Extra Ordinary Ideas

A Portrait of the Artist as You

When lobbying for state and federal grants, professional artists carefully cultivate the impression that they are different from the rest of us. More sensitive. More passionate. More creative. Endowed with a rare ability to express shared cultural values and personal experiences. They are so important – these rare creatures – that government should support their full-time efforts as a public good. The alternative, they imply, would be a world without Art, and thus a society without meaning.

This tired mantra makes Dana Gioia, the new head of the National Endowment for the Arts, incredibly refreshing. A well-known poet of the New Formalist School, Mr. Gioia has also held a series of “real jobs,” including Vice President of Marketing for General Foods. Asked why a poet of his talent would devote so much energy to crass commercial pursuits, Mr. Gioia ironically observes, “My parents neglected to give me the private income that I so richly deserved.”

Mr. Gioia has long highlighted the twin moral failings of the professional art world, Artist Separatism and a consequent sense of Artist Entitlement. In an incendiary book titled “Can Poetry Matter?" he argued that much of today’s poetry, written only to impress other cloistered academics, does not matter. Too many artists are so convinced that “the masses” lack the capacity to appreciate good art that they wish to be paid by the public to chatter only to each other.

This attitude is most unfair to the masses, many of whom are artists some of the time. I know lots of lawyers, managers, analysts and secretaries who are also musicians, writers, dancers and singers. My father, in between making commercial aviation insurance deals, has written three novels, the first of which is actually fairly likely to be published this year, though not for any great profit.

I danced for many years at the student to semi-professional level before heeding the market’s advice that I try doing something more analytical for a living. I have friends of similar, fairly modest artistic talent who have remained dancers. They have various reasons for their decision to stick with art, including greater enjoyment of it, fewer injuries, or less in the way of other interests. None of these reasons makes them profoundly different from me as dancers. They just had a slightly different set of costs and benefits. Why should an artist who decides to take a “real job” be required to support an artist who, for lifestyle reasons of her own, does not?

A real-life Gordon Comstock, Mr. Gioia demonstrates not only that good art can be accessible, but also that a guy with a day job can be a good artist. Ironic as his new position at the NEA will be, his example is one that all artists would do well to ponder.

UPDATE: An appropriate addendum by one of the 20th century's wittiest women:

Bohemia by Dorothy Parker

Authors and actors and artists and such
Never know nothing, and never know much.
Sculptors and singers and those of their kidney
Tell their affairs from Seattle to Sydney.
Playwrights and poets and such horses' necks
Start off from anywhere, end up at sex.
Diarists, critics, and similar roe
Never say nothing, and never say no.
People Who Do Things exceed my endurance;
God, for a man that solicits insurance!

Courtesy of Alina

Posted by Marie Gryphon on February 17, 2003