What you do will not be important, but it is important that you do it.
- – -Gandhi
The other night some comedians were performing at a restaurant. Some friends and i were on the patio, far out of earshot. The performers, on the other hand, were amplified, so we were able to catch the occasional string of their acts. It was bad shtick pretty much. I started mocking one guy and everyone got a good laugh. One guy sitting on the patio with us challenged me to go in the dining room and heckle Mister Lousy-Comic. This guy was sort of being alpha-male, egging me on. The implication was that I was talking shit out of sight, why not face the man I mocked.
But I explained that I actually had moral issues with heckling a comedian during a performance. I would never interfere with anyone’s art, as I wouldn’t want anyone interfering with my writing. To heckle a comedian changes that comedian’s art, it is like slashing a painting in a museum. A painting may have a lifespan of a thousand years and a performance only a few minutes, but either both are entitled to their respective lifespans as their creators intended or neither are. We, the audience, are under no obligation to laugh or to store the painting, but we are not entitled to affect the outcome. they announce that before baseball games. You are entitled to keep any ball that lands in the seats but are not allowed to reach over and interfere with any ball that is in play, as that could have an outcome on the game.
The role of any critic is to examine the finished product as it is presented, not to attempt to alter things along the way and influence the outcome. Journalists slant their stories quite a bit in the hopes of influencing people. Critics try to point out historical occurrences as they are purportedly happening. This is pretty foolish at best and out of balance at worst.
The critic must review the outcome, and the only way for that outcome to be achieved is for the person creating it to never consider the place of the final product in the world, but to just create the final product and put it out into the world. You don’t make love thinking that you are creating a baby who will grow up to cure cancer. The artist cannot go about making art with a narrative of art history or current trends that the artwork is going to fit into.
Does this make any sense? It is starting to sound too philosophical to continue…
This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2003 at 2:41 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.