The Artist As Instrument

     I just received an email from Megha Lillywhite, who runs a Substack titled Classical Ideals. In it she invites attention to this piece. A brief appetite-whetter:

     To deny one’s moral disease is the primary symptom of it, so those who have the worst judgements of beauty, are the most morally diseased, and the most vociferous in their claims to the idea that judgements of beauty are “subjective”. They claim that what is ugly to one person may be beautiful to another so there is really no meaning to beauty and ugliness anymore. One of the most morally diseased people in the world, Frida Kahlo, expressed her malaise best when she said “La belleza y la fealdad son un espejismo” meaning, “beauty and ugliness are a mirage.” It is because of this disease that Kahlo never made a single work of beautiful art in her life and is another charlatan pushed on the population to demoralise us with the ugliness of her work.

     If you have any interest in art and what’s happened to it in recent decades, I exhort you to read the whole piece.

     I wasn’t conversant with Frida Kahlo, other than as a Mexican Communist activist. Miss Lillywhite’s evaluation of her as “One of the most morally diseased people in the world” made me sit up and take notice. So I surfed through a few online reproductions of Kahlo paintings, and I came to agree with Miss Lillywhite: Kahlo was an enemy of beauty, in intent and effect.

     My thoughts veered from there to a passage from That Hideous Strength:

     He had a look at the pictures.
     Some of them belonged to a school of art with which he was already familiar. There was a portrait of a young woman who held her mouth wide open to reveal the fact that the inside of it was thickly overgrown with hair. It was very skilfully painted in the photographic manner so that you could almost feel that hair; indeed you could not avoid feeling it however hard you tried. There was a giant mantis playing a fiddle while being eaten by another mantis, and a man with corkscrews instead of arms bathing in a flat, sadly colored sea beneath a summer sunset. But most of the pictures were not of this kind. At first, most of them seemed rather ordinary, though Mark was a little surprised at the predominance of scriptural themes. It was only at the second or third glance that one discovered certain unaccountable details—something odd about the positions of the figures’ feet or the arrangement of their fingers or the grouping. And who was the person standing between the Christ and the Lazarus? And why were there so many beetles under the table in the Last Supper? What was the curious trick of lighting that made each picture look like something seen in delirium? When once these questions had been raised the apparent ordinariness of the pictures became their supreme menace—like the ominous surface innocence at the beginning of certain dreams. Every fold of drapery, every piece of architecture, had a meaning one could not grasp but which withered the mind. Compared with these the other, surrealistic, pictures were mere foolery. Long ago Mark had read somewhere of “things of that extreme evil which seem innocent to the uninitiate,” and had wondered what sort of things they might be. Now he felt he knew.

     If that gets you thinking about the degeneration of art from classical subjects and standards to the presentation of mounds of filth in museums, you’re not alone.

* * *

     I hold to an admittedly minority view: i.e., that there are objective standards for beauty. By implication, there are objective measures by which to discern beauty from ugliness. The prevailing “eye of the beholder” view crashes against Robert M. Pirsig’s demonstration that there is a reality to Quality:

     When I say, “Quality cannot be defined,” I’m really saying formally, “I’m stupid about Quality.”
     Fortunately the students didn’t know this. If they’d come up with these objections he wouldn’t have been able to answer them at the time.
     But then, below the definition on the blackboard, he wrote, “But even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is!” and the storm started all over again.
     “Oh, no, we don’t!”
     “Oh, yes, you do.”
     “Oh, no, we don’t!”
     “Oh, yes, you do!” he said and he had some material ready to demonstrate it to them.
     He had selected two examples of student composition. The first was a rambling, disconnected thing with interesting ideas that never built into anything. The second was a magnificent piece by a student who was mystified himself about why it had come out so well.
     Phaedrus read both, then asked for a show of hands on who thought the first was best. Two hands went up. He asked how many liked the second better. Twenty-eight hands went up.
     “Whatever it is,” he said, “that caused the overwhelming majority to raise their hands for the second one is what I mean by Quality. So you know what it is.”

