CSotD: Art is Essentially Deafening
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Timing is everything in comedy and all sorts of other stuff as well.
I encountered Harry Bliss's daily panel at Gocomics within half an hour of coming across a Very Important Interview with a Very Important Artist about a Very Important Piece of Work she had done as a Very Important Commentary on a Very Important Event.
Which I did not read.
Not because I don't like her work, or didn't like that particular piece or didn't care about the event that sparked it but because I really don't give a shit about what she thinks it means or why she wanted to create it.
And it's not even that I don't give a shit, but either the piece works or it doesn't.
Back in my guitar-slinging days, I used to play in campus coffeehouses where, as in Harry's cartoon, people would get up and introduce their songs and then play them and, as not in Harry's cartoon, the heartfelt introductions were often longer than the goddam songs themselves.
At which point, you wanted to say, "Look, if all this is so important, why didn't you get it into the song?"
Or, to put it another way, "Shut up and sing."
It isn't just about music.
One night, we had a special presentation of short films by a cinema class. And I do mean "short" because this was pre-video, so they were single-reel 8mm silent pieces, most of them about love stories that ended tragically, at least from the auteur's point of view, sometimes with simple rejection, sometimes with tragic death, far too often with the tragic end involving tragic suicide.
When I say "far too often," I mean that the first couple of cineastes got off easy because by about the fifth time the protagonist reached for what I think was the same prop gun to tragically end it all, the audience began to giggle.
Fortunately, not all the filmmakers were present to explain their films, which were simply shown one at a time.
Older readers will realize this included rewinding and then threading the next one onto the projector, during which we could have been given an explanation of what we were about to watch but thank God that didn't happen.
Finally – and it may have only felt like "finally" because it so numbed us to everything else that evening – there was a short film that consisted of shots of a guy hitchhiking on the highway interspersed with shots of him looking at himself in a bathroom mirror.
It was either brilliantly dada or complete nonsense.
Someone who was taking the course later said that, when it was shown in class, it was followed not by the usual peer-criticism but by stunned silence, until finally the professor invited the filmmaker to say a few words about it. "So he got up and talked for about 10 minutes and nobody understood anything he said."
Again, either brilliantly dada or complete nonsense, and who are we to judge?
Well, we are the goddam audience. That's who we are.
That same year, some English professor inspired his class with a lecture built around the phrase "Art is, essentially, defining," which they started dropping into conversations until, like the prop gun in those films, it began to inspire snickering rather than thoughtful nods.
However brilliant the original lecture had been, the phrase was now being used to wrap conceptual coffee grounds and evocatively dead fish, and, finally one day, someone had the coffeehouse stereo cranked way up with some rock while others were trying to study or talk.
When it was turned back down to a reasonable level, someone in the room remarked, "Art is essentially deafening," and that was the end of that phrase.
Shut up and play. If you have to tell us what it means, it doesn't mean anything.
Let your biographers and the doctoral candidates and, yes, bloggers explain it. That's their gig, not yours.
For example, it doesn't matter that she was a professor's wife and that the heroes in the seaweed were in the St. Lawrence River off of Montreal's Old Port.
If that were what the song was about, it would be a very trivial piece of work. Don't turn it into one.
And Cohen later regretted having broken the Gentleman's Code and told people whom he had sex with in a New York City hotel room. It was not only ungallant in the extreme, but it was gossip and it distracted from and diminished a really good piece of work.
Once the song had been let it out into the world, it was no more about that particular lover than it was about that particular hotel.
Shut up and sing.
Good art — graphic, literary, musical, cinematic — speaks for itself, and, if you can't avoid explanations, at least turn them down so we aren't forced to hear them.
And I chose those two videos for their lack of specificity.
But that's a rant for another day.
Now here's your moment of deafening art (Crank it up!)
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