September 1, 2002
9/1/02 My brother Kent took
My brother Kent took issue with my blog from a few days ago while I was bemoaning the state of art and brilliance in my generation, and also stating that Manhattan makes being an artist downright unbearable. He responded:
Art isn't made best by the comfortable, unfortunately for those who try. The reason that New York has always been a site of creative ferment is that it isn't 100% comfortable, and the inspiration of desperation makes people productive.
Which is basically true, and Orson Welles (as Harry Lime) had that great line in The Third Man about how 30 years of noisy, violent churning under the Borgias in Italy produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance - while 500 years of peace, quiet and harmony in Switzerland produced the cuckoo clock.
I understand all that, but there is still such little emphasis being placed on art as a career in this country if anyone told you that they were a painter, more often than not, your response would be, "yeah, but what do you really do?" Making movies is respected only because there is the shot at a pretty big monetary payoff (even Tessa's dad asked us at the diner if Five Wives had made any money yet - never mind that it was on the short list for the documentary Oscar). And to an extent, being a visual artist is generally tolerated because so many websites need an artistic rendering, and websites help companies sell products.
All other "artists" can fuck off, as far as most people are concerned, and the rents in so-called "artistic neighborhoods" (SoHo, Chelsea, etc.) only further the reality that it's okay to be an artist as long as you have a $10 million trust fund. The government cuts funding for the arts yearly, even though it adds up to pennies per American per year. I suppose, in a nutshell, all I'm saying is that New York, which is supposed to be an artistic haven, has priced itself out of genuine talent. That pre-supposes that rich people aren't generally talented, something I happen to believe, but don't have the energy to defend it tonight.
No doubt Kent's right, and some poor, struggling writer, poet or painter will claw his way out of his/her hovel in the Bronx, and his/her work will be better for the struggle. But that idea has become so quaint that most people have opted for some other day job they can stand, just to pay rent around here. Soon enough, someone who could have been a brilliant playwright finds herself working at Chase Manhattan for five years, and before you know it, she's a banker. If you want to find some of today's unwitting Mozarts, Eschers and e.e. cummings, they're the ones vaguely dreaming of an alternate life, while they make doodles on a pad, at a desk on the 34th floor of the Citibank building, a stack of papers waiting to be input into Microsoft Excel.
basically, that's me doing the same in 2000 at the Woolworth Building