But This Is Wondrous Strange: Week 2
Week the Second, What’s Good?
It’s been a strange and enervating week. Work and overextension on art projects made things stressful, then the news of Neil Peart’s death yesterday made it all sad. I’ll pen a proper tribute soon, but this video of the Rush boys having a hilarious, tipsy dinner together is the next best thing to listening to his music.
It’s All Good, Geraldo
Jerry Saltz, the often peevish (and impish) NYT art critic tweeted the above hot take this week about public art. It got me thinking again about a subject I started wrestling with before I went back to art school: what’s art? And even more to the point: what’s “good?”
The tweet is a paraphrase of Theodore Sturgeon’s famous “90% of everything is crap.” The Wikipedia page for Sturgeon’s Law has more detail, but it wasn’t an attempt to trash most of human endeavor. It was Sturgeon saying science fiction—at the time dismissed by many as inferior or childish—was equal to any other genre or form. Most things are, well, mundane, which if nothing else is what crap is. But some of it is great, and a little is genius. So, maybe it should be called Sturgeon’s Razor, paring away derisive framing to get to the central part, the meat, underneath. Any work can be worthy of examination, regardless of where it comes from or where it resides.
I’m a fan of TV Tropes. Less so of the rabbit holes I invariably fall into when going there, but there’s also a trove of good things at their own Sturgeon’s Law page.
Saltz is a critic, and I enjoy him, but his job is to publicly discern. Evaluate. Assess. I don’t want that job. I’d like to elevate creativity in the world, and mostly keep my opinions about what I find terrible to myself. Because even in the terrible, I can see value of some kind. We all have the capacity to create, to make art, and the act itself is so essentially human it needs encouragement and support. Find what’s good and move forward, make better things and improve our abilities.
I’ve had a notion to start a video channel devoted to art education for some time, and my first set of ideas for episodes centered on public art. I moved to Portland after 17 years in Los Angeles to find it busting with the stuff, from sculpture on downtown streets to massive murals every few blocks to sidewalk chalk scrawls. It’s a cornucopia. But if I start thinking and writing about any particular piece, it isn’t to talk about how much better it is than other things, or how awful it is. I want to find what’s central and specific and compelling about it.
When I was a lot younger, and reckless enough to watch daytime trash TV (mostly because, O children, in the long long ago, there was no streaming online video, nor hundreds of cable channels, and we took what we could get), I sometimes caught an episode of Geraldo Rivera’s eponymous, sensationalist talk show. People basically yelled at each other and hurled salacious accusations, and sometimes chairs. One moment that always stood out to me was a guest who’d been called out for some outrageously antisocial or exploitative behavior who casually replied, “it’s all good, Geraldo.” It was funny, the egomania of such a blithe dismissal, and if he hadn't been a jerk I'd have admired his brashness. But he didn’t mean it was all literally good. He meant it in the colloquial sense that it wasn't the end of the world, that it was okay. And so it is, in another context, with art. One of my goals is to keep looking for the good, the sincere, the expressive. Humans make art, it's part of who we are as beings. Just about everything created is okay, and probably has something good in it.
We’re Here Because We’re Here
If you haven’t yet listened to John Green’s amazing, heart-squeezing podcast episode of The Anthropocene Reviewed, “Auld Lang Syne,” please do. John covers the history of the New Year's Eve standard, and ponders the ways we’ve applied it to our sense of renewal and beginning a fresh, shiny year. Usually, he does two reviews per show, but this one’s all about that one song and thing we all know and do.
You’re still here? It’s over! Go home. Go.
That’s a wrap on #2! And this is your reminder that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is streaming on Netflix. Still good.