Sanctifying Art. Deborah Sokolove
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or fishing. It may be very important to them, and they may even become quite good at it, but it is understood as a delightful extra to the daily work which pays the bills and often brings a great deal of professional satisfaction of its own.
Artists, on the other hand, see their art-making activities as primary, as central to their understanding of who they are. This is not necessarily a matter of economics or even how many hours each day are spent in making art. Many artists are gainfully employed in some other occupation. But, among artists, this is known as one’s day job, done in order to pay the bills. For them, the real work of painting or sculpting or writing or composing is done as a second shift, often late into the night, and to the exclusion of adequate sleep, attention to relationships, or anything that might be a recreational activity. For serious artists, to make art—whether as an economic activity or as largely unpaid second shift—is a vocation in the true sense, a calling from God to work that, like ministry or medicine, is both burden and gift. When others assume that it is simply creative release, rather than real, serious work, artists tend to bristle.
Some artists do use the word play to describe what they do. Musicians play instruments; actors may refer to themselves as players; and, of course, what they are acting in is called “a play.” However, this understanding of play is not intended to imply some innocent, childish, useless occupation. Rather, it derives from an older sense of the word, which implied not so much frivolity as exercise. This sort of play, like professional sports, is seriously intentional, taking years of daily practice to do even marginally well.
The problem, then, is in equating what artists do with what is done merely for fun, as though they were weekend bowlers, or four-year-olds pretending to be superheroes. While a case can be (and sometimes is) made for the serious nature of this kind of play, as well, especially in connection with the socialization of children or the mental and spiritual health of adults, that is a discussion for another time and place. The point I am making here is that when the disciplined practice of art is trivialized as a childish pursuit, recreational hobby, or therapeutic technique, artists feel marginalized and misunderstood, left out of a conversation in which their own hard-won skill and knowledge is devalued by a culture where how hard one works is the marker of seriousness and commitment.
Spiritualizing Art: Art as Savior
Artists hold a special status in Western culture. Simultaneously revered and dismissed, they are presumed to possess a unique insight into the way the universe works even while they are ignored as irrelevant to the important work of the world. The starving artist is a common cultural trope, as is the artist as revolutionary, outsider, flaky, or weird. These stereotypes are largely the invention of the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, and were intensified by the writers, painters, and composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Lurid stories of Van Gogh going mad and cutting off his ear, of Cocteau and Baudelaire using cocaine and opium, of the enthusiasm for séances and automatic writing among the adherents of art movements such as Dada, of the general aura of licentiousness and debauchery surrounding the avant-garde, are circulated as evidence that artists are somehow different from ordinary people. Not only do they, themselves, live dangerously; their very existence is often seen as dangerous, as a threat to the morals and mores of the rest of society. Today, many artists continue to cultivate this aura of edginess, having internalized the role that society has given them.
In this discussion, I am speaking of artists quite broadly, to include not only practitioners of what might be called high art—concert music, opera, ballet, theater, painting, sculpture, poetry, literature, and the like—but also movie stars, pop singers, designers and others whose work falls under the general label of creative. Society tolerates—and sometimes even celebrates—the flamboyant clothing, the excessive use of alcohol and drugs, the flaunting of sexually charged extravagance, in part because the presumed reward to society is that the artists will return from their perilous journeys outside the ordinary with something precious to share with everyone else.
The reality may be quite different. Many (or perhaps most, it’s hard to know) artists live much more sedate lives. They get married, they worry about their kids’ schools, they pay their taxes, they go to church. If you met them on the street, you would not assume that they are any different from accountants, teachers, salesclerks, or waiters. For the most part, at least once they are out of art school, artists live like everybody else.
But the stereotypes persist, perhaps because there is a way in which artists are, in fact, different, and because this difference does sometimes lead to odd behaviors. Having trained their eyes, their ears, their minds to notice things that most other people do not, and to produce things that point to that noticing, they do something that people who are not artists perceive as outside the normal range of abilities. To paint a picture, to compose a tune, to choreograph a dance—these things seem marvelous, magical, the result not of work as it ordinarily understood but rather the product of a divine gift or genius.
I do not deny that some people do seem to have more innate talent than others. However, it is important to recall that even those who are more gifted than most still must work hard to develop that raw talent into something that others will recognize as great. In his memoir, The Street Where I Live, Alan Jay Lerner noted that every great star he had ever worked with never rested on talent alone, but worked harder, cared more, and had a greater sense of perfection than anyone else. He wrote,
I remember when I was doing a film with Fred Astaire, it was nothing for him to work three or four days on two bars of music. One evening in the dark grey hours of dusk, I was walking across the deserted MGM lot when a small, weary figure with a towel around his neck suddenly appeared out of one of the giant cube sound stages. It was Fred. He came over to me, threw a heavy arm around my shoulder and said, “Oh Alan, why doesn’t someone tell me I cannot dance?” The tormented illogic of this question made any answer sound insipid, and all I could do was walk with him in silence. Why doesn’t someone tell Fred Astaire he cannot dance? Because no one would ever ask that question but Fred Astaire. Which is why he is Fred Astaire.28
Such a story might be told of any talented, disciplined artist who strives continually to move towards a vision of perfection. The gift of talent is only a beginning, perhaps a necessary—but never a sufficient—condition of greatness. As someone said in another context, genius is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.
Regardless of the presence or absence of innate talent, in many cultures, everyone is expected to sing, dance, tell stories, and/or make images with some degree of facility. Even in our own culture, until relatively recently every educated person was given some instruction in playing a musical instrument, making watercolor sketches, and singing sufficiently well to carry a tune. It is only in our own time and place that teaching these skills is so neglected that only certain specialists are expected to do them at all, with everyone else serving as passive, adoring audience.
However, even when the practice of art is widespread in a society, rather than the domain of a specialized few, certain pictures, tunes, dances, poems, plays, and other artworks seem—at least some of the time—to convey something that feels like revelation, like an encounter with the holy. It is this experience, even more than the presumed differentness of artists, that suggests that those who make such works have a special access to God. There is something about that access that we perceive as simultaneously dangerous and valuable. The artist is given license to be flamboyant in return for going into the dangerous domain of the hidden and bringing back visible (or audible, or tangible) evidence of what is found there. In the popular imagination, the artist is often understood as a kind of shaman, and flamboyant behavior is seen as evidence of that special status.
While artists may be given license to be unconventional and simultaneously castigated for doing so, it is the artwork itself that is often seen as salvific. The conflation of aesthetic experience with religious ecstasy is the source of a worshipful attitude towards art that is widespread, especially among the highly educated professionals who make up the bulk of the audience for (and patronage of) opera, ballet, concert music, and art museums. A worshipful attitude towards art as a whole, not simply this or that artwork, is particularly problematic because it denies both the particularity of individual artworks and the