On William Deresiewicz’s “The Death of the Artist”
lareviewofbooks.org
lareviewofbooks.org
This is awful for the artists, but awesome for everyone who enjoys art. This is truly the peak of art. Think about what you could experience before and what you can experience now. And not only think of yourself, but all of the people in the world who now have access. It's mind-blowing.
Like all industries, competition sucks for the entrenched. Artists can't just write a book anymore or can't just paint something beautiful. The landscape has completely changed. The choice has never been greater and artists must adapt by finding their niches.
It’s like when the CEO of spotify said recently that “you can’t make an album every 3 years and be successful anymore.” He’s mostly right, but he skips over the part that he is probably the person most responsible for that fact. He also skips over the fact that cranking out 3x as much music is unlikely to result in higher quality art.
So I guess all I’m saying is that I agree with you, but it’s not inevitable and it doesn’t have to be this way if we don’t like it.
On the contrary, the more you produce, the more outstanding your hits.
Yes there's more crap too, but nobody sees the crap. They only see the good stuff (thanks to recommendation algorithms, charts, and marketing).
Here's the usual pottery class story that people use to talk about this phenomena:
> The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".
> Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
You can also look at statistics. Across all fields, the people who produce the largest volume of work also have the most outstanding successes. Beatles, for example, credit their success to being forced to play strip clubs for 8+ hours every day for months. Created lots of practice.
Roald Dahl stepped out of a fighter plane in ww2 and into a writing role. His first stories were wartime stories, which has a quality you can't grind out. He has since proved himself to be a good writer.
Someone in your pottery class mistook perfectionism for quality.
There are a few french chefs that run perfectionism as a culture, with the corollary that if you think you achieved it, you haven't and you should start again. It works in a time-limited task like making food for hungry customers.
It doesn't work when you allow people to ponder what it means to be perfect forever. The important qualities in life have a meaning and aren't just points on a scale to perfection which you have to grind out.
I'm not so sure about the last part. Because in the meantime, theater has become "televised performance", concern has become "album or stream", etc.
So they get a better performance but not exactly the same thing as before...
And lots of the magic is in the moment and the interaction with the live audience and in the volatility of the experience...
I think that the end result is not that it's "awesome for everyone who enjoys art" but that people consume art more conveniently and disposably, and (most of it) enjoy it less.
No matter what type of music you enjoy, it has never been easier to consume it in an exploding variety of formats and levels of interaction. The level of access and variety is unparalleled.
(1) https://www.statista.com/statistics/1096409/live-music-indus....
[1,2]? Hamilton?
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2020/09/18/provoc...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...
[1] https://www.pinterest.co.uk/senoritamadmax/ancient-art-fails...
First, he writes that early artists (Da Vinci, Bach etc.) basically saw themselves as artisans who worked jobs for their patrons, who essentially sheltered them from the cold realities of the market.
Later, he laments that now artists are crushed by the market and can't have any stability that Bach et. al. enjoyed. He's missing a ton of contemporary working artists, who still have their patrons - visual artists working in game dev, musicians composing music for movies, commercials, video games etc. These people have steady income, just like Bach did. Of course, they're not really working on what they'd like to be working on, but neither really did Da Vinci (he was known to procrastinate a ton when asked to produce another boring portrait of somebody's daugther - a portrait which comically now could fetch tens of millions of dollars).
Great read, thanks for sharing.
Actually there are very talented artists around today but it's impossible to find them... Takes a lot of searching on YouTube. I found some music on YouTube recently that blew me away but it didn't even hit 100k views... This extremely talented artist can't even feed themselves with that.
I guess today we regard some canonical rendition of a song to be the 'correct' one. Does that stem from the dying art of singing - folks don't hear songs except in their most viral form?
By all means, one should sing old songs, and for many purposes remember Chesterton's dictum that 'anything worth doing is worth doing badly'. But if one is going to market an album of X sings Y, it is well if X actually can sing Y close to tune.