught my attention were in the conversation between Luca and Marcus:
"That's the secret, just fuck up?"
"Might be. Just... fuck up."
and
"It's less about skill and more about being open."
How true, and how terrifying. We joke a lot about writing and how it's easy: "Just open a vein and bleed on the page." But they're the hah-hah-only-serious kind of jokes, and they are funny because they are true.
You can't have great art or great love if you don't make yourself vulnerable--open yourself up, take risks, commit. You have to get in there with both feet and be truthful to the person you're trying to establish a relationship with, whether that person is an audience or a life partner.
You have to make yourself open, and the hard part is that the world punishes open-ness. Whether it's the critical establishment or the brigade-ready bully pulpit of social media or the people in your life who will fuck you over out of jealousy, there's always somebody who will use your vulnerability against you.
I quote for a moment the great Chuck Tingle:
In some ways, I think we have entered an era of guarded art, because the artists are so accessible and exposed, so available to harassment or bullying.
It's hard--the push toward safe ground is compelling, but of course there is no safe ground. And it's not that art is aiming toward the lowest common denominator or whatever dismissive construction is currently trendy. It's that trying to protect yourself from constant criticism is perfectly normal and natural and human... and it's also mediocritizing.
If everything is safe, everything winds up at a Network-TV-in-the-90s level of complexity and challenge.
I'm not saying, by the way, that one should go out of the way to be offensive or shocking or just freaking racist/sexist/queerphobic. That's not the kind of avoidance I'm talking about. But when we find ourselves tempering the likability of our protagonists, say, so that the social media mountain won't fall on our heads, we're diluting the impact of what we have to truthfully and compassionately say as artists.
And it's funny, because often the art that's most reliant on "edginess" for its impact is the safest for the artist, because those artists are often protected by privilege. Whereas more marginalized artists get less support, are punished more thoroughly for lifting their voices, and have to work harder for less notice and support. The pressure wants to keep you down.
So you have to swim against that pressure constantly and consciously. It takes a lot of courage and determination and a willingness to fuck up, but it also offers us the opportunity to be open and skillful and to tell the truth.
Telling the truth is terrifying, because it makes us vulnerable, and there's always somebody out there who wants to take advantage of that vulnerability.
But it's also the only way to make real art.
Stay safe out there, folks, and remember that nobody but you sees the world the way you do--and the real art comes from that unique perspective, not from recycling received wisdom and keeping your head down.
Best,
Bear