anonsally:
This is a brief follow-up to my series of posts on my unusual career path.
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I really enjoyed this. It bears on something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, but from a perspective I hadn’t previously considered.
Lately I’ve found myself having strong reactions, both positive and negative, to various creators’ artistic expression. In thinking about why I’m experiencing those reactions, I’ve concluded that for reasons I don’t completely understand, I’ve become more sensitive than I used to be to a quality I’ve taken to labeling as artistic integrity.
It has to do with my perception of the motivation and intention of the creator of the work, as revealed in the work itself. Among the things I’ve noticed myself responding positively to are:
- a zealous concern for seemingly minor details and an unwillingness to compromise the internal self-consistency of the work
- manifest ambition; that is, a sense that the creators are trying to push past their limitations, risking failure or embarrassment in pursuit of something new and greater than what they or others have achieved before
- an openness to engagement with their audience, in the sense of both expressing gratitude for praise and responding honestly and constructively to criticism
Part of this could just be me drifting into an idiosyncratic preference for certain kinds of “small”, less-accomplished, amateur, fan-made works. Peoples’ tastes change over time, and I’m suspicious that I might be trying to cloak what basically is just an arbitrary personal preference rooted in my own particular history and whims with some sort of grand theoretical underpinning.
So I’m not saying this is universal, or that the things I find myself liking and disliking lately are intrinsically good or bad in some objective sense that anyone else will agree with.
It’s all very subjective. But for me individually, it feels like a real thing. And one more interesting thing about it: It’s not so much that I’ve started liking works like this more than I used to. I think I’ve always liked them, a lot. It’s more that I’ve become more aware of, and more sensitive to, the absence of those qualities I described above. That is, I’ve become less-forgiving of works I perceive to be lacking in sincerity. I’ve become more intolerant of things I perceive as falling short of my ideal.
It’s a little ironic to me that I’d be doing that, because one of the things I’ve also been coming to feel lately is that it’s much better to celebrate the things I love than to criticize the things I don’t.
Anyone who follows me knows that I haven’t been particularly good at avoiding the criticism side of that lately. So I’m going to try to be better about that. And I want to thank anonsally for helping me better understand what it is I think I’m responding to.
Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/67546513178.