     Pirsig, in his “Phaedrus” persona, had touched what C. S. Lewis called the Tao: the absolutes that are the bedrock of reality itself:

     The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. ‘In ritual’, say the Analects, ‘it is harmony with Nature that is prized.’ The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being ‘true’.
     This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’. Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.

     From here I could spin off into an exhausting ramble about things versus events, and what modern physics tells us we can and cannot know, but I’ll spare you. The point is a simple one:

There are real things.
We know them by their qualities,
Which reflect Quality – The Tao – in greater or lesser measure.

     Among those real things are beauty and ugliness.

* * *

     Artists, like the rest of us, are purposive beings. What they do, they do for a reason or reasons. It’s not always easy or pleasant to infer their reasons.

     Contemporary visual art has largely turned away from depictive art: i.e., art that attempts to show the viewer something real or plausible, though perhaps in a heightened or dramatized degree. Some “artists” have departed altogether from art as derived from artifice. Have a tale of a museum janitor who “destroyed” an exhibit by such an artist, because he took it to be trash:

     “The most delicious news to emerge from the art world this year,” I wrote at the time, “came in October, courtesy of the BBC.”

     Under the gratifying headline “Cleaner Dumps Hirst Installation,” the world read that “A cleaner at a London gallery cleared away an installation by artist Damien Hirst having mistaken it for rubbish. Emmanuel Asare came across a pile of beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays and cleared them away at the Eyestorm Gallery on Wednesday morning.”

     I went on to express the hope that Asare would be immediately given a large raise. “Someone who can make mistakes like that,” I noted, “is an immensely useful chap to have about.”

     I also daydreamed about this paragon of the cleaning industry being taken on by some large metropolitan paper, the Daily Telegraph, for example, since he clearly demonstrated sounder aesthetic judgment than most of the fellows calling themselves art critics.

     Alas, Asare’s good work was soon undone.

     John Q. Smith, the Celebrated Man in the Street, coming upon a heap of “beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays” in the street would unhesitatingly classify it as garbage and ask why it hasn’t been cleared away. Put that same detritus on the floor of a museum and he’d all but certainly react the same way. But what happens when the museum puts a placard on it, naming it and attributing it to an artist? Would it change Smith’s reaction? More pointedly, should it?

     Smith is either in harmony with the Tao or he isn’t. If he is, garbage is self-evident to him. If he isn’t, he can be bamboozled, propagandized, led by the nose… trained to celebrate offenses against the Tao. Which brings us, via Miss Lillywhite’s observations through Pirsig and C. S. Lewis, capped by Roger Kimball’s tale, to the point I had in mind.

     We have been admonished in stentorian tones not to ask “What is art and what is not?” But unless we insist upon answering that question, we cannot discriminate – we cannot rule some things out of consideration as artistic efforts. A firm answer to the question would make it possible. It would also dethrone quite a number of “artists” and the critics that celebrate them.

     The above focuses on visual art, as I intended, but similar questions must be asked about other art forms: sculpture, musical composition, storytelling, poetry, dance, and so on.

* * *

     There’s a snippet from “Individuality,” a poem by 19th Century poet Sidney Lanier, that comes to mind here:

What the cloud doeth,
The Lord knoweth,
The cloud knoweth not.

What the artist doeth,
The Lord knoweth;
Knoweth the artist not?

     I submit that the question is an imperative one. We must answer it. Why is the artist doing what he does? What is his intent? Does he have an agenda – and if so, is it for good or for ill?

     Many an artist of times past spoke of himself as an instrument: a tool being used by some remote power. For some artists, such talk was a form of “humble-brag.” But some were sincere. George Friedrich Handel said something of the sort when an admirer asked what drove him to compose The Messiah.

     But there are powers and powers. Might some self-styled artists be tools in the hand of Satan? Might the filth and degradation they present as “art” – all too often celebrated as “transgressive” by a gaggle of critics – be something more than a jest at our expense? Consider the passage I cited from That Hideous Strength. Perhaps Lewis had seen such “artwork;” he wrote about it piercingly enough.

     Do such “artists” know what they’re about?
     Do they know what they serve, and do they serve it willingly?
     And can we the audience afford not to ponder the implications?

