The art world needs its assholes

The Art World would be boring without a great many assholes.

Groups have the right to exclude people. There. I said it. I believe they do. That doesn’t mean I’m okay with it, but I definitely think they have the right. The question for me, though, is this: does exclusivity hone the skills of a form’s practitioners or sound its death on the great gong of stagnation? I think the answer is: sometimes both, but let’s explore both sides.

In the case of groups, sometimes being exclusive helps a group grow. The best example I saw of this recently was in the film, B.I.K.E. It’s about the Black Label Bike Club and how very hard it and very subjective getting in can be. As organizations go, it’s healthy and growing. Getting in, though, is a nightmare.

I know that I have been a part of a lot of organizations that have tried to expand their membership and participation by opening their arms wider and wider. For example, I once took part in a showing of the PBS documentary, Eyes on the Prize. My boss wanted everyone to come to one showing. I suggested that we might want to have a separate showing for the political professionals in town. He said they’d get more from coming to one that normal people took part in. Fine, I said, but they won’t keep coming if it’s just open to everyone.

And they didn’t. Maybe they should have, but they didn’t.

Let’s take this to the arts, directly. When I was a Senior in College, I got very into writing haiku. I had had a creative writing teacher in high school that had really encouraged me to write haiku. He was a hippy. He liked Zen, but he also believed I had talent that haiku would help me hone. So, sometimes, I did.

Then, four years later, in my last year of college, writing it would become fixation. I wrote a lot, always trying to capture the power of the best haiku I ever read. I found it in Haiku magazine one day when flipping through it with my teacher. I can’t quote it back for you, but it was the image of a man walking through his bedroom with his mind on other things, then stepping on a plastic comb that had belonged to his dead wife.

Pow.

In that last year of college, 1999, it was the age of Web 1.0. We didn’t have blogs yet and message boards were then, as they are now, a weirdo thing. This was the heyday of Listservs. People would conduct elaborate discussions via email. One email would go out and 1000 people would get it. You might get 50 emails or more a day from one list. So many emails.

I joined a Haiku listserv. Shortly, I posted a haiku to it and it went out in many many emails to many many people. It had something to do with drinking a bit of Port wine.

Wow, did I get hammered. I got skads of hostile email. Emails telling me that I didn’t know anything about haiku. That haiku is about NATURE and NATURE ONLY. That I needed to read this book about haiku and that book about haiku and study the “masters” and I’d see… boy would I see.

The nicest email I got was from some guy who said that he could “help me” if I wanted to work with him. By ‘help,’ he could improve my ability to conform to the prescribed expecatations on this ancient form of poetry.

So, if a group of people want to have a forum for posting haiku about nature and nature only, I say: let them. It is their right, but, know ye this… at the time, I had thinner skin. I felt bad about not writing about nature. I felt stupid, but I also didn’t want to write haiku about nature. Nature was not and never had been a big part of my life, and it had not been a feature in the best haiku I ever read (in Haiku magazine) either. I wanted to write haiku about what I did see. My campus. My house. My booze. So, I quit the listserv.

I would like to report that I kept on writing haiku about whatever the hell I wanted.

I did not do that, though. Like I said; I had thinner skin.

I moved on to other forms. Which might have happened anyway, of course. Here’s the question: is it good for the art form for people to be doctrinaire about how and what the form should be used for?

Before you give me the easy answer: no, of course not, let me give you one more example.

In past lives, I visited a lot of churches. At many churches, they “pass the peace.” That is, everyone gets up and shakes hands and says something nice to each other. Often, it is simply “The peace of the lord” or “Peace be with you.” It’s never at the end of the service so you’re stuck with it. Everyone gets up. You’d stand out if you didn’t, and you just can’t escape it. It is many peoples favorite part of the service, but I struggle with these moments because the awkward decisions about how far to go with it, who to greet, how much to say, how much to touch all make me uncomfortable.

Some people walk all over and greet everyone — they love having permission to touch whomever they want. Others stand where they were sitting and wait for it to end. And what about the huggers? Some people will just hug you during passing of the peace. Even if they don’t know you, or barely know you. I hate that. I hate forced intimacy.

Does that make the ritual inappropriate, though?

It makes sense for communities to challenge us about what we believe appropriate intimacy to be. That’s not to say that the person who hugs strangers is right and I’m wrong for not hugging strangers. Things just aren’t that neat. I’m just saying that it’s worthwhile for a community to create situations in which I have to evaluate my own boundaries. The answer may be different for everyone, but your mind will stagnate without other people pressing hard questions to it (even if it takes them pressing up against you to press that question).

Is it wrong for schools to force a kid to write some sonnets, even if he’s destined to grow into e.e. cummings? Did the sonnets slow him down or hasten him along?

Let me ask the question again: does a world with societies of haiku purists insure that haiku will always be boringly the same?

Let me ask the question one last time in a wildly different way: would Jackson Pollock have ever splattered paint madly against the canvas in quite the way he did if some art world asshole hadn’t said to him, I don’t know what you’re doing, but that, by God, is not a painting.