Much as I’d like to think of time spent enjoying good art as a sort of exercise of the mind and the spirit, there’s an assumption there that I wonder about sometimes – no, not the mental or spiritual benefits of art, I am generally convinced of those, but the benefits of good art in particular, as compared to bad art. Surely, while learning about another artist’s carefully conceived and expressed world view is worthwhile, so is picking apart a poorly formed piece of claptrap to discover aspects of your own worldview. Bad art, acknowledged as such, can be a path to self-discovery – simply finding the words to describe what it was you disliked about something can be as beneficial as any other experience engaging with art.
This is why I hesitate to class the experiences we can have with art into any sort of hierarchy of quality. The movie or book or game may have been clumsy and naive, but it might still have genuine insights which were not heretofore available to me – or maybe it was a masterpiece, but still contained niggling flaws which I am compelled to catalog and describe. This is all valuable. What is not valuable is deciding partway through what the experience I am having is and ceasing to engage with the work – to decide 10 minutes in that because I understood the particular narrative trick at play I have nothing to learn, or that because I didn’t understand how it was done there was nothing I can do but gawp in awe. It’s tempting though, to dismiss something as beneath notice or embrace it as beyond knowledge. It’s freeing, being able to enjoy something solely as an experience, in the moment – but it’s also constraining, believing most things to always be beneath notice or out of reach.
I guess if I could distill my general philosophy it would be this: Pay Attention. This doesn’t stop at art. People who are contemptible and unwise often follow some rule of behavior, and even if it’s an foolish and destructive rule it’s better to know what it is, and why it is, than to not. Every friend and ally and mentor and hero carries deep flaws and unseen scars: We are all different, and no one can really live someone else’s life or create their art. We can’t trace, we can’t copy, we can’t merely emulate, we have to actually learn how to make our own art and our own lives. No role can be sufficiently modeled before the fact: Eventually you have to become whoever you are.
All we can do is our best to learn what we can and give what we can. None of this can happen if my understanding stops at friend, ally, mentor, hero, just as it can’t if I write off someone as loser, idiot, asshole, enemy: Understanding cannot stop there, even if it’s easier that way.
We have to look closer. We have to not turn away. We have to see.