Feeling Meh About Art
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I rode my bike 16 miles to the performance. It was about half an hour long, it was good, I stuck around a little while after, I biked home. There had been fewer people there than I’d expected. I tried to go to dance class the next day, it was good but I had to stop halfway through because my chronic hip thing is back. There was a different show by people I like that was running for 3 weeks. I told myself I’d go. I thought of 3 people who might like to see the show too. One was out of town, the others I never asked, maybe I will. I haven’t seen the movies that are good and out right now, maybe I will. One night there was a dance outdoors by people I didn’t know at all. I told myself I’d go and then the night of it was a heat wave and work ran late and I didn’t go. I didn’t go to the concert in the park the next night either.
When I don’t go see the art it’s strangely easy to say hey, whatever, it was probably just meh. When I do go see the art sometimes it is, in fact, meh. And sometimes when I go see the art it’s very good, but I, myself, still feel meh as I wave goodbye to a couple acquaintances and unlock my bike and ride home, where I might moodily turn some pages or watch something made by people who are currently on strike in an industry I’ve dreamed about working in but don’t.
Along the way I am bothered by the institutions. I’m bothered even though I’m not suffering or in lack, and even though I know I’m using the phrase “institutions” rather widely and to describe amorphous clusters of funding and employees at least a few of whom are probably doing their best. Their application questions feel self-satisfied, but perhaps they, themselves, feel meh on the other side of the form? Can they read the meh between my lines of eager text? Are they shutting down next year anyway?
My artist friends are doing alright. Some of them have great gigs coming up! Some are on strike. Some are in long-term interpersonal stalemates. Some are asking for what they need. A couple have never experienced so much disappointment in the face of the supposedly most prestigious opportunities of their lives. We empathize, vent, gossip, listen, squeeze a knee or shoulder, say goodnight and plan to see each other soon.
Last night on the roof a friend started crying about how much she does, in fact, care about art, and how that great care is the thing that underlies the cynicism, the so-what, the critique, the feeling-bad, the yuck. Actually, we had just watched the livestream of a performance series called Yuck. Our friend Lichen Bouboushian did a piece that had kept us absolutely rapt, clutching my cell phone with our ears lit up to catch every word above the sound of the highway a block away. Lichen’s piece was structured in part around a list of things they hate, which covered a lot of parts of life but definitely included the ways people and organizations can be shit to each other in the context of this thing called art. Later, they spoke of good things, things that allow us to rise out of the persistent feeling of cynicism, yuck, meh. I did not feel meh about Lichen’s piece. I felt shifted, struck, relieved.
It may be that this is all just a touch o’ the summertime sads, the dog-day doldrums, the hot and heavy heartache, the Italian-ice itch, the climate summer clarity, the days-slowly-shortening depression, the goddamn-I-really-shoulda-gone-to-see-Beyoncé gloom. It is strange to care so deeply that your body has to dull itself to chug along, or to feel so dull that the sudden sparks of meaning, joy, and motivation can be nonsensically simple: a livestream, a whiff of shucked corn, a plan to join the picket line. In any case, I am seeking to receive what is availably beautiful, to fight what is fucked, and to support the people around me as best I can - in the season of meh and beyond. And there will be some beyond.
Yuck was excellent, here's the livestream we watched.
And for some levity: if you saw the last newsletter's plea to enter a fundraiser raffle for Queer|Art, I'll have you know that out of 20 pairs of gay boots that QA had to give away in the raffle, 6 were won by my peeps. SIX! out of TWENTY! pairs of gay boots for gay art! In conclusion: enter raffles and listen to your Uncle Nor, kids.