     Have a nice day.

Concerning My Smartphone Agonies

     Subsequent to posting yesterday’s rant, I received a lot of email that echoed the sentiments therein. One piece in particular was rather plaintive. The writer wanted to know why no one writes clear instructions in readable English any longer. It cast my thoughts back to a book many Gentle Readers have read and others have heard about and have said “Yeah, I’ve always meant to read that.” Here’s a long but relevant citation:

     DeWeese brings over some instructions for assembly of an outdoor barbecue rotisserie which he wants me to evaluate as a professional technical writer. He’s spent a whole afternoon trying to get the thing together and he wants to see these instructions totally damned.

     But as I read them they look like ordinary instructions to me and I'm at a loss to find anything wrong with them. I don't want to say this, of course, so I hunt hard for something to pick on. You can’t really tell whether a set of instructions is all right until you check it against the device or procedure it describes, but I see a page separation that prevents reading without flipping back and forth between the text and illustration., .always a poor practice. I jump on this very hard and DeWeese encourages every jump. Chris takes the instructions to see what I mean.

     But while I'm jumping on this and describing some of the agonies of misinterpretation that bad cross- referencing can produce, I've a feeling that this isn't why DeWeese found them so hard to understand. It's just the lack of smoothness and continuity which threw him off. He’s unable to comprehend things when they appear in the ugly, chopped-up, grotesque sentence style common to engineering and technical writing. Science works with chunks and bits and pieces of things with the continuity presumed, and DeWeese works only with the continuities of things with the chunks and bits and pieces presumed. What he really wants me to damn is the lack of artistic continuity, something an engineer couldn’t care less about. It hangs up, really, on the classic-romantic split, like everything else about technology.

     But Chris, meanwhile, takes the instructions and folds them around in a way I hadn't thought of so that the illustration sits there right next to the text. I double-take this, then triple-take it and feel like a movie cartoon character who has just walked beyond the edge of a cliff but hasn't fallen yet because he hasn’t realized his predicament. I nod, and there’s silence, and then I realize my predicament, then a long laughter as I pound Chris on the top of the head all the way down to the bottom of the canyon. When the laughter subsides, I say, "Well, anyway — " but the laughter starts all over again.

     "What I wanted to say," I finally get in, "is that I've a set of instructions at home which open up great realms for the improvement of technical writing. They begin, 'Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.’ "

     This produces more laughter, but Sylvia and Gennie and the sculptor give sharp looks of recognition.

     "That’s a good instruction," the sculptor says. Gennie nods too.

     "That’s kind of why I saved it," I say. "At first I laughed because of memories of bicycles I'd put together and, of course, the unintended slur on Japanese manufacture. But there's a lot of wisdom in that statement."

     John looks at me apprehensively. I look at him with equal apprehension. We both laugh. He says, "The professor will now expound."

     "Peace of mind isn't at all superficial, really," I expound. "It’s the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test’s always your own serenity. If you don't have this when you start and maintain it while you're working you're likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself."

     They just look at me, thinking about this.

     "It's an unconventional concept," I say, "but conventional reason bears it out. The material object of observation, the bicycle or rotisserie, can’t be right or wrong. Molecules are molecules. They don't have any ethical codes to follow except those people give them. The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquillity it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine’s always your own mind. There isn't any other test."

     DeWeese asks, "What if the machine is wrong and I feel peaceful about it?"

     Laughter.

     I reply, "That's self-contradictory. If you really don't care you aren't going to know it’s wrong. The thought’ll never occur to you. The act of pronouncing it wrong's a form of caring."

     I add, "What’s more common is that you feel unpeaceful even if it’s right, and I think that’s the actual case here. In this case, if you're worried, it isn't right. That means it isn’t checked out thoroughly enough. In any industrial situation a machine that isn't checked out is a ‘down’ machine and can't be used even though it may work perfectly. Your worry about the rotisserie is the same thing. You haven’t completed the ultimate requirement of achieving peace of mind, because you feel these instructions were too complicated and you may not have understood them correctly."

