My formal arts education started in high school, when I was fortunate enough to attend a fantastic public school called the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts. I was delirious with the stuff, steeped in French film, Surrealist art, jazz, James Joyce and the pleasures of becoming a writer. I believed in art for its own sake. It was a thing worth doing, therefore I did it.
I still think that’s true of the arts. But in the ever-increasing pile of years since NOCCA, I’ve learned a fair bit more about being an artist, about living as an artist. To make art of any kind is to navigate a whole host of tensions. Basic to the whole endeavor outside the bounds of school is the tension of making a living versus making art. From that starting point, all sorts of related tensions arise: Should art be more accessible to generate more income? Is art for art’s sake by definition commercially unviable? If you have a job outside the arts, will you be able to keep making art?
Perhaps the central consternation is this: why do so many people adopt wry smiles and deliver somber prognostications to artists, telling them they’ll have a rude awakening in “the real world”? Of course, what they really mean is not “the real world,” but the world, like it or not, that we’ve created, a world in which everything, including art, is held hostage to the model of sale and transaction. A more honest version might be, “How are you going to sell a product—and you have to sell it—that our culture doesn’t value?” (Why such things are always accompanied by smirks is probably the question most worth addressing, but that’s fodder for another story entirely.)
Some fortunates inherit sufficient funds to ignore such stuff (but is their art, absent practical struggles, less relevant?). And then there are jobs in the arts, like the course I’ve taken, working at the Advocate as the Arts Editor. It’s a great gig in a place like the Valley—and the name of this column, Art in Paradise, is meant to refer to the entirety of our Valley, not just Northampton. The Advocate‘s offices may be in “Paradise City,” but between the off-putting prices of gentrification and the gorgeous backroads that wind into nearby places, many an artist of every kind chooses to live in other corners of the Valley. Surely the whole area deserves the moniker “Paradise,” in part because it’s one of the few places where people really do value the arts, where the transactional nature of everything is still prevalent, but not inescapable.
But making art here has its frustrations, too. I don’t know precisely when it happened, but somewhere in grad school, maybe at Hollins College or at UMass-Amherst, it became much clearer to me that even in the supposedly high-minded world of the arts, little matters quite as much as who you know and how you play the game of professional schmoozing (and often bamboozling). Perhaps I should have realized it long before, but somehow back in the crumbling environs of NOCCA, reading Italo Calvino amid the breezes of the Garden District, the world of the arts seemed too otherwordly to be invaded in such unseemly fashion.
It bummed me out when that veil blew away. I still believe the arts are worthy for their own sake, and that a good poet can see his day, a fine painter her installation at MOMA. That a hundred more might get there through politicking or the accidents of birth makes it all the more astonishing to see the real thing when it shows up. But when it does, isn’t that just as real, maybe more substantial yet, than that drab “real world” people keep talking about?
Here in Paradise, we’ve got every stripe of artist. We’ve got purists and naifs, artists who make music or dance at great cost solely because it’s a thing worth doing, and we’ve got trust funders who finance careers with scads of free time and the right connections a phone call away. As a musician and writer, I’ve long seen the artistic process in a personal light; as the Advocate‘s Arts Editor, I’ve seen it as arbiter and promoter, too, the parts of the process you don’t learn about at art school. Art in Paradise is in part an attempt to address the tensions inherent in the arts from both those viewpoints, to go beyond the laudatory spin-cycle, the press release-fueled easy loop of arts coverage to ask how art gets made here, and why it gets made here.