Appreciation

by Alex F. Vance on 16. Jan, 2006 in Blog

While I understand the delightful buzz of a good review or the surprised elation at hearing that someone you’ve just met is aware and appreciative of your work, I’ve never fully understood how sensitive some people can be regarding their work.

I have a love of pulp, be it fiction, art, cinema, music… Pulp is mediocre, but competent. Good enough, but not really good.

Modern media, starting with publicly affordable photographic journalism through radio, television and nowadays teh intarwebz have poisoned our ability to appreciate works on a less absolute scale. While we were in Paris last year, my boyfriend drew a delightful sketch of the back of the Louvre while I sat beside him reading and taking notes, the two of us swapping pencils occasionally because my mechanical pencil has an eraser and his has a better tip size — since then he hasn’t done much sketching since he wasn’t pleased with the results.

We saw very different things in the same sketch. He saw flawed proportions, crooked angles and clumsy detailing. I saw straight lines and a surprising resemblance to the actual building. He saw a drawing that would be sneered at in an architectural office, I saw a drawing that showed immense promise, especially since it was his first try.

Excellence is freely available to us, or at least, the knowledge of it. You can see pictures or films of the most beautiful and artful things ever devised by the hands of man for free after a few seconds of Googling. You can buy CD recordings of the most sublime music of the last few centuries for a few bucks in the drugstore bargain bin. In school, Shakespeare and Multatuli are thrown at young folk with such force they have to try to dodge them — a few hundred years ago, in the town where I now live, the sight of a horse meant for riding rather than ploughing was news that kept buzzing around the area for months.

I’m not trying to argue that we should lower our expectations or worse, aspirations, simply that we re-​​evaluate the process by which we judge works of creativity. The movie Serenity didn’t change my life or my expectations of cinema, but it was good fun, well-​​written and, gorrammit, it had a hover-​​craft chase in it. Compare a product to its goal rather than its pinnacle, and all of a sudden mediocrity switches from being ‘less than good and much less than excellent’ and becomes a genre of its own.

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  • I don't know, but as an artist, I am always much more critical of my own pieces than anyone else. I think it has to do with the desire to better, but at the same time, it's an issue of control. Since I was the one weilding the pencil, it's my fault that there's a gimpy area in the corner. If you're looking at something someone else did, you might have some ideas for improvement, but you aren't the one who controls the artistic output. This hyper-criticality also focuses on the goals you have for a piece. If you're just playing with light and shadow, it's much less disturbing to have some things out of proportion, but if you're trying really hard to accurately represent something, that great use of shadow is much less important to you than correctly gauging scale and proportion. I have a tendancy when looking at my work to have very small areas that I really dig, but much larger areas that I think need work. It is my eventual goal to make pieces which contain nothing but areas that I really like.


    The thing about "pulp" is mediocrity in service of something else. It is typically genre work, in which the setting is more important than plot or characterization. As a consumer, you don't care quite as much about the literary merit of a work, as long as it has the cowboys or aliens you were looking for. Another example dear to our hearts is furry. Furry is very much a pulp genre, in which we overlook many flaws and conceits because it has the wolves or lions or foxes we're looking for. Pulp starts to have problems when it gets too good. After reading Heinlein (at his height) or Dick it gets hard to go back to reading dreck. It gets your expectations up too high. Furry is slowly starting to get like this for me, with the good writers slowly lowering my tolerance for second rate writing. I could go on and on, I've got a thing for cultural critique, but I think I should probably stop. I need to get back to writing my thesis.

  • The difference though is that your significant other had an expectation and demand from his own talents and effort, while you can only appraise the piece of art for what it is. I do not think it's so much the comparision between these famous works and one's own work that is the cause for dissatisfaction, but the fact that he has not lived up to his own expectations. Now, whether he has to be more realistic to accept what he produces from what his mind's eye creates (this is sounding very Platonist already) is another story, but suggesting that can be changed by arguemnt is shaky.

  • What I'm arguing is that that expectation and demand has been informed by previous exposure to excellence. I'm not suggesting that it can be changed either, hency my choosing the word 'poisoned'. I saw his drawing's flaws just the same; they just didn't seem nearly as meaningful as the achievements I saw as well.

  • ka

    Subjectivity. The artist sees his work's flaws, but to the casual observer, it is flawless, or those defects make it whole. On one end, if the artist didn't see his mistakes, he wouldn't improve--but if he is overwhelmed by them, he rips the page apart in frustration.


    At what point does something become artful? It's ideal to think we could give equal consideration to all forms, but we don't applaud those that draw stick-figures unless there's some other aspect of quality over the visual. Should we? I don't think so.


    I think art is a combination of technical skill (or a purposeful lack of skill for humor's sake) instilled with some intuitive gleaning. If you don't have the technical skill to communicate that gleaning, you're always going to fall past the mark.


    Still, I agree, we tear ourselves apart over the smallest things.

  • You're right about contentment possibly leading to complacency, but with your second paragraph you hit the nail on the head. We do applaud someone who draws stick figures if that person is paralyzed in all but two toes. We have the ability to place achievements in the context of the achiever's capabilities, or the receiver's expectations of the creator.

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