How big a frog? how small a pond?

Eastside Road, May 3, 2018—

Fame or sanity

ah, old pond
frog leaping into
water noise

THAT'S BASHŌ*, of course; I'm thinking about it in connection with a friend who reaches out yet again, anguishing over public neglect of his work. He is a painter and a good one. We have known him for years; several of his paintings are on our walls.

For a time he was in the San Francisco Bay Area, to my mind a significant locus of painting (as of litereature, of music, of cuisine, of so much) — an area as rich with history and creative energy as any Paris, Vienna, London, or New York. Already then uncomfortable, I suspect, with his view of his place in such a center he ultimately settled in Santa Fe, ironically itself a smaller version of the same kind of cultural and artistic focus.

Here’s the problem: how does an artist (a composer, a writer, a painter) live and work with any degree of contentment in a global society addicted to fame? Why, my friend asks, does the art community — meaning the galleries, the museums, the critics — celebrate garbage instead of the true and faithful work he is doing?

By “garbage” — my shorthand, not my friend’s — he means gimmicks, the trendy, the wannabe intellectual. Doggy art: Giant topiary poodles; photographs of Weimaraners. And so on.

I tell him I think art is always local. By that I mean the artist responds to his life experiences, with the means and techniques he has learned. So the results of his work — his paintings, poems, musical compositions — are best given to his own community. Forget the international market; let it go to its own devil. I'm not sure it's better to be a big frog in a small pond than a small frog in a big pond, but only because I think it's best to be an appropriately sized frog in one's own local pond.

Think of the exceptions as accidents. Rauschenberg, Thiebaud, Philip Glass, writers whose names I won’t think of because I rarely read current work — they are lucky beneficiaries of an essentially unjust system. Envy their wealth at the expense of your own contentment.

Of course in a just society one must make a living. In my youth I was impressed by the composer Charles Ives, who early decided not to pursue a career in music, so that he’d be free to write his kind of music, not music that would satisfy a paying public. Make a living in a related field, if you like — I myself chose journalistic criticism and a little bit of teaching. Or in a totally unrelated field.

The danger is that you will be considered a hobbyist or a dilettante. The greater danger is that your work will turn inward, lacking the feedback and commentary and coexistence with the work of others that enables it to stretch and grow.

Like so much else of the social sphere, art — and works of art, and the artists who make them — has thrived or not within successive forms of societal structure. The largesse of wealthy individuals, the support of social institutions, the whims of monarchs — and since the rise of capitalism the vagaries of the commercial market.

Recognize this, and make a living, and do your work. (And mind your business, my grandfather would have added.)

And don’t, I told my friend, don’t subscribe to the art magazines. Don’t read about the latest trends, the latest superstar; it’ll only make you resentful.

All that said, there is the question of marketing, even within your own community. You can buy my own books by clicking here. Be careful about the shipping fees!

*My translation, in 3-5-3, replacing the original 5-7-5