Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a short essay. I was happy to talk about some of these sorts of questions with
earlier in the week.Best,
Sam
ON ARTS COMPETITION AND ARTS CABALS
I write frequently on this Substack about the ‘broad church’ and the ‘narrow church’ in art. I am an advocate of the ‘broad church,’ by which I mean that I do not think ‘talent’ is some god-given attribute handed to only a few (and if it is, it’s not all that important); that anybody is interesting so long as they can express themselves with sincerity; and that what matters isn’t so much the ‘quality’ of a work but the psychic distance that a person traveled in order to make it.
But the broad church — like the narrow church — has its discontents. The knock on the broad church is that it’s an invitation to mediocrity, that it becomes difficult to separate out quality and worth if one thinks that way, and I feel like I have to engage in some complex exegesis to deal with that charge.
The point I would make is that there is nothing in the creed of the broad church that would stop somebody from trying to be the absolute best that they can be, and nothing that precludes ferocious competition between artists. The broad church looks favorably on such examples of artistic insanity as: the drummer in Whiplash practicing so hard that he makes his hands bleed, his teacher claiming that his task was to “push people past what’s expected of them” and with no limit really; Hemingway challenging other writers to boxing matches and Bukowski to arm wrestling matches; Mailer insisting that he wrote his books in head-to-head competition with various dead authors and that at times in The Naked and the Dead he had ‘licked’ Tolstoy; the teacher in Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar claiming that writers “are about as civilized as feral cats.” These are maybe deplorable psychic states, but if they are useful tools in bringing the best out of people, in encouraging people to go beyond themselves, then so be it. Jonathan Franzen claimed that if subway riders knew the driving inner ambition of the ‘aspiring writers’ in their midst, it “would make their eyebrows singe.”
The idea here is that art is a calling; that those who enter into it do so voluntarily and with the idea that it is, at the end of the day, a spiritual exercise: they wish to reach the highest, truest form of themselves, they wish to really capture the essence of their era; and are furious with themselves if they fail, if they sell out, if they fall short of that goal. On that path, the notion that somebody living (dead people are no problem) might be better than you i.e. more truthful, more evocative, is insupportable. The examples of these rivalries are legion and, typically, are all-consuming. But there is also a sense that if somebody makes you mad, arouses your jealousy, then they are deserving of respect. And there is a curious camaraderie among artists who hate each other but view each other as being fundamentally equals, players in the same game.
I remember being very moved once when I was in a bar and happened to see an MMA bout on TV — this was right at the time when MMA was crossing over from the underground and being broadcast. The bouts were really dangerous, there was a risk that the fighters might do real damage to or even kill each other, but there was something almost tender in the way that the fighters embraced before and after the fight — an understanding that while they would do everything in their power to annihilate one another in the fight they also respected the other one for being in the ring with them. There is something similar at play, I think, in these famous, life-long literary rivalries.
That, to me, is how art competition works. The teacher — the J. K. Simmons character — in Whiplash puts it well when, discussing Charlie Parker and how hard Parker drove himself, he’s asked if there’s any limit, a line past which the next Charlie Parker would be discouraged, and the teacher, very sure of himself, says, “No man no. Because the next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged.”
But the arts cabal is something very different and deserving of nothing but contempt. Arts competition is fundamentally a private, lonely undertaking; the point isn’t exactly about being ‘good,’ it’s about going as far as you possibly can. It takes its place in the broad church where a really crack choir, really dedicated penitents, are welcome alongside lay people and easygoing Sunday parishioners. The arts cabal, as practiced by publishing houses, newspaper critics, college smart-alecks, and so on, posits that there are those who deserve to be read, listened to, watched, and those who do not; that the world at some level divides into audience and performer. These cabals are forever making differentiations — writing out lists, awarding prizes, and every differentiation is a way (sometimes it’s a marketing gimmick, which is sort of ok, but as often as not it’s genuinely believed as well) of saying that there are a few people at any given time who are able to speak for everyone else. (If you take the prizes literally, the prizes are implicitly saying that there is only one work in a given year that matters; everything else is, in some crucial way, expendable.)
The arts cabal’s way of thinking is so childish that it would seem to not be worth even addressing, but, unfortunately, that is exactly how most people come into contact with art — they are trained to regard it as a sport, to think that, for instance, every serious movie is only made to, at some level, have a shot at an Oscar.
I think of the differences between what I’m describing as the ‘arts competition’ and the ‘arts cabal’ as being basically pastoral. The ‘arts competition’ has a pronounced degree of self-regard, of ego and ambition, but doesn’t get in the way of anybody else making or promoting their own work. The ‘arts cabal’ absolutely does — dividing the world between what is ‘legit’ and what isn’t — and is animated fundamentally by narcissism, by the idea that some work of art can be so wonderful as to make everything that is not that essentially valueless.
But, of course, in practice, it can be very difficult to distinguish, even for those making the work themselves, whether it is driven by ‘healthy competition’ or by narcissism. In pastoral terms, these are old and challenging arguments. Augustine distinguished between ‘cupiditas’ and ‘caritas’ — often manifest in love for the same object — but cupiditas in his view leading back to the self while caritas led ultimately to God. Rousseau distinguished, equally sophistically, between amour-de-soi (the healthy love of the self) and amour propre (the corrupt love of the self as dictated by social norms). Modern writers make the same hairline judgments between ‘healthy narcissism’ (the quality that all children have) and ‘malignant narcissism’ (which is a near-medical condition primarily afflicting ex-boyfriends). There is of course much room for debating who or what falls on the different sides of those divides, but the consistency with which thinkers through centuries have been grappling with these sets of questions implies that there is something to it — a difference between healthy ego and ego that tips over into something else. Art is, again (I believe), more than anything else, a spiritual exercise — a way of understanding the true self in a fictive space unencumbered by normal societal restrictions. And, in that sense, it is also a theological high-wire act, in which you discover if (to put it dramatically) you are dedicated to celebrating God’s world and the divinity in yourself — to push yourself in the direction of that divinity as much as possible — or if you just collapse into self-love, self-regard, the ego covering for itself.
If I had to leave just one comment, it would be: come on over to Timeless to hear me bash the art cabal at every opportune moment! :D God I despise the institutionalization.
https://timelessfelixpurat.substack.com/
Seriously though, I think this is my favorite article you've written. It's the question of our times, the great philosophical premise behind the oversaturated literary present. And you handle it superbly. I tend to lean toward a narrow church personally, but with the caveat that I don't think it's as narrow as the term implies. I don't think the term includes much "lowbrow" culture, apart from that which has transcended its humble origins. And also I don't think it's constructive to tell people they shouldn't write, though the tradeoff is that critics shouldn't be just nice and smiley either since the oversaturation has to be reduced at some point. And critics are perhaps some of the few who can make a difference, even if it's infinitesimal.
I think the premise of the broad church is flawed in that 1) egalitarianism is a value, not a scientific fact, and projecting egalitarianism onto something doesn't make something true, any more than wishing for egalitarianism among, say, engineers makes everyone suddenly capable of being an engineer: if we understand that engineers are exceptional people then why can't we extend that understanding to artists of a certain caliber?; and 2) the broad church perspective is, in many respects, a negative backfiring consequence of the writer's mythos. A lot of people envy the writers mythos, so they have sought to deconstruct it; ergo, all the anti-writers-mythos arguments, especially from academia. But also because of that envy they want to be writers and can be as long as the writers mythos doesn't make them feel like interlopers for being less like Hemingway. You mentioned mediocrity, and that's an issue; but I would take it a step further and say that it's more like a professional "migrant crisis."
But like I said: I don't think it's productive to tell people not to write. Anyone and everyone should try their hand. And Whiplash, by the way, was a hilarious movie. I laugh at it the way Kafka's friend circle laughed at his stories. And call me cruel, but there are times when I think what that drummer kid went through would really do more to give us a great artist than a heap of stupid prizes. You hit the nail right on the head with that one!
As for self-love, Jesus said it best: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these." The 'as thyself' is the clincher: it's perfectly fine to love ourselves, just not only ourselves.
The tricky thing here would be that neither the broad church nor the cabal quite know what to do with people who make art not caring particularly about competition or being the best or being driven or even with a sense that they mean for what they make to be compared to, owned by or seen, but whose work, once either the people in the pews of the broad church or the cabal happen upon it by chance, seems extraordinary. That alone documents that there is perhaps a broader church still in which notions of "best" or "great" are helpful neither as motivators nor as tools, not really. Perhaps as Felix Purat suggests in his comment, neither is an assumption that everyone can make art, or that all art is equal, but that the differentiators in artistic work can't simply be some great chain of being that sorts great, good and mediocre into their proper placing.
As for the cabal, it seems to me that despising the cabal has to be first and foremost about the superintending of *markets* rather than mere dominion over taste or aesthetics. Which is why I think a cabal around literature is not especially threatening in this respect: it does not really gate off or protect a narrow market any longer, for the most part. Visual art, on the other hand, is entirely a different matter.