     DeWeese asks, "Well, how would you change them so I would get this peace of mind?"

     "That would require a lot more study than I’ve just given them now. The whole thing goes very deep. These rotisserie instructions begin and end exclusively with the machine. But the kind of approach I’m thinking about doesn’t cut it off so narrowly. What’s really angering about instructions of this sort is that they imply there’s only one way to put this rotisserie together...their way. And that presumption wipes out all the creativity. Actually there are hundreds of ways to put the rotisserie together and when they make you follow just one way without showing you the overall problem the instructions become hard to follow in such a way as not to make mistakes. You lose feeling for the work. And not only that, it’s very unlikely that they’ve told you the best way."

     "But they’re from the factory," John says.

     "I’m from the factory too," I say "and I know how instructions like this are put together. You go out on the assembly line with a tape recorder and the foreman sends you to talk to the guy he needs least, the biggest goof-off he’s got, and whatever he tells you...that’s the instructions. The next guy might have told you something completely different and probably better, but he’s too busy." They all look surprised. "I might have known," DeWeese says.

     "It's the format," I say. "No writer can buck it. Technology presumes there’s just one right way to do things and there never is. And when you presume there's just one right way to do things, of course the instructions begin and end exclusively with the rotisserie. But if you have to choose among an infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be considered, because the selection from many choices, the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That’s why you need the peace of mind."

     "Actually this idea isn’t so strange," I continue. "Sometime look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you’ll see the difference. The craftsman isn’t ever following a single line of instruction. He’s making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he’ll be absorbed and attentive to what he’s doing even though he doesn’t deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn't following any set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind’s at rest at the same time the material’s right."

     "Sounds like art," the instructor says.

     "Well, it is art," I say. "This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It’s just that it’s gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie assembly is actually a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous."

     They're not sure whether I’m kidding or not.

     "You mean," DeWeese asks, "that when I was putting this rotisserie together I was actually sculpting it?"

     "Sure."

     He goes over this in his mind, smiling more and more. "I wish I'd known that," he says. Laughter follows.

     Chris says he doesn't understand what I'm saying. "That's all right, Chris,” lack Bareness says. "We don’t either." More laughter.

     "I think I’ll just stay with ordinary sculpture," the sculptor says.

     "I think I’ll just stick to painting," DeWeese says.

     "I think I’ll just stick to drumming," John says.

     Chris asks, "What are you going to stick to?"

     "Mah guns, boy, mah guns," I tell him. "That’s the Code of the West."

     They all laugh hard at this, and my speechifying seems forgiven. When you’ve got a Chautauqua in your head, it’s extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.

     If you recognize the book, congratulations on having a fine memory. If not, it’s Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values. It has a fair claim to being one of the most influential books of the Twentieth Century.

     Pirsig’s style is much like mine: He orbits his central point until he can arrow in on it with decisive force. In the above, the central point is the importance of an esthetic of elegance – an artist’s esthetic – to the writing of a technical document. And he nails it.

     The dismissive attitude so many tech vendors have toward the documentation of their wares is a symptom of an important sickness. That sickness doesn’t yet have a name. It tolerates ugliness and awkwardness where elegance and simplicity should reign. The emphasis is on saving a few pennies on the development budget when saving the eventual customer’s sanity and good will ought to be the highest priority. It’s a great part of the reason for experiences like the one I narrated yesterday.

     Elegance and simplicity are the twin progeny of a profound understanding: a comprehension of the wherefores of the device and its design, in whole and in part. If you don’t understand the design of the device and the principles behind it, you’ll never produce an elegant, simple set of assembly instructions. If you don’t understand the reasons the customer would purchase the device, you’ll never write an elegant, simple User’s Guide: i.e., a document good for something other than a doorstop.

     Food for thought for your Monday.

Art, Entertainment, And Money

     You can make money by entertaining people, if you’re good enough at it and are noticed for that. Quite a lot of Americans strive to build careers as entertainers. If the entertainer observes the usual legal and ethical constraints, it’s as acceptable an occupation as any other.

