Your Art is the Best Art… of… ALL THE ART!

As last night’s Grammy Awards reminds us, ours is a culture obsessed with artistic competition. Rarely satisfied to merely let good music, literature or art well enough alone, we love the making of lists, and the awarding of prizes and prestige to the “best” of the categories that we assign to the  things that we make.

There’s nothing inherently  wrong with this. It’s often good fun to judge and give out prizes, and sometime the sense of competition brings the creative community together where it would otherwise be fragmented. But the merits that we use to judge our “bests”  are rarely those of good artistic evaluation, and they are unable to adequately reflect the true, often nuanced reasons why the art that they are evaluating is good at all in the first place.

Sometimes, we need some perspective to ground us, to help us remember that awards do not an artist make, and the “best” is actually a pretty odd category to apply to art at all… 

I’ve mentioned Nick Cave’s iconoclastic letter to MTV in the past. In rejecting MTV’s nomination for “Best Male Artist” in 1996, Cave wrote:

“…I FEEL THAT IT’S NECESSARY FOR ME TO REQUEST THAT MY NOMINATION FOR BEST MALE ARTIST BE WITHDRAWN AND FURTHERMORE ANY AWARDS OR NOMINATIONS FOR SUCH AWARDS THAT MAY ARISE IN LATER YEARS BE PRESENTED TO THOSE WHO FEEL MORE COMFORTABLE WITH THE COMPETITIVE NATURE OF THESE AWARD CEREMONIES. I MYSELF, DO NOT. I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN OF THE OPINION THAT MY MUSIC IS UNIQUE AND INDIVIDUAL AND EXISTS BEYOND THE REALMS INHABITED BY THOSE WHO WOULD REDUCE THINGS TO MERE MEASURING. I AM IN COMPETITION WITH NO-ONE.
MY RELATIONSHIP WITH MY MUSE IS A DELICATE ONE AT THE BEST OF TIMES AND I FEEL THAT IT IS MY DUTY TO PROTECT HER FROM INFLUENCES THAT MAY OFFEND HER FRAGILE NATURE.

SHE COMES TO ME WITH THE GIFT OF SONG AND IN RETURN I TREAT HER WITH THE RESPECT I FEEL SHE DESERVES – IN THIS CASE THIS MEANS NOT SUBJECTING HER TO THE INDIGNITIES OF JUDGEMENT AND COMPETITION. MY MUSE IS NOT A HORSE AND I AM IN NO HORSE RACE AND IF INDEED SHE WAS, STILL I WOULD NOT HARNESS HER TO THIS TUMBREL – THIS BLOODY CART OF SEVERED HEADS AND GLITTERING PRIZES. MY MUSE MAY SPOOK! MAY BOLT! MAY ABANDON ME COMPLETELY!
SO ONCE AGAIN, TO THE PEOPLE AT MTV, I APPRECIATE THE ZEAL AND ENERGY THAT WAS PUT BEHIND MY LAST RECORD, I TRULY DO AND SAY THANK YOU AND AGAIN I SAY THANK YOU BUT NO…NO THANK YOU.”

It’s a rare artist who will climb to the top of their field, then refuse the artificial  recognition that such a position commands in our market-driven creative world.

At the end of 2011,  Ursula LeGuin discussed on her blog what we mean when we talk about literary and artistic ”bests.” She’s also confused and quite unimpressed by the term, and by our motivations behind handing such titles out. Subjecting artistic merit to popularity or even short-term critical judgment rings more hollow the more you think about it.

“Voting is the dangerous but essential tool of democracy. In art, voting is dangerous without being essential. Often it’s not even appropriate. In art, even given a carefully selected jury of peers, there’s no way to guarantee that a vote reflects informed, unprejudiced judgment not influenced by fashion, faction, or mere personal quirk. Anybody who’s juried an award, or just argued about a book, knows that.

Novels and stories that a whole lot of readers, plus honest and serious teachers and critics, have continued to hold in esteem for over six decades are surely beginning to deserve the status of “excellent” or even that slippery and over-used adjective “great”. But there are so many different kinds of fiction, so many standards by which to judge a novel, so many ways in which one work may excel another — Whose judgment is so widely and deeply and disinterestedly informed that they can presume to say which handful of them are “the best”?

And when you’ve said it, what have you gained?

And what have you lost?”

She asks many more good questions in her lengthy piece, which is well worth your time (full text here).

In the end, good art, great art is compelling. We know it when we feel, hear, or see it. It moves us, beyond our power to move ourselves. That’s the magic and glory of it. And though we all pick favorites, though one man’s trash may be another’s treasure, well crafted, creative expression will resist labels, judge’s panels, and sometimes even popular opinion or memory.

Why? Because if art is good at anything, it’s at besting the “bests.” And when the best we have is a “bloody cart of severed heads and glittering prizes,” we shouldn’t be too upset if our muses trot out from under the harness.

photo credit