What Does A Healthy Culture Look Like?

Manifesto(es)

Dear Friends,

I have a recent piece up in Persuasion on the current PEN America fracas and one up in Compact Magazine on Obama and wokeism. At the partner site Inner Life, Liz Haswell and Joshua Doležal chat on sending their children into the university system they left.

Best,

Sam

WHAT DOES A HEALTHY CULTURE LOOK LIKE?

I’ve been reflecting this week on a couple of state-of-the-culture pieces — on Elle Griffin’s “No One Buys Books” and on Chris Jesu Lee’s The Nostalgia Plot and, like in some Sim for total dorks, I wanted to think through what the criteria of a healthy artistic culture would be.

1.It must be decentralized. At this point in world history, everyone knows what heavy-handed cultural control looks like.

2.It must be a big tent. It’s really true that ‘everybody has a story to tell,’ that ‘everybody has a book in them,’ etc. Even more than producing quality work, in a healthy cultural environment the instruments of culture have to be widely, if not universally, available.

3.Exchange is part of that big tent. It is possible for people to write or work entirely on their own but — trust me — it gets lonely. Writing isn’t much without reading, music without listening. Even the most dedicated, sexily egomaniacal-type artists have an obligation to reach back, to take in, support and uplift others.

4.The culture must single out and reward quality work. This is a tricky one and there are many people who cheerily spend pretty much their entire lives attempting to identify what is “quality” and what isn’t. The reality is that not all art and not all artists are created equal. Some simply are better than others. And the healthy culture has a robust criticism underlying it. For that criticism to work, it has to be totally honest — dealing only with the work at hand as opposed to the reputation of whoever is making the work.

5.The culture must recognize that there is such a thing as talent and genius. Also a tricky one — there are some people who have it, usually by sacrificing their lives to the form. Their work deserves an extra degree of scrutiny and forbearance but never a critical free pass. One of my favorite quotes ever is from the chess grandmaster Siegbert Tarrasch (I told you this was a Sim for dorks), who said, “It is not enough to be a master of chess, one must also play well” — meaning that, no matter your achievements, your dedication to the game and so on, you can be just as lousy as anyone else.

6.Talent and genius actually are less exclusionary concepts than they are sometimes understood to be. One of my favorite lines on art is Stella Adler saying, “An actor’s talent is the choices he makes.” The point is that, in any work of art, there usually is a moment where a more risky, frightening path presents itself, and talent seems mostly to be about having the courage to take that frightening path — and to make that choice consistently.

7.The culture needs to have, as it were, ‘safe spaces,’ in which that crazy risk-taking is allowed in public space free of moralistic judgment. There is an understanding that the artistic form — the blank page, blank canvas, bare stage — is a place where the subconscious is given free rein. What happens there is a different gravitational field from ordinary morality and social censure.

8.There has to be money for serious, professional artists to be supported in what they do.

9.There has to be an understanding that money and art come, essentially, from different domains. Money is a very imprecise evaluator of artistic quality, just as high production budgets are nice but change little in the underlying worth.

10.There is a sense of comprehensiveness — of as much experience as possible having its mimetic representations. It’s been a real pleasure for me in life to, for instance, get into running and then find John L. Parker’s Once A Runner as the book on running, to travel as a Westerner in India and find that William Dalrymple has already mapped out so much of the experience.

11.There is room for fantasy, an understanding that even more than mapping or ‘capturing’ our reality, art offers a path into the subconscious or, if you like, into other realms. The best work is often the strangest and follows a logic entirely of its own.

All in all, the culture isn’t so bad at the moment. There is an incredible amount of work produced and a general recognition that this is a worthy way to spend one’s time. There is money although of course with all the usual attendant corruptions and distortions. I’m amazed at some of the risks that get taken, even with big-budget Hollywood projects, and there is very little direct censorship. Still, as we all know, the artistic culture could be better. The ‘industry’ has far more power than it should and it functions through a logic of artificial scarcity — endless rounds of gatekeeping, a kind of social promotion of those who for whatever reason have already made it through or around the gatekeeping system, and then a belief in stars and the whole twisted psychological structure of resentment and adulation for stars.

The healthy artistic culture is more democratic than what we have. It looks for interesting, honest, risk-taking work wherever that can be found. It is highly suspicious of any work that slots too neatly into existing power structures. And, maybe most importantly, it is never satisfied with itself: it believes that there is always more of lived life that can be depicted and ‘captured,’ always fresh realms of fantasy and deeper layers of the subconscious that can be explored, always more voices that can be heard from. The healthy culture is looking, constantly, to best itself.