Sincerity: The endangered artistic ingredient
For anyone who has read a few of my pieces, I know it sometimes seems like I am on a mission to downplay the arts — to take artists down a peg and to reduce the glitter factor in the perception of the world’s audience. That’s because I am. The drama is supposed to be in the work, not in the lifestyle and in the peripherals of the performance. All that stuff is tabloid bull, not artistic expression.
I operate under the principle that the most important part of the artistic formula is sincerity. I guess some people won’t agree with me. And my distaste for what I see as insincerity and pretense is extreme — I acknowledge that. I’d rather see performers in their street clothes than in glitzy costumes. I wish symphony orchestras played in jeans and T-shirts. To me, having dancers behind you in a concert is phony showmanship. In fact, I even hate the word “show” because it is often preceded by the phrase “putting on,” which, to me, sounds like lying.
I know — I almost want to satirize myself. But if I am writing about sincerity, better to be honest.
If one acts much differently on a stage than one does in real life, one is not communicating one’s most sincere emotions and ideas. Right? Would I address a group, anywhere else but from the stage, by saying: “Helooooh! How you all feeling tonight? I said, how you all FEELing tonight?” (My acting brethren — and sistren, for that matter — are excluded from this discussion. They open up another can of philosophical vermicelli that I will certainly boil to a nice al dente at some other point.)
My extremist self hates the idea of the focus being taken off of the art itself. At a concert, one should listen to the music, not watch the lasers and lights and dancers. You could argue that all these things in performance enhance the music. Sure they could. But it makes me wonder why the music needs enhancement. Isn’t it good enough on its own?
(Dancers, please don’t get mad at my statement above. I’m not cutting on dancing. If anything, I am arguing that it should be focused on and not used as an accessory to the main show. I suppose this raises interesting questions about ballet. Strange that I have no problem with music being second fiddle to a movie or to choreography, but somehow that feels more like a blending of arts rather than the use of one art as a decorative bauble for another’s vanity.)
To me, there is a difference between showmanship and the pure communication of emotion and ideas. The latter is the higher art. It is what inspired most of us artists from the earliest awakenings of creative desire. (The musicians, for instance, who say they went into rock and roll “to get women” ought to have their musicians’ licenses revoked. They’re an embarrassment. This doesn’t mean they are bad musicians, necessarily, just inane people.) There are also those who have always wanted to be on stage; to perform. That is a different calling than the one the predominantly creative artist hears — a slightly more needy drive, but an understandable one.
If the truly creative artist performs, it is because of the need to communicate, not the need to be clapped for. This is an important distinction. For him or her, the joy is in the creating, not in having created and not in basking in the audience’s applause. Sure, everyone needs to be validated — we all want an audience for our work, or I wouldn’t be writing this article. What the sincere artist needs is not the wild applause of millions, but the praise (and even the constructive criticism) of those he or she respects.
Maybe, in the end, that is why there is such a soft place in my heart for the artist who creates without fame, perhaps from childhood to death: the pure desire to do — to make something profound. If the unknown artist has accepted this obscurity, he or she is free (though maybe not by choice) of marketing concerns and ticket sales. Making good art is the only motivation, especially to those who have come to grips with their anonymity; therefore, they are simply trying to produce the best work they can, free of vanity, free of pretense, free of glitter.
A lifetime of anonymity is also kind of a crucible. If you are still churning out work without the success, you must really mean it. If you are really talented and you really mean it, how can your work not be brilliant and powerful? How can it not be sincere?
What can be a better source of good art than the life of a person who has worked and worked and matured in her art all of her life and who has never given up, even though no one was buying? She has come ever closer to mastering her art and, now, she is unfettered by peripherals like fan expectations, maintenance of an artistic career and the cultivation of an image. Now, all she needs to do is her best writing or her best composition or her best painting, sculpture, etc. And it can come right from the head and heart. Sincere and direct. She is in control of her work.
Let’s wish for her to gain some positive feedback to keep her going; maybe a few sales. You could see this as a paradoxical, but, it would be a shame if some of the world didn’t get a chance to enjoy artistic purity, for once, without the lights, costumes, dancers and tricks.
I’d be interested to hear people’s take on this, bearing in mind that I am admittedly an extremist, here. I guess everyone has his “line” with tolerance for “show.” It is not as if I want a stage to look like a naked warehouse. Ambiance is good for the communication of art. But when ambiance turns into pizazz, I start to feel lied to. At what point does that happen to you? Or does it not ?
Chris Matarazzo’s ARTISTIC UNKNOWNS appears every Tuesday.
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But Chris, isn’t the dressing down of performers itself an affectation, and “I’m-just-an-ordinary-guy” pose? I wish evening dress would come back into fashion. I’d love to don white tie, tails, and a top hat — to say nothing of a cape.
Except for a select few, there are few musicians/bands who sound better live than on their CDs. So why go to their concerts unless you have something to see in addition to something to listen to?
I think dancing creates something virtual — going back to Langer’s definition. I’m having a hard time putting my finger on just what that virtual something is though. Visual, obviously. A painting, perhaps? The body is the brush, the movement the picture?
And most dance requires the accompaniment of music. As with movies, they compliment eachother. Movies would be lackluster shells without the score to evoke emotion — usually without the watcher even realizing it.
But I see your point. I’m not sure a group of dancers behind Madonna (or whoever) necessarily adds anything or compliments the music.
My, what a welter of half-baked opinions! LOL To be blunt, this is the sort of thinking I never hear coming from artists themselves. You’re “defending” what doesn’t need to be defended. Most artists of my acquaintance would read this, laugh, and go back to doing their art. What I get out of this is an apparent vast ignorance of the creative process itself.
The bit about dancers is completely wrong-headed, because it seems to be an opinion formed by watching dancers added to rock shows, where it’s true that dancing is often an add-on, rather than on intrinsic dance itself, ranging from classical ballet to Bill T. Jones or Merce Cunningham. You’ve stated your own contradictory feelings here; let me add to your contradictions by pointing out that dance isn’t an isolate art and never has been. You want it go back to being something it never was. Having myself played live music (as a composer and improvising musician) for dance concerts (not to mention for silent films), your opinions about how dancers ought to be used would probably be laughed at by most dancers.
Yet there is a kernel of sanity amidst this welter of half-baked notion. That kernel is about respecting art AS art, for its own sake, not for what it can do for your commercially-driven show experience.
People do expect a lot when ticket prices are so high these days. The root of those practices you’re abhoring is based in commerce, not in “pure” art. One reason that popular music shows are big showy productions (and again, they always have been), is because the music industry is indeed dominated by commerce (and has been). Rock and roll puts on a show that is more than just about the music, sometimes, for two reasons: 1. gotta make money doing it; and 2. sometimes the music IS weak, without a show. No musician would put Kiss concert on the same level as a Mozart concert; they’re too entirely different worlds.
Except that there’s a fallacy here, too. The fallacy is the “purity” of art—there never has been any such thing. Artists have always needed to make a living. I can tell you from my own experience as an artist that in this world, you need to work to pay rent. If you work a 40 hour week, you often come home too tired to actually DO your art. If you work at your “pure” art in obscurity, with no independent source of non-work income, you starve or become homeless. And then where do you do your art?
No, artists like everyone else have always had to earn their living. What you neglect to point out here is HOW. At least artists who are “prostituting” their art are making their living FROM their art, not from working at Wal-Mart, and coming home too tired to make their art. Artists who DO make their living from their creativity are happy in that they ARE making their living from their creativity and talent, and not pumping gas.
You’ve obviously never had to work as a commercial artist OR as a fine artist. No artist shares your opinions about “pure” art, beyond fantasy and wishful thinking. All of us know better.
You’re just recycling the Romantic myth of the “pure,” unpaid, starving solitary hero-artist, working alone in obscurity. That’s a nicely Romantic myth that was never really true. It was promoted by the Romantic artists who wanted to be seen as individualistic Hero-Artists, but in fact it was only ever a myth. No artist actually works that way: and once again this is a myth that only non-artists believe.
As an artist, poet, and composer, I’ve spent most of my life around other creative individuals, and without exception they all need community, if only to gather together to talk with each other about what they’re trying to do. Art doesn’t thrive in solitary vacuums; it needs feedback. Most artists who follow the myth you’re supporting go off by themselves and are never heard from again, and if they are, their art has often become so disconnected from everything that it’s either incomprehensible or pointless. Solitary artists, despite the myth, often end up in artistic dead ends. They are only occasionally innovative geniuses; they’re usually cranks.
As for sincerity: Well, let’s see. What you’ve argued for here makes any taint of money or commercialism be defined as de facto insincere. Once again, it’s a false dichotomy, and completely unreal. There are indeed artists who have not achieved fame and fortune who keep doing it because they are dedicated to it—but not because they are above the fray, rather because its’ like breathing, you make art or you’re dead. You ascribe a wishful-thinking motivation about purity to such artists who labor in relative obscurity (I am one of these, who matches your profile while mocking it) when in truth we’d all like to be well-off enough from our art-making to drop the day job and just keep making art. Once again, your opinions are not of the real world.
You’re correct in that sincerity, whatever that is, will not surface in art if it is self-conscious. But you’re incorrect in believing that sincerity is a function that is automatically destroyed by any contact with commerce. Except you do allow for minimal contact, purely on grounds of encouragement. How incredibly condescending you are to working artists! Do you imagine that Charles Dickens was an insincere writer because he was paid to publish his novels in newspaper installments? Or Henry James? By your criteria, Emily Dickinson was a sincere writer, but Walt Whitman was not. Self-promotion by your criteria is inherently insincere.
But that’s a crock. Even Emily Dickinson had her small community of readers. Dickens sincerely wanted to depict the hard life of the lower classes in Victorian England, as a way of improving their lot (and he succeeded).
You are recycling the Modernist myth—which is a late Romantic myth, founded upon the hero-artist myth—of “art for art’s sake.” That’s all well and good. But not even the High Modernists practiced the myth they promoted. They expected to get paid for their artistic work. The Bauhaus school was not a charity institution.
Maybe you need to start making art, rather than just opinion about it. Then maybe you would appreciate the dilemmas of the creative process, and what artists must sacrifice to be able make their art, and perhaps come to realize just how unreal your myth of artistic “purity” really is.
Frank — point very well-taken. If one’s inner-soul is truly cape-clad, it should shine through in dress. That would be sincerity at its best! A negative reaction to that would be my own fault, for sure.
Art — you are clearly very creative, at least when it comes to creating a fanciful bridge between what I said and what you want me to have said. An interesting argumentative technique: set ’em up and knock ’em down yourself. I literally can’t argue with you.
Well, Chris, you could if you wanted to. I drew every implication and response directly from what you wrote. So I didn’t “invent” anything, I just responded to what you said. If I made mistaken assumptions, they were based on what you presented.
And you openly stated you wanted replies to your admittedly extremist viewpoint as expressed here. You got exactly what you asked for. Your choice to refuse to respond to any it speaks volumes, and rather seems to prove my point.
Oh well.
Art, I still can’t argue with your points about the piece, because they are mostly irrelevant to what I said. (Even after comments by someone else on a previous piece of mine showed you ignored an entire passage in your comments.) I’m not going to give you a critique of your argumentative strategies. That’s my day job and I am off the clock. But you might want to consider the fact that you read a plea for artistic sincerity and concluded your response to it by accusing a writer you know nothing about of having a “vast ignorance” about the creative process and you insulted that writer, who composes music every single day (and has since the age of ten), by telling him to start creating and stop giving his opinions. My abilities as an artist were not part of the piece. You felt it was okay to attack my worth as an artist. That, I never asked for. Your response was not constructively critical, it was nebulous and mean-spirited. “Oh well,” indeed. Your intention more to prove your superiority than to discuss my ideas. That’s not my thing. I just want to discuss the thing that drives me in life with people who also want to find answers, especially those of us who work day jobs and don’t cop out when they get home and say they are too tired to create.
You just didn’t get what I was saying, Art. But I don’t think you’ll even consider whether that might be true.