darin.wilson

Too good not to share…

There’s a good discussion going on over at the Propellerheads user forum (it’s password-protected so unfortunately I can’t link to it). It began with one person describing how he was having difficulty completing a piece of music he was working on because he was “obsessing over the tiny details”. The responses varied widely - some argued that when you’re stuck, it’s best to let go and move on; others said that details were the most important part so they must be obsessed over; one person even confessed an inability to complete anything because he gets too hung up on the fine points.

For anyone who’s ever embarked on any kind of creative endeavor, this probably sounds pretty familiar. It points to a fundamental problem that all artists have to grapple with at some point:

How do you know when you’re done?

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The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it.

But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold, we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.

- Ursula Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

During the years of Buchenwald and Auschwitz, Matisse painted the most charming flowers and fruit that were ever made. That’s why today they still speak more eloquently than the most macabre description of the period. Their creator was faithful not to the tragedy but to the reaction that tragedy kindled in his conscience.

- Odysseus Elytis, translated by Theophanis Stavrou: Books Abroad, Volume 49, no 4, Autumn 1975 [emphasis mine]

I firmly believe that joy is more fertile than pain.

- Maurice Ravel

Thanks to Rob Brezsny for the first two quotes (he’s been on quite a tear lately!).

All I can say is “word”:

I dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes — all the better.

Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.

-Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” interview in Le Monde, 1980

Hat tip to Rob Brezsny.

The legality of abortion continues to be a hot-button topic these days. Activists on either side of this issue rarely see eye to eye on anything, and in the current climate, where most of what is laughingly called political debate can be reduced to “I’m right you’re wrong so shut the hell up”, the conflict between the two sides is more than usually fierce.

I was therefore quite surprised when I learned that there is, in fact, one thing that both sides definitely do agree on: Daniel Edwards’ new sculpture, currently on display at the Capla Kesting Fine Art Gallery in Brooklyn, is a travesty:

Britney Spears will soon be giving birth again in Brooklyn, as a sexy sculpture that has drawn thousands of hate e-mails…The life-size pop princess is naked and pregnant, crouching face-down on a bare-toothed bear rug as the baby’s head appears on the opposite end…

When some bloggers heard about the exhibit “Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston” the gallery was inundated with about 3,000 e-mails from around the world in just a week, split between pro-choice and pro-life opinions.

“We also got calls from Tokyo, England, France. Some people are upset that Britney is being used for this subject matter,” said gallery co-owner David Kesting. “Others who are pro-life thought this was degrading to their movement. And some pro-choice people were upset that this is a pro-life monument.”

There it is folks: the power of art. What else but art could successfully piss off both sides of an extremely contentious issue? What else could cause such bitter rivals to find common ground (excluding, for the moment, the case of deeply divided religious factions uniting in their hatred of an invading superpower)?

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