     Part of the reason many persons pursue one of the arts – fiction, poetry, music, drama, painting, sculpture, athletics, what have you – is to make money. Indeed, artists who hope for financial remuneration from their work are almost certainly a large majority. But what would predictably, reliably make money isn’t always what the artist would like to do, or what he’s best equipped to do. It’s a tension that’s existed since we first deemed certain pursuits to be arts.

     That tension can warp an artist’s mind, to say nothing of the effect on his bank balance. But it arises from effects that no one can undo.

---

     When Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press in 1439, his immediate aim was to produce and distribute the Bible. The Bible was the one and only book of general importance. He who owned an actual copy of it was fortunate indeed. But an invention as versatile as the printing press would not long be confined to the production of Bibles. There were other books people wanted reproduced in volume, and the rich ones among them offered incentives for doing so.

     Thus, patronage, long a key factor in the support of the visual and musical arts, became a part of the written arts. But printing presses and those skilled in their operation remained scarce for a long time. Those who wanted their works reproduced had to bid against one another for the press owners’ efforts. That’s how the first publishing companies were born.

     A lot of water has passed under Mankind’s bridges since then. There are still vanity presses, of course. They don’t command a lot of respect, but they’re out there, available to the writer who wants to see his name on the spine of a book and is willing to pay for the privilege. Respectable publishers are in business to make a profit by selling books to readers, rather than by selling them to their authors. But to do that, they must solve a perennially difficult problem: accurately predicting which books will sell in volume.

     This is so difficult a task that to remain in business, most conventional publishers – i.e., those that concentrate on producing and selling hard-copy books rather than eBooks – must be supported by a larger, more reliably profitable organization. Indeed, owing to the proliferation of genres and sub-genres, accurate prediction of readers’ tastes has steadily grown harder. The pressure on conventional publishers is at an all-time high...as is the pressure on a writer who looks to his fiction for his principal income.

---

     The explosion in eBook publishing has complicated matters still further. Publication in electronic format was at first regarded as the lowest of publishing’s slums, suited only to writers who have neither stories to tell nor skills for the telling. That lack of prestige caused conventional publishers to shun the eBook for a long time – far too long for their financial health. Readers, once they got used to their Kindles and NOOKs, found the eBook an adequate publication medium with several advantages that compensate for its limitations. The coalescence of eBook formats around two dominant ones, each easily converted to the other, helped to resolve matters of availability and eReader compatibility. The sale of eBooks swiftly rose to equal and then surpass the sale of conventionally published books.

     Conventional publishers, desperate to shore up their finances, belatedly got into the eBook act. Unfortunately, they brought baggage with them that impeded them despite the advantages that could have accrued from their institutional prestige. The eBook hasn’t served them nearly as well as it’s served the legions of small, eBook-only presses that cater to “independent” writers.

     But the flood to eBooks is not an unmixed blessing for writers. It’s so easy to produce an eBook, and so easy to make it available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, and several other online retailers, that getting attention for one’s works is harder than ever. So many writers are “talking” that any individual one must “shout” to be heard at all. Making a living by writing fiction remains a tough challenge.

     A few indie writers have succeeded, especially in the speculative genres. The best known ones emphasize relentless productivity. Their novels arrive in barrages, series of a dozen or more volumes with a common setting and protagonists. It’s difficult to criticize this approach, if the end in view is revenue. Nevertheless, there are drawbacks, especially for their emulators.

---

     Since the releases of the various volumes of the Futanari Saga, a number of my fiction readers have written to ask a common question: “Why did you write this?” (Most of them go on to say “I mean, I liked it, but...”) I wrote that series for the same reason I write everything: to explore certain ideas in a fictional setting. One of them – transgenderism – has ignited a great deal of public controversy. So I decided to delve into it from a skewed perspective: the fictional existence of women born with male genitals, whose condition is involuntary and irreparable.

     While I wouldn’t turn down big revenues as long as they come without strings, it’s more important for me to write about the ideas on my mind than to pursue big bucks. It’s a personal choice that not all writers make. Indeed, not all visual artists make it, as we can see from the large amounts of schlock that decorates so many living room walls.

