Guess Who's Back/Back Again/Flash is Back/Tell a Friend

I'm just going to pretend that I didn't say anything about a longish new topic appearing last week. I'm reading Stephen King's dark tower series right now, so in that vein lets just say that "time works differently here". I just hope the world isn't moving on.

ANYWAY, Mike's point is well taken. I can think of a specific example of "Bad Art" made by four strapping teenagers in one Mike Mahoney's basement. The first record we made as Ben Flash and his Boyish Good Looks ("Kids Find 'The Boot' Buried in the Trash") is a perfect example of something that meant a great deal to the creators (at least Mike and I) but certainly was not deserving of larger critical acclaim. I worked with a guy at the Monroe Library in Rochester, New York who was a big fan, but he also loved The Church more than anything in the world so I don't think I should take it as a huge compliment.

The thing is that album still works for me. Which does make it inherently valuable, just not widely valuable. I have gladly given some away in recent years if someone expressed interest. Unfortunately the feelings of almost everyone I've given it to has bordered on disgust.

Which annoyed me because they got it for free. See this is where capitalism mucks everything up. I (subconsciously) felt like their disdain was undeserved because they hadn't paid for it, and I had warned them, fervently, that they wern't going to like it. Yet they insisted. I try to(conciously) judge things, at least a little bit, in terms of how much I paid for them.

For instance, I was in Paris recently and went to the Pompidou centre. The lower floor was made up of the modernest of modern art and much of it irritated me. If only because I had paid a goodly amount of Euro's to get in to see a bunch of red blow up furniture (I did manage to take the picture at the top of this pos, which made it all worth it... i think).

Upstairs however was a chronological exhibit that ran from Van Gogh up through the modern day. This I enjoyed much more because, I think, someone had already done the art criticism for me. When I go to a museum, part of what I am paying for is for someone to have made the decisions of what is worthy and not worthy FOR me. If I was attending such an event for free my level of acceptance would have been much higher.

All of this said, I'm an enormous hypocrite because I am as guilty as anyone for ripping on a shitty song that I got for free. Mike and I send bad songs on myspace pages back and forth from time to time and giggle at the self-righteousness. This is probably unfair.

Which is why I think Mike is on the money when he talkes about "Great" art versus "good and bad". The question is how effective we are at discerning that distinction. Both of us have had the experience at working at college radio stations and I found that it was exceedingly easy to miss the trees for the forest, as it were. I was so deluged by new music that I often missed out on stuff I really liked because I would listen to it once and if it didn't grab me I would move on the next thing without thinking twice. As such, I'm not sure that I was really capable of making fully formed judgements about anything that I heard.

This problem applies generally across the field of critisism. I happend to read an article in the NYTIMES reveiw of books about a poetry critic who hates almost everything and as such waters down the quality of his opinions (unfortunatly I can't find the link now because my drug addled brain can't remember his name and Nytimes.com has "moved on"). The point is that his critisism has become very difficult to take seriously, because SOMETHING must be good. I think that critisism is a field that is very easy to do badly and very difficult to do well exactly in light of my expirience at the radio station.

Yet in the interent age critism is much more diffuse. It is good that a handful of people are not determining what we read and see and hear, yet there is so much noise it is difficult to pick the good from the bad.

So obviously I am conflicted on the issue. It is clearly important not to discard things out of hand, but at the same time there needs to be way we can discern good from bad, and I do think that while there may not be such a thing as EMPIRICALLY good and EMPIRICALLY bad we can come damn close. The new Eminem song, for instance, is very close to being the new philosophical definition of "The Bad", which makes my heart cry just a bit.

I recognize that this post doesn't quite have it's shit together. This is why I need to get back to posting all the time, apparently my mind has been percolating on this topic while I "listend" to discussions of shoes and pictures and flowers and hotel arrangements and meals.

One final example of everyone; critics, the general populace, hipsters, news agency's etc. getting something wrong. The movie King Kong. I went with my fiancee to see this a few years back and it was the only movie I have ever walked out of. I essentially decided that it was worth 10 bucks to keep two hours of my life that I would otherwise have lost. It angered me that no one told me this movie sucked. Everyone loved it. What the hell!?

Art!

To draw on what I've been learning in my Creative Arts Therapy schooling, I would offer that the creative process is important in and of itself as a way for the creator to express himself, especially the parts of one's "stuff" not expressible with language.

Of course it's not practical for every casual art fan to witness every single work of every single amateur artist in the world, or even in his own home city. Luckily, there's a distinction to be drawn: Some art (in accordance with your question, we'll call this "good art") is accessible to a wider audience, allowing the viewer or listener to work out his unresolved tensions by way of the tension and release implicit in the artwork. Most art ("bad art," to put it bluntly), however, is not accessible to a wider audience and it remains connected only to the creator, and maybe his pals as well.

(By 'accessible,' I'm talking about a quality of the art itself, and not its placement in a gallery.)

This is not the end of the discussion, though (unless the continued absence of EVERYBODY proves me wrong). "Bad art" by the definition above is often just fine for what it is supposed to be and what it is meant to do. A handmade Valentine's Day card could look like hell, but hit the spot perfectly. So is it really "bad?" Art is often so deeply connected to its creator that calling it "bad" feels intuitively wrong, because it's sort of like calling that person "bad," or denying he put the work in. Then again, many great artists HAVE been pretty rotten people in a lot of ways.

Anyway, I think the real split I'm talking about is between great art and the rest of art. Not good and bad, so much. Still, this is an attempt to define the art that you should look at, or at least try out. Obviously, everyone in the world will never agree on the greatness of anything.

Mike