Temporal Flush

Artists have something to accomplish in this society. Regardless of forms or media, our times require the presence of art and the commitment of artists to contest the values of this world. We need musicians and writers, painters and dancers, photographers and actors, web designers and dramatists… We need artists who speak truth to power, who connect us to human realities that technologies shroud and the prevailing forces of political and corporate power would have suppressed. But where are these artists?

Oh, there are an abundance of individuals trained and skilled in the arts. They rush stages and “networking opportunities” everywhere to showoff their chops, to promote themselves to the next level, to grab a headline, to meme their way into fame — or greater fame — and a millionaire lifestyle. They push, they tug, they bully, they whore themselves without limit, delivering work that is as tiresome and irrelevant and vapid as their ethics.

So the aesthetic void known as Kanye West snagged a few days worth of attention at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards by publicly bullying another aesthetic void, Taylor Swift, and in so doing he just happens to promote his latest recording, which he made with two other aesthetic voids. The next day, the trio of voids appeared on the premiere of Jay Leno’s new show (a noise machine if there ever was one), where West made an inarticulate apology, appearing to wipe away a tear at the mention of his late mother (who raised no fool but who did fail to teach her son how to behave in public or how to use his talents for something other than making money and getting laid).

Following his mea culpa on Leno, West and his collaborators, Rhianna and Jay-Z, performed Run This Town, a track from their latest, in which West raps, “It’s crazy how you can go from being Joe Blow/To everybody on your dick,” and Rhianna sings, “Life’s a game but it’s not fair/I break the rules so I don’t care/So I keep doing my own thing,” and Jay-Z says, “You can call me Caesar.” I’m not making this up… All said: The whole thing turned out to be a promotional success story that will most certainly be studied by students of marketing and PR for years to come.

In this song alone we have a fascinating study of the melding of nihilism, individualism, fascism and, of course, consumerism in contemporary American culture, of which there are many examples, but that is not what this essay is about. Nor should my criticism be construed as an indictment of hip-hop or an endorsement of any particular genre of pop music.

But what is clear is that West, Rhianna and Jay-Z would like us to see them as individualists and rebels. But they are neither. They are outlandish, I’ll give them that. However, individualists and rebels don’t contort and distort and exploit themselves in order to pander to markets and audiences, nor do rebels become millionaires. In fact I will posit an idea that should be obvious but may shock and, even, cause outrage: One cannot become wealthy or maintain wealth and be in rebellion against the forces and values of this society. To be rich, to even be merely “well off” in America today, requires a compromise of ones principles and identity to the point of irrelevancy. We may take this logic one step further: To be rich and powerful in today’s America is to be a slave.

American culture is a wasteland of prosperous “artists” producing little of any enduring consequence. The corrupting influence is money. Whether we look at young successful “artists” or at the repackaging of old successful artists, it’s all the same. Money is the single constant and degrading factor. Consider one of our most recent divas to break into the pop music bordello, Lady Gaga (a.k.a. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, 23), a child prodigy who gained early admission into NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where “she studied music and improved her songwriting skills by composing essays and analytical papers focusing on topics such as art, religion, and socio-political order.” Her biggest hit to date is “Poker Face,” a song based on a pun, construed around oral sex and gambling (to say it’s about anything would be an overstatement). The promotion machine behind Lady Gaga is massive, and it’s all about making money by dressing her in little and by greasing her up in as much sexual innuendo and soft-core, self-exploitative outlandishness as possible. She creates and performs what is expected to sell, bothering with little to nothing else. It’s a long-in-the-tooth formula that Madonna gave us in the eighties. She didn’t invent it, she just took the outlandishness and self exploitation and subsequent profits to new extremes. Since then the formula has been predictably regurgitated through the likes of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Lindsay Lohan and, now, Lady Gaga.

Another way to look at the corrupting influence of money in art can be seen in the latest repackaging of the Beatles oeuvre, fifty years after the band’s formation and forty since they broke up. For audiophiles the music has been digitally re-mastered. For gamers, you can play along with the Fab Four vis-à-vis Rock Band. Take your choice or have both. But be prepared to pay and pay big to participate in the fantasy.

Popular music has always had it’s whorish side, with managers and record companies and promoters pushing artists to do a little more, show a little more skin, be a little more outlandish to sell a little or a lot more records or concert tickets. But now it has become so degenerate, that members of the media and audiences expect artists to be outlandish as a matter of course, to exploit themselves as a rule, not as the exception. Audiences demand pornography and combat and games.  It’s not art because it’s not original, it doesn’t speak to the times, it doesn’t speak truth to power. It is the perversion of art by marketers — of one sort by Lady Gaga, of