Taste

"I ain't the one whose gonna be missing the feast,
Just like you ain't the one who seems to be calming the beast."

-- Jason Mraz, "Too Much Food"

--

As I sat in the back seat of the van today, halfway through the three-hour drive back north, listening to Josh Groban and Charlotte Church, wondering why I couldn't sleep, I had a sort of epiphany. And when I say "epiphany," I really mean that a metaphor occurred to me.

It's how I think about pop culture. I know that just because something is popular doesn't make it good, and by the same token, being unpopular is not the same as being bad.

And when people think about good and bad art, what they really think about is its popularity. "Good" movies sell well at box offices and star "good" actors, who have been in tons of films. "Good" songs get played most often. And "good" plays not only run for a long time, they get seen by a lot of people, and then (once the rights are up for grabs), they get produced by a bunch of companies.

Such thinking is dangerous to the person who cares about art. Quantity is not quality. The danger is that by thinking about goodness in terms of popularity, you ascribe a value (usually some sort of number) to something that is invaluable. You think about the difference between "good" and "bad" in terms of a spectrum, or worse, a ladder. The idea is that bad art is on the bottommost rung, and good art is at the top; in other words, a bad artist starts at the bottom and works his/her way to the top. And once you're at the top, you can stay at the top.

But Van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime. And Shakespeare was ignored for two centuries before wacked-out Romanticists cracked open the folios again. As Billy Joel sang, "I won't be here / In another year / If I don't stay on the charts."

The span of art is not a spectrum, spanning left to right, nor is it a ladder, starting low and reaching high. It is, in my opinion, a merry-go-round, the old, squeaky, rusted-iron kind we knew as kids.

--

You start as a runner on the outermost edge, just barely hanging on, trying to keep up. Then, you leap--and this is graduating, this is making your livelihood your art. Your legs leave the ground, and you're on your stomach, literally crawling to the center. Your shoulders strain with the weight of your body, multiplied by centrifugal forces. You hang on, or you eat dust.

You make your way inward, closer and closer to the spindle point, the rotating axis of the wheel, the hub. Your focus narrows, your concentration and skills keeping you upright, balanced. You press to the center. And this is the sweet spot, the hardest goal: Reaching that spot, and staying there, spinning in place like a figure skater, getting dizzy the moment you stop looking at what is right next to you.

This is the place of good art, the region artists rarely (if ever) visit. Moments of genius are scampers across the center, brief encounters with the one point on the wheel that doesn't move. It is hard to stay there, and so most artists stop trying after a while. They linger on the bars, elbows wrenching against the metal, watching the world whiz by on the outside. Or, sadly, they fall or jump off the wheel completely. Most artists crowd around the bars or outside the circle, and because they are nearer to everyone else on the playground, they become popular.

The best place for the artist, it seems to me, is near the center, within touching distance of the circular iron grate in the middle. There is the security of the bar without the danger of losing balance. There is always hope, too, of someday standing in the center.

And there, too, is the patient, uninhabited space of the unpopular.