Eddie, 10/23

Does writing have to be popular with consumers to be considered writing? This was the question given in class and one I would like to discuss. Below I will include writing with other forms of art – such as painting and drama – as their collective whole: art.

I recall previously mentioning that equating economic performance with excellence in any form of art imposes a sense of functionality onto the work in which it must fulfill. Such is not unlike the iPhone, which has a list of functions it must do well for the consumer. Critique is given to the device based on satisfaction of the promised functions. While the iPhone, more or less, made many of its consumers happy and, more importantly, made many people its consumer, most people would find the notion of the iPhone as a piece of art to be at least a little silly (though the pseudo-religious status of the iPhone among consumers is somewhat of an artistic spectacle). Art is simply not a Swiss army knife that does everything, and neither is it the kitchen cleaner that promises to remove even the most stubborn of stains. Worth is neither tied to the array of its function nor the magnitude of any of those abilities.

However, some may immediately raise the question that we are speaking of art that is popular and not debating how popularity does or does not elevate objects into art. But what my previous discussion does not elaborate is that which I wish to express: consumer popularity is separate and irrelevant to artistic worth. Consider, first, that art never fulfills material needs. A faucet brings us water – a very basic need for the modern life. Microwaves heat food for the lazy, which is a step up from satisfying the bare minimums of daily tasks. Yet art never aims to provide nor improve basic provisions essential to our physical being. Rather, art is a proof of higher intellectual needs when the element of warding off immediate death has been removed from our minds. Extending this idea further, art is thus not the means to keep an artist or a company alive. True art that happens to be marketable would merely be a happy coincidence rather than an intended outcome. So best-seller art can be worthless art, bargain-bin art can be a masterpiece of talent and any combination of economic worth with artistic worth is just as valid, because there is no logical connection between the combinations.

Think about it: should art need to sell before it is great, then no piece of work is ever finished at the hands of the artist: he or she must surrender the work to the shapeless and looming will of the mass. Through the process of consumption, which adds neither inspiration nor insight to the work, it is “finished” and prescribed a judgment of worth. Consider how strange a notion it is where an artist may personally find his or her work of great artistic significance, yet that significance can be retroactively striped when the people find the work to not be massively consumable.

Economics hint that artwork must fulfill the needs of many, regardless of medium, inspiration and intent. Such logical rebuttal against tying art to profit is nothing new, but we should explore this hypothetical world where best-selling art is good art to appreciate the logic headaches which we can well live without. Artwork in this world is in a bizarre state of flux in its excellence. One week it may sell feverously well, but come next week it may have lost that momentum and thus has fallen in its artistic value. Strangely, artistic value is affected by the inevitable waning of interest and the simple fact of market saturation. And while we are on the topic of market saturation, if a printed poster sells to every home in a village of a hundred households, does that make it an equal, better or inferior piece of work than the same poster selling to a hundred households in New York? Here, artwork is at the mercy of marketing and population size.

The problem with profits making good art is that, with art, there is a lack of an objective restraint from reality to govern demands that art strives to quench. We cannot decide that we do not like to be hungry, and there is certainly nobody who gets thirsty, rather than sleepy, at night. While there are patterns in the preference, style and taste of art, there is no unified form of demand for it. Thus, how can we hope to skewer the arbitrary and infinitely diverse nature of art with a lazy scale such as sales figures to make them easier to comprehend? Art is worth as much as each individual makes it. It is worth different to the artist, consumers and institutions, and there is no escaping the effort it takes to find out for ourselves if that toilet seat on the wall is art or nonsense.