Let’s start right away by splitting art into an arbitrary and completely unreasonable spectrum. Picture a single line with two extremes. Toss beauty, aesthetics, sensation, artistry, elegance, and imagination to one side, as the label for one extreme. And then toss ideas, intellect, politics, philosophy, insight, and purpose to the other side, as the label for the opposite extreme. Now this is unfair, it ignores the obvious overlap between these categories, and it also ignores my longstanding contention that style and substance are inseparable, that style is actually what determines substance—yet this spectrum with beauty at one extreme and ideas at the other extreme is still a useful shorthand to make a small, but absolutely vital, point, which is that you must always, in every circumstance, select your highest value.
Occasionally, you come across a concept that feels fairly basic, a concept that’s part of the foundation underneath you—the fact of gravity, the existence of self, the tediousness of clichés—but then you discover, somehow, that this isn’t a shared concept, that what’s ordinary and obvious and objective to you is actually a bit controversial, or at least contested. Learning that not everyone agrees with you is always a troubling moment, but it is particularly troubling when the concept feels foundational, such as, for me, the knowledge that selecting one category as prominent in your art automatically diminishes the opposite category. For every choice always triggers a hierarchy, regardless of what the artist happens to desire.
Nevertheless, I’ve discovered that this subject, which I insist is a conspicuous, blinding fact, is somehow contested as an opinion, despite my everlasting perplexity. When I feel brash, I shake my head, and look down from my throne, the world foolish, too primitive for such plain truths. When I feel a bit more humble, alas, I realize that I’m flawed, and that I’m wrong with a rather disturbing frequency, and begin to question whether on this subject, too, I might be wrong. With variables, on the necessity of choosing what’s foremost in your art, on the impossibility of avoiding a hierarchy between your objectives, I oscillate from the arrogant response to the humble response, though I’m pretty much always in one category.
Because pretending that you can maximize two distinct values at the same time seems to overlook some basic mathematics—a conclusion that some artists, and nearly all contemporary art critics, might want to accept. The maximum point for one variable cannot also be the maximum point for a second variable. To paint with only blue, for instance, is to ensure that your canvas is pure and optimized for that color; once you start fooling around with the rest of your palette, you’re no longer, thankfully, at maximum blueness. Or you can try to optimize your words for complete truthfulness like a madman, and that’s perfectly fine, or you can optimize your words for complete kindness like a character in a fairy tale, and that’s just fine, too, but, at a certain point, maximizing one of those desires is going to conflict with the other: the objective of truthfulness does very quickly battle against the objective of kindness. Because of the same constraint, you can train your body to its maximum strength, or you can train your body to run at its maximum speed, but you can’t do both at the same time. To be a functional human—which doesn’t, to be fair, have much to do with being an artist—is to recognize that your desires come in a hierarchy, that desires are synergistic, complementary, symbiotic, contextual, and that you must choose.
But those dials are forever shifting depending on the circumstances. To do a little of something is to do a little less of something else, and the artist, of course, must decide either purposely or accidentally what’s most important for a creation. Even though it is perfectly reasonable to have ideas or politics or philosophy at the root of a drama, for instance, you can spot the hierarchy whenever the artist must make a decision: what resolves the conflict when the question is between the needs of the idea and the needs of the drama? Most creations come with an amalgamation of desires, and there’s often, in the case of the ideas that drive a drama, no conflict, as the relationship feels, to the creator, complementary. But what happens when there’s a divergence? When the needs of the storyline don’t quite match the needs of the idea? Once you start fiddling with multiple desires—a canvas that contains both a realistic scene and an underlying theme, a novel that’s both comic and philosophic—there will be moments of tension, places that demand choices, imbalances between competing impulses.
And all of these little adjustments add up to the art. These are the decisions, the edits and cuts and deletions, that fashion the final work—with every creation the simple consequence of a long series of choices. Every artist has principles, an objective, and a method for resolving all the conflicts that arise, when competing desires abruptly meet. Only a juvenile temperament believes that all desires can be maximized at all times, where the greatest sense of beauty is aligned with the best political values and the most incredible storyline is adjacent to what’s deemed the pinnacle of style—although artists, thankfully, are nothing if not dreamers.
To forget what drives the art is the danger of those dreams. Wanting too much, trying to do everything at the same time, often leads to a muddle. An artist confused by a hodgepodge of impulses overlooks what art does best. Painting a canvas isn’t equivalent to representing a philosophy, telling a story is different from delivering a dissertation, although it is easy, amid the messiness and frustration and ambiguity of creation, to forget the distinctions, to forget why you picked up the brush and pen. A canvas has certain advantages, as does a novel, and they both have, too, certain disadvantages. And it is always obvious whenever an artist strays too far from those foundations, whenever the ideas, rather than the art, becomes the focus. In those instances the quality of the ideas is what determines the quality of the art—which should terrify every honest artist.
What’s curious is that my arbitrary spectrum does collapse with the very best artists at the extremes. The completely false separation between style and substance is revealed as a mirage. If I stand before a large abstract canvas, where all the cognitive decisions have been severed away, where there’s only color and line and accidental form, I start to notice that the emotional experience, within me, of those ambiguous, disjointed lines becomes intellectual, that the expanse of colors triggers a surprise experience of beauty and that triggers the creation of ideas in my mind. What I first observe as pure color and sensation and experience becomes, for this viewer at least, a moment that kindles new thoughts. Or this same experience occurs in reverse when I encounter a writer that uses nothing but cold, dead, and literal phrases, and I start, imperceptibly at first, to experience beauty in its very absence.
In both instances, however, there’s a divide between the artist’s desire and my experience—with the artist more monomaniacal, focused on singular elements, and my experience more expansive, focused on the entire spectrum. If you create a beautiful sculpture, it might be meaningful, profound, even intellectual, but those latter consequences come from the success of your original, and very different, intention. If you create a sculpture that represents a significant event, it might be, as a result, beautiful, too, but you can consider that beauty a consequence of your original intention. So whenever an artist creates a work that’s visceral, I find myself walking away with my mind stirred; and whenever an artist creates a work that confronts my construct of the world, I walk away with new sensations that warm my blood. It happens as long as the artist doesn’t end up muddled, in an attempt to reach every peak, by wanting to take every path—which is the equivalent of not selecting any path.
This is sooooo good.