Many moons ago I took a class from an instructor who shall remain nameless. I often felt bad for the rest of the class because most nights the lecture degraded into me and this (very smart, talented) woman arguing over what constituted art.
She was very insistent that if, as an artist, you aren’t pissing someone off then you aren’t really an artist but a hack. Real art, she said, has to dig deeper than entertainment. It has to stir something inside of it’s viewers/readers. We watched a lot of French films for that class.
The things is, I believe there IS such a thing as just telling a good story. For instance, I think “Hot Tub Time Machine” was one of the most hilarious films of the year. A timeless masterpiece? Maybe not, but a creative project that achieved exactly what it set out to – to tell an entertaining story. In my book that counts as art. I wish I could say I wrote that.
So I felt pretty vindicated at least year’s AWP conference when I attended a panel about controversy in writing. Sapphire, the author of “Push” (which was made into the movie “Precious”) was on the panel, and at the end I got the chance to ask her about this question that my instructor and I never did agree on. To count as real art, does a story have to piss someone off? Given the intense nature of the story she chose to tell, I really wasn’t sure what she’d say.
Her response was beautiful. She thought for a moment then answered “Miles Davis never pissed me off.”
Where was she all those nights when I was arguing depressing French films?
What a great answer. The truth is, art is a lot of things. Art can provoke. It can entertain. It can depress us or lift us up. It can make us question. It can be totally overlooked. This is a definition of art that I can live with.
Leave a Reply