     One of the downsides of the eBook explosion has been what I think of as “The Forty-Niner Effect.” The discovery of gold in northern California caused a lot of people to flock thither in hope of great riches. A few of them prospered mightily, but far more of them were bitterly disappointed. Some even starved to death. Of the unfortunate ones, how many could have prospered more and lived better by “staying home” and plying some more conventional trade?

     Writers in the age of the eBook face the same sort of temptation. The fabulously successful ones inspire emulators. The emulators are usually disappointed by their results. A lot of them become bitter. But far worse by my lights, among those who fail to prosper financially are some gifted storytellers who’ve sloughed their own, unique ideas to pursue the big bucks. There’s a tragedy for you.

     Of course, it’s the Curmudgeon Emeritus to the World Wide Web saying this: a writer so obsessed with originality that he won’t set his fingers to the keys unless he’s certain that what he has in mind has never even been attempted before. So as usual the proper seasoning is cum grano salis.

     Still, I personally know two highly gifted writers who’ll tell you from dawn to dusk (and all night long if you have the staying power) that they only do it to make money. They have yet to make much. Yet both of them have broached exciting, fictionally unexplored ideas to me that they’ve “left on the shelf:” in one case to turn out a series of formulaic space operas; in the other to produce (shudder) vampire novels. And I look at my Kindle, and fret over the lack of anything fresh and original to read, and I sigh.

Quickies: The Wheel Turns Round...

     Does anyone else here remember Rene Magritte? His artwork is generally considered surrealistic, but some of it points toward an under-layer of unaddressed realism that observers tend to overlook. Perhaps this is the most famous example:

     Observers seldom twigged to the reality buried within that seeming contradiction. Magritte had to explain it:

     Magritte's work frequently displays a collection of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, 'The Treachery of Images' (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. It does not "satisfy emotionally"—when Magritte was once asked about this image, he replied that of course it was not a pipe, just try to fill it with tobacco.

     Magritte died in 1967. But the wheel of art and fancy has turned, as wheels will do. Apparently we have a budding Magritte somewhere among us, though his medium isn’t paint on a canvas:

     (Shamelessly stolen from 90 Miles From Tyranny.)

Going For The Bucks

     “Oy! Every prophecy I fulfilled! And now He tells me consistent I am not! This is justice?”
     “No. It is Art.”

     [Robert A. Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice]

     I’d intended to write about the plague of sexual-harassment accusations we’re experiencing, about the irrational responses those accusations have elicited from the political class and the partisan press, and the range of attitudes private citizens have adopted to them. Then I regained command of my senses, realized that anyone could write that piece, and decided to address something more pleasant: the clash between the artistic impulse and more commonplace human desires.

     Relax, Gentle Reader. This won’t be one of my more demanding screeds. Though if you’re near to my age, it might evoke a few memories. I can’t guarantee that they’ll all be pleasant.

---

     The “starving artist” is a stock figure in cultural discourse. He might be a novelist, playwright, or poet. He might paint, or compose music. He might sculpt. One way or another, he strives to create things broadly recognized as art (whatever that is) and suffers materially for it.

     Why the suffering? What makes that necessary? Well, nothing, really. He could have been a plumber. He could have sold linoleum. He could have written Harlequins, a category which (I’m told) will keep a writer in “well upholstered poverty” if he can stand to live with himself. But he didn’t elect to do any of that. He put devotion to his art (whatever that is) above all the rest of human action.

     That makes the starving artist’s Muse sound like a far crueler taskmaster than any corporate supervisor. The former haunts one’s dreams but promises nothing. The latter usually lets one leave the office at 5:30 or 6:00 and pays a decent wage.

     In the usual case, the starving artist doesn’t produce much. Perhaps his vision is fitful, unpredictable and un-schedulable. Perhaps each gem from his pen, palate, or chisel takes too much out of him to rush from one to the next. Or perhaps he’s just too starved. His life output tends to be lower than that of his competitor who elects to “go for the bucks” – i.e., who strives to cultivate popularity and a following that will pay for his work.

     A fair number of starving artists quit young and revert to fixing pipes or selling linoleum. But some go through a difficult mental and emotional transition. It’s not difficult just for them.

---

     I’m not privy to the financial records of other artists. (I can barely keep my own straight.) However, certain careers in the arts have experienced transitions that are broadly suggestive about inflection points in the life trajectory of the starving artist.

     When the “folk music revival” of the Sixties began to flag, late in that decade, Bob Dylan and others prominent in that scene decided to transition toward the more popular electrified format. Many of their followers were horrified. They described the change with terms such as “sacrilege.” And in some cases, the musicians who’d tried it reaped nothing by it, or fell by the wayside. But not all. Another group got increased air time on commercial radio stations, expanded its following, and prospered materially. Dylan was nearly booed off stage when he first appeared with an electric band, but he persisted, to his ultimate advantage.

     A curious sort of inverse-transition occurred when the Grateful Dead, originally beloved of a relatively compact group of fans, produced Workingman’s Dead. This iconic San Francisco rock group chose to embrace a softer, more commercially acceptable mode, and sold big for the first time in its existence. The group’s followup albums, from American Beauty onward, maintained the new approach...and the sales.

     Writers have done much the same. The one who comes to mind at once is Robert Silverberg. His early novels, such as Thorns and A Time of Changes, were sensitive emotional explorations set in science-fictional contexts. He was critically applauded for such books. Yet in the Eighties he transitioned almost completely to the commercially more popular field of fantasy fiction, starting with his novel Lord Valentine’s Castle. Those fantasies displeased many of his previous fans, but they sold far better than his earlier work.

     In each such case, there were fans who would have preferred that the starving artist continue to starve. The artist in question felt differently.

---

     Sometimes it’s as much about a desire for broader appeal as about money. That could easily have been the key to any of the transitions described above, or all of them. What’s common among them is the move from a less widely received mode to a more widely received one. After the move, the artist was both more popular and better off materially.

     There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s also nothing wrong with “sticking to my guns” and “doing it my way.” The artist’s priorities are his alone. So are the consequences thereof.

     When I first decided to try fiction – as an adult, that is; I’d tried my hand at it at a much younger and more callow stage, got nowhere, and set it aside in favor of sweet-talking computers – I knew from the first that conventional publishers were unlikely to approve what I wanted to write. My first agent, who actually liked my stuff, nevertheless exhorted me repeatedly to “write a nice romance, Fran.” Though I had no objections to that genre, I didn’t think romance was “in my wheelhouse,” and kept on with the Christian-flavored / semi-mystical / half-fantastic stuff I’d been producing.

     (Yes, I did eventually write a romance. But that’s yesterday’s news, and anyway, it’s at least as weird as anything else I’ve written.)

     Eventually my novels began to sell, but it took both time and the willingness to admit that the reader who prefers my sort of crap will not be a person of common tastes. He’ll be an exception looking for exceptions to the fictional norm. He’ll never be numerous. And I decided that that’s quite all right...because I don’t depend on the revenue from my fiction to keep food on the table.

     If it were the other way around – if the income from my novels were all I had to keep body and soul together – I’d write the most commonplace, unoriginal, formulaic garbage you can imagine. I’d sell millions of books, because I know what the great majority of fiction readers actually want, and I could produce it just as shamelessly and copiously as anyone who’s ever prostituted himself. And I’d bloody well do it with my head held high. My priorities put survival and a good life for my family above all else.

     No artist can make such decisions for anyone else. Neither is it cricket to slam an artist who makes such a decision for “betraying his art” (whatever that is).

---

     I’m not perfectly sure why this subject was at the top of my stack this morning. There it was, and I was tired of current events opinion mongering, so I decided to make use of it. Still, it’s heartfelt, and as I cast my eyes over it one last time, I find myself thinking that there have been artists of all sorts who “maintained their vision” despite initial unpopularity, were eventually “discovered,” and ultimately became world-famous.

     Of course, most of them were dead of starvation by then, but those are the breaks. Who said you could “follow your Muse” without making a sacrifice or two? The garrets of Paris will always call out to starving artists. Somehow I doubt they’ll go unoccupied.