Light On Dark Water

Some Kind of Artist

A few weeks before the recent election the arts section of our
local paper featured a discussion of the fact that so many
artists are on the political left, sometimes the fairly radical
left. The editor put the question to a number of local artists,
and the unsurprising answer that many of them gave was a
variation on the theme that artists are superior people who
naturally embrace superior ideas. This of course brings to mind
Orwell’s “herd of independent minds,” and I can
think of several less flattering explanations for the phenomenon
under discussion.

But I’m really more interested in the underlying
assumption: that “creative people” are fundamentally
different from everyone else. I consider this idea not just false
but pernicious, doing an injustice to the vast majority of the
human race and considerable harm to art, artists, and culture.
Among other things, it carries an implication which is pretty
much insane: that the definition of art is “what an artist
does.” Some twenty-five or so years ago I heard on NPR an
interview with an artist which made clear both the madness of
this idea and its grip on the world of the visual arts (at
least—it doesn’t seem to have the same hold on
literature and music). This disturbed fellow’s art included
cutting himself with razor blades before an audience. The
interviewer, a nice intelligent liberal fellow, was obviously
appalled, but, not wishing to appear a Philistine, seemed to be
trying not to show it and to treat this sick stunt as just the
latest manifestation of the same gifts and intentions that were
exercised by Leonardo. But at one point he couldn’t resist
asking the question “Is this really art?” The
“artist” of course pounced on this; I remember
thinking that he had been waiting for just such an opening:
“Yes, it is. I am an artist, and therefore what I do is
art.” I wanted to reply “No, you are a nut, and
therefore what you do is nuts.”

The truth, I think, is that every person is a creative person.
The artist—by which I mean one whose primary vocation is
one of the arts—may be more creative than most people, and
he really must be more skilled in some particular craft than most
people, but I deny with every fiber of my being the idea that he
is intrinsically different from, still less superior to, them.
It’s hard to see that the term “creativity” can
mean anything more than the manifestation or expression of the
interplay between a unique self and the rest of the world, which
of course is always subjectively unique. In that fundamental
sense almost everything we do, unless it is a strict and
mechanical obedience to the orders of another, has in it some
tincture of creativity. We all, for starters, have our own way of
talking. We have our characteristic ways of constructing
sentences, turns of phrase, witticisms, the occasional simile of
our own invention, and so forth. Language in fact is a torrent of
mostly anonymous creativity: the other day, listening to a sports
talk show, I heard a football coach describe a thin player as
having “a neck like a roll of dimes.” Various schools
whose football programs are not doing very well have been
described as being under attack by the terrorist duo of bin
Losin’ and bin Cryin’.

Going a step further into what we more typically mean by
“creativity,” we see it in much of our everyday work:
a woman rearranging the furniture in her living room or
decorating a cake, a bricklayer fitting the pieces of a paved
path, a software developer designing a more efficient algorithm,
all are exercising a degree of creativity. Our technological
civilization in fact surrounds us with the work of engineers,
product designers, and advertisers of all sorts who are extremely
creative; although we may not consider what they do to be art and
don’t credit them with being members of the fragile and
superior class of creative persons, I don’t know how one
could reasonably define creativity in such a way as to deny that
they possess it.

A number of 19^th and 20^th century
thinkers, such as the Catholic artist, typographer, and sculptor
Eric Gill, railed against the factory system precisely because it
removed the element of creativity from work, making the worker an
inhuman automaton. Indeed we are now seeing the replacement of
traditional assembly line workers by robots and if this did not
involve unemployment we would have to consider it a good
thing.

I certainly would not deny that there is a distinction between
the fine arts, in which the object is made and valued principally
for itself, and the useful arts, in which the object has some
function outside itself. But the distinction is not hard and fast
and I don’t believe there is any qualitative difference in
the human impulses and gifts exercised in either case.

And when I say that everyone is creative in some way, I
don’t mean to imply that there is no hierarchy of quality
in the arts, or that everyone should be encouraged to write or
paint or make music, whether or not they have any talent, on the
grounds that creativity is only real if exercised in those arts.
I’d have us understand Eric Gill’s aphorism:
“The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is
a special kind of artist.” I might even go so far as to say
that the term “creative person” is redundant,
although the addition of an adjective such as “more”
or “less” can make it useful.

Whenever I think of Gill’s words, I remember a poem by
James Seay, whose writing classes I took in college. The poem was
called, if I remember correctly, “Kelly Dug a Hole,”
and although I don’t remember much of the poem itself I
remember Jim’s account of its subject, a man who could dig
a hole with perfectly square corners and perfectly straight
sides. As I remember, Jim said he thought Kelly could have been,
in the right circumstances, an artist of some kind. But
that’s only half-right: he was an artist of some
kind—as was my uncle Jimmy, who was a bookkeeper (or
something) by trade but painted the walls and ceiling of his
children’s playroom with vertical stripes that tapered
perfectly from a foot or so wide at the baseboard to a point
where they met at a light fixture in the ceiling. When I
expressed my astonishment (not too strong a word) at the skill
involved, he just laughed, as if to say it wasn’t that big
a deal. And in a sense he was right: the skill was unusual, but
the impulse and some ability, however slight or mundane, to
exercise skill and imagination belong to us all.