Thursday, September 04, 2008

Prime Passage: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination

From the introduction to Falling Upwards (2006) by cultural critic Lee Siegel:

"... The arts are losing their capacity to create an original experience, though no one has been able to say why. It seems harder and harder to make a work of art that does not conform to the dictates of the trivializing media, or that does not follow the lead of marketing experts...

"It's often the artists themselves -- novelists, painters, filmmakers, television writers -- who seem to believe that art is exploitable for nonartistic purposes. They seem to have given up on the idea of art as an autonomous end. Making art now often serves as a means to advancement. ...

"Art has become more, as the people in the personnel department like to say, 'goal-oriented.' ...

"This has a terrible effect on art-making. The general anxiety now is that if you don't have a gallery, or a movie about to be released, or a six-figure advance for a book soon after college, you have bungled opportunities previously unknown to humankind. ...

"Learning to make art takes time. But instead of the artist patiently surrendering his ego to the work, he uses his ego to rapidly direct the work along extra-artistic shortcuts, toward the success that seems to be diffused all around him like sunshine."