I had a conversation with my roommate this evening about taste, and I've been thinking a lot about it.
I recently had to read a portion of the poem Howl by Allen Ginsberg (if you're sensitive to f-words and obscenity, don't read it. But I still secretly think you should) for my American Lit class. One particularly vocal kid raised his hand as we began discussing it and said, "You know, I don't really get it, I don't think it's all that great. I mean, I didn't even understand a word of the thing. Personally, I got absolutely nothing out of it."
I heard a handful of exasperated and slightly horrified gasps explode around the room (my own included) at the words. Upon our further discussion, it seemed a portion of us understood the poem, loved it, and thought it had artistic merit and aesthetic value. And the rest just didn't.
Why? Why is there such a disparity between those who love art and who have devoted their education to its study, and who cannot agree on what has value, what has beauty, what can be rightly considered "art"? Why is there so much to say about something that is inherently static? A painting, a poem, a building, a symphony? Those things were painted, written, and built long ago and have (usually) not altered since their completion. There is nothing about their nature that has changed or is changeable. And yet people write books and conduct debates and dedicate entire careers to the exploration, analysis, and appraisal of them. And the artists themselves. What is it about them that gilds their names in our collective memory? That gives them a sort of exemption from societal values justified by the pursuit of their Art, that praises them for the mere act of Creating, that provides for them a unique pedestal among the noted celebrities of time? One may easily group political leaders, social activists, the wealthy, the intellectuals, and the entrepreneurs on the same shelf; but the artists? No, they are something apart: strange, composed of different elements than the rest of us from their birth. One may aspire to be a president, even a monarch; one may work to be wealthy, study to be intellectual, gain experience and a certain measure of indignation to change society; and one may start a business as easily as one may set up a lemonade stand on the corner down the street. But one does not become an Artist, and one is not considered to be such by obtaining certain credentials or experience. It is something one is born to do; a career, or rather a mentality present and continually developing from the first breath. One is not an entrepreneur from birth, but an Artist? That is the only way to do it.
I don't understand it, none of it makes sense. To create. Why do it? From where comes that strange purple pleasure of seeing--and most importantly, feeling, for thence comes the Art-ness of it--your words on a page, your brush strokes on a canvas? From where comes the pleasure of seeing and feeling others' words and brushstrokes? For in the end, that's all they are, aren't they? Shapes articulated on a flat surface. And still there's always that something more.
Place To Be -- Nick Drake
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