A call for an end to arsty-fartsy whining

A call for an end to arsty-fartsy whining

Posted on October 5th, 2010 by Chris Matarazzo

Complaining about the cruel, insensitive world is a norm for creative artists. So is blaming that world for their own obscurity. The thing is, about 98.34% of artists who complain about their plight have no right to. If you want to whine about why you didn’t “make it” and be free of my judgment (and who doesn’t?), you will need to meet certain standards. Otherwise, stop flapping your artsy-fartsy gums and get back to creating.

I’m a novelist, you know. Oh, wait — you don’t know. That’s because I am a complete idiot. Two novels sit in my little studio gathering dust — really astute and discerning dust that knows a good book when it sees one, clearly, but dust, nonetheless. Whose fault? Mine. I accept that. My obscurity is not a result of a world that “doesn’t understand me” or that can’t keep up with my multi-layered, soul-illuminating prose. Members of the world audience haven’t even had the chance to misread my work and condemn it, because I have not taken sufficient steps to put it before them. Why? Choices. I choose very little over creating, believe me. The problem is, I choose almost everything over the “business” end of art — sending things out, writing query letters, etc.

So who are the (calculator time) 1.66% who get to complain, free of my universally feared condemnation? People like this:

Picture a guy rubbing the sleep out of his eyes as he sits on the edge of a mattress on the floor of a horribly tiny motel room, either in Los Angeles or New York (only these locations are acceptable). He has been renting this room by the week for many years. He is skinny, because he can only afford to eat once per day — usually ramen noodles. This morning will start with his usual three-mile walk for conditioning; he doesn’t have the kind of protein in him that it takes for jogging. He is somewhere around the age of sixty-five and lives solo because he has broken ties with his fellow humans in pursuit of success as an artist. At night, he performs or displays his paintings or reads his poetry in the arts district of the city, depending on his type of art. Or he stays in and creates.

Our hero is not on drugs. He is not an alcoholic. None of his time gets pissed away at parties, because that would eat up too much energy. He is also not afraid to “sell” his work and has knocked on the doors of agents and industry reps for forty years now, with no results. Every day. There is no wife and there is no family because he realizes that any sane human must put them first, before art, and he doesn’t ever want to be one of those celebrity failures-at-life he sees on the TV shows with whooshy, animated graphics.

Still, he has no money, no contract, no publishing deal, even though he is startlingly talented. (The talent part is essential, here.) This man has a right to complain. The world is turning its back on him, despite his full energies and endless potential. It is not fair. He has a right to whine about it. (But he doesn’t, because he is too busy.)

Now, before you tell me about your mom whose promising concert mandolin career was cut short in a front-end loader accident when she was seven, know that I put her in with the excused ones under the category of those who have been truly cheated — horrible accidents, disease, underhanded deception by others — that kind of thing. (Your grandparents don’t get off so easily. What was the kid doing near that thing?)

Everyone else, however, should clam up.

If you are lucky, you can eat your cake and have it too. Occasionally, a soccer mom scratches out a best-seller between laundry loads. Now and again, a plumber who belts out Puccini arias gets world fame from a game show. That’s cool. But it is, mostly, luck.

The rest of us need to accept both our anonymity and the fact that the world doesn’t owe us a crumb for our talent. We can hope for a break. It could happen. But if it doesn’t, we need to remember the chills we got when we heard our first studio playback; when we saw our first story in print in the school paper; when the teacher put up our drawing over her desk, and let that continue to drive us on.

Ultimately, the choices we make are the cause of our artistic situation. We need to face that.

If we really are artists, we will create and we will never stop. There are a lot of geniuses in graves. If someone hadn’t found Emily Dickinson’s poems in a box, after she died, tied up into pretty little books with ribbons, we never would have heard of her. But that doesn’t change her life — she wrote; she died. Maybe it is not about the world giving us recognition. Maybe it is about us giving the world beauty and insight. Maybe the arts are an even higher, more selfless calling than we all thought.

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Chris Matarazzo

Chris Matarazzo is a writer, composer, musician and teacher of literature and writing on the college and high school levels. His music can be heard on his recent release, Hats and Rabbits, which is currently available. Chris is also the composer of the score to the off-beat independent film Surrender Dorothy and he performs in the Philadelphia area with the King Richard Band. He's also a relatively prolific novelist, even if no one seems to care yet. His blog, also called Hats and Rabbits, is nice, too, if you get a chance...