When I was younger I really could not appreciate art: it did not seem useful and I didn’t understand it for that. For example, my mother is an interior decorator and it was escaping me really how somebody could spend his life with a profession that involves choosing the right material for somebody’s couch… She was taking me to museums and I did not appreciate them at all either. I think it was especially against fine arts and architecture that my ignorance was targeted against. It was escaping me really, the meaning of it all. The more I think about it the more I decide that I could not accept the value of art without a clear message and of course I could not see the message in Goya’s or Kandisnky’s paintings or in Macintosh’s architecture for that matter. I was the type or arrogant child that would utter sentences like, ‘if you are to dedicate your life into studying something, it might as well be psychology because what could it be more important that the human psyche?’ And then I grew up to become a linguist… But that’s a different story; we’re talking about art here. So I couldn’t understand my mother’s profession or her love of fine arts.
On the other hand, as an only child I was reading a lot, I was reading all the time. So I loved literature. And of course I loved music, too. And films… My question therefore is, what is the difference between these three and all other kinds of art that I could not appreciate? What was the split I did in my head due to? Now I think that it was due the clarity of the message and my distorted ideas of what is useful, so let’s talk about that…
When she broke up with her boyfriend, my best friend answered my question, what do you do at nights, with a simple, I have my books. Today, I felt the exact same thing: my life is dull, boring and quite melancholic these days but when I read a nice piece of literature my heart smiles. I read a nice sentence and I underline it and take strength from it and write it in my diary or on my wall. I close my eyes and read it again and I get stronger because of it. Because of ‘… all this beauty in this world…’ it fills me with hope. The other night I sang, the house was empty, my flatmates were gone and I was singing for half an hour. I was singing old songs that I haven’t sang for a long time and this filled me up with strength. But why? What is it about art that gives importance in our lives? What is about art that people want to live their lives through it? Is it aesthetics, is it because art makes our lives ‘aesthetically pleasing’? Or is it something deeper? All that jazz, I think, answers that question perfectly with a little help from Shakespeare of course.
All that jazz is a movie about a Broadway director / choreographer whose life is quite of a mess, he is an alcoholic, workaholic, arrogant, unfaithful bastard. But a talented bastard as well. He is a failed ex-husband and father who cheats on his current girlfriend with random, unimportant young actresses for no particular reason. (Who cheats for a reason, anyway? That is a different story though, right? Anyway…) The only thing he knows how to do well actually is dance and direct. This is his most important means of communication with everybody: when his girlfriend and his daughter want to wish him ‘happy birthday’, they dance for him. This way is the only way he can actually feel this ‘happy birthday’ and perceive and absorb the emotion behind it. He lives his life through dance.
Smoking, drinking and all that jazz give him a stroke. And then reality and fantasy fuse charmingly with each other in the remainder of his (semi) conscious moments. But why should dance be an illusion? For this guy it is the truth, it is his life. That is the way he perceives reality, through dancing and music and art. The second half of the movie is a dazzling overture of surreal dance sequences, as they are perceived by a dieing man in his deathbed. The only way he can understand his life calling for him is through his loved ones singing and dancing ‘don’t die daddy’ and the rest of it. It seems surreal but actually it’s not: art is a part of life, it’s just that some people see it more clearly than others. In one of the last scenes of the movie he sings ‘bye bye my life goodbye’ in an auditorium full with the people of his life. As the orchestra plays the reprise, he goes towards the audience shaking hands and kissing everybody goodbye. This is where a well-known Shakespearian quote first came to my mind.
When I am sad, I find it more natural to express my sadness through a song, through somebody else’s lyrics than with my own words: ‘funny thing how two sweethearts, with the world at their feet, all at once are two strangers that look away when they meet. Funny thing, but who’s laughing? Not me…’ This is so much more accurate than anything I would ever say about how I feel. ‘I need to set my lands in order…’ and ‘let us go then you and I as the evening is spread out against the sky’ contextual jokes that only an elite would understand… A winking of an eye to an unseen friend. What is it that makes such an expression of emotions so charming? Is it the fact that we consider ourselves intellectually higher than others insofar as we can express our pain through art? And who are ‘we’? A friend once told me, beware of the generic pronouns ‘they, we’ what do they mean, what do they stand for? Educated people shouldn’t use them… I use them all the time, unfortunately…
When I write in my diary I always end with a lyric from a song or with a question. Therefore, it’s either that I am uncertain about things or I am using somebody else’s words to express my (uncertain) thoughts and feelings. What does that tell us? (Not about my fragile state of mind but about the relation between emotions and their expression and art.) I think it tells us something about why art is important. As Shakespeare wrote ‘the world is a stage and we are all actors.’ Why is that relevant? Because life is art, if we want it to be. We can live our lives gracefully and write articulate summaries of it in our diaries, summaries that resemble literature. We can cry in style, reciting Lord Byron and other romantic poets. We can drown our pain in (cheap vodka and) Godard. But, wait a second, what am I saying? Am I saying that art is just a matter of good style? Is that all? No. So? Let me start again. Disregard this last paragraph, if you wish.
‘The world is a stage and we are all actors’. Surely, this cannot mean that we are living phoney lives. Surely, this cannot mean that art’s sole contribution to our lives is to add up a bit of style and good aesthetics. It can’t mean that art makes our lives a bit less boring. What does it mean then? Why is art so relevant, why do we seek its company when we are sad? Or why truly interesting people, live with it throughout their lives?
I think this is because the meaning of art is communication. Every artist (even the ultimately cryptic ones) wants to communicate with its (potential) audience: they write, compose, draw, direct with the ultimate goal to communicate their feelings to other people. The stories they say are usually not so original anymore: when was the last time you saw a truly original movie? The world’s major issues have been explored in all so many ways: good against evil, love, friendship, growing up… Is there anything else, really? Only the style changes. And that, I think, is what we call art in the conventional sense. It is the (hopefully) original / personal / interesting / idiosyncratic means that the artist chooses to convey his or her emotions. This is where originality lies: in the means. It’s not what you say anymore, it’s how you say it. There are no original ideas, I mean how many times have we heard a song about love? How many times have we seen a movie about two doomed lovers that end up together in the end? Why are these people allowed even to make this kind of movies anymore? Because each of those artists has a (slightly, most of the times) different way of saying the same (old) story. And if art is good, then this personal way of saying that story is interesting, if art is bad then that way is boring. But do not expect any original stories any time soon, because they will not come, I assure you. Only the means will change, they will become more relevant to our times, more relevant to young people. They will force us to revisit the well-known themes and maybe think of them in a different way, maybe we pay attention to an angle we had missed.
If every story is a cliché, then what is the message behind it all? The message, I think, art’s sole message is always ‘you are not alone’; identification, we crave to identify with the characters in movies, with dancers, with singers. You are not alone, what a comforting thought. And if you in all your pain and drama, cannot put your thoughts in a coherent order, the artist (/god?) will do that for you. The artist puts in an articulate and aesthetically pleasing order, the pain of people. And people read it and sing it and watch it and they identify with it and they feel less unimportant, they feel poetic and their life and their pain acquires new meaning… Through art, you tend to relive your pain through the pain of others in a more glamorous way; it’s one thing to cry boringly and in a totally uncreative manner, drinking alcohol and cursing an ex, and it is quite another thing to identify with T. S. Elliott. I mean, excuse me but there is a huge difference here. And I don’t mean it in a bad way, not necessarily. It is truly different to see that other people have been through what you are going through at the moment and lived through it and created art because of it. (A potential counterargument to my point here might be that all important artists are depressed and ultimately suicidal, but let us ignore this at the moment.)
Sometimes, with fine arts or music the message is straighter: there is no message really, it’s pure emotions. What do you feel when you listen to Exit music (for a film) from Radiohead? You feel pain? You feel redemption? Be it as you wish, you feel something. And maybe you communicate with the composer (because he felt pain and redemption when he composed that piece) or maybe you don’t. But the mere idea that somebody was as melancholic as to compose this music that expresses the melancholy you are experiencing at the moment, is good enough of a feeling. You are not alone, indeed and this is so comforting.
So I guess that’s why I couldn’t grasp the ‘use’ of art when I was a kid: I was not in pain then, as I am now. I felt nothing for which I would need any kind of feeling of solidarity, I didn’t care if I was alone or not, I was an only child anyway… I was a happy, arrogant child as I said. Art is not for happy, arrogant people. Art is for the depressed. Art is for the thoughtful, hurt adults all these happy children have grown up to become. Art is sadness, communication through sadness. There is no happy art, and for a good reason: happy art, even the thought of it is an oxymoron. Why would anybody want to share their happiness? More precisely, happiness is far too idiosyncratic to be shared, while sadness is universal and so common to all of us. All people hurt the same way but all of us are happy in such different ways. Only friends can communicate happiness, share the same jokes. I would never know how to make a stranger happy. But I can make a stranger sad all too easy. Hurting is easier than making someone happy, unfortunately.
October 2004
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