Sobering Considerations for Substack Writers who are “Artists”

The most crowded room in some of the finest museums in Paris, London and New York is often the cafeteria.

By

David Gottfried

This article began as a letter to a friend on substack:

Dear X,

Your free-associative talk raised so many disparate issues !

I will address one of the issues you discussed: Art and the desire to create art.

You want to create “art.” I want to create “art.” Every other person born after 1945, who came from a middle-class background or richer, wants to create art.

One hundred and Fifty years ago, most people never considered themselves artists, or putative artists or creative people. The overwhelming majority of people were simply trying to get their “daily bread.”

Sometimes I think that the widespread contemporary yen to be artistic is simply a manifestation of the smug self-importance of petty, over-privileged, prissy princelings of our civilization of bourgeois braggarts.

Many of these people have some technical proficiency, and no small measure of intelligence, but they DO NOT BURN WITH ANYTHING TO SAY.

Yesterday, I was re-reading Halberstam’s introduction to “The Best and the Brightest,” and he spoke of its success. He said that a certain illustrious writer (I don’t remember who it was. The writer’s name is in the “Introduction” to the “Best and the Brightest.”) had told him how to write the book that will really sell:

“If you burn to express a certain thing, that is the thing you should write about and that is the thing that will get the most readers”

So many people are writing stuff to appear cute, artistic, intelligent or witty, but their output often fails because it has no fire inside demanding expression.

Listen to the Beatles, “Please, please me.” It doesn’t merely express a desire for love. It has the intensity and commitment of a JIHAD FOR LOVE. We felt it in their music, and their music was loved as it deserved to be loved.

It is no shame not to be an artist. Our society arguably does not need more artists. In the galleries and museums of New York and Paris the most crowded room is often the cafeteria.

About ten years ago, I read a critic who said that since the advent of French Impressionism, artists have had, essentially, one goal: “Epater le bourgeoisie,” or shock, confound and irk the stuffed shirts in the suburbs.

For over one hundred and fifty years, artists and philosophers joyfully or sneeringly jeered, berated, and denounced upper middle-class propriety, stolidity, and the general sense that our foes were all emotional and political derivations of that funny hunter from the Bugs Bunny comics, Elmer Fudd. (I suppose Bad Bunny has resurrected my memories of Bugs Bunny, Crusader Rabbit, etc.)

I love writing like a sarcastic, sardonic son of bitch, who combines the haute elegance of Gore Vidal with the gut punches of Norman Mailor, but after a while is it time for us to stop being the acne-scarred, angry adolescent and give it a rest. (To be honest, I don’t want to ever give it a rest.)

Although we arguably don’t need any more self-indulgent, egocentric artists, our society is in desperate need of more home health aides, because of our rapidly aging population, and more plumbers because of our decaying infrastructure and pipes coated with lead.

Besides, we ought to read that which is good. Attention devoted to the enormous numbers of mediocre artists means less attention to the works of Paul Simon, Paul Mc Cartney, William Shakespeare and Pablo Picasso.

I may sound like a bit of a snob. That might be true. I was raised by people of another age who are now in their graves. They told me that in the 1950’s most educators believed that 85 percent of the population should not go to college as they did not have the raw IQ to properly study college course work. As I remember my days in college, and students who spent more time painting their fingernails than reading, and students who majored in French who never learned to speak French (But did spend their Junior year getting juiced in France), I am beginning to see the wisdom of those old fogeys who favored a very restrictive policy on college enrollments.

PS. Someone said the preceding was smug and egotistical, as if I was posing as superior to my peers. I readily admit that some of my criticisms, of some “artists,” are quite applicable to some of my work and personality.

Indeed, I remember that in a Freshman class on European art, I wrote a final paper which contained these starry-eyed lines, “The red was not only on the canvass; the red also raged in their radical, leftist minds.” My professor wanted to know which artists I was referring to and demanded sources. I had no concrete info to substantiate my claims. Just a vague, ineffable dream of revolution birthed from a rich, romantic diet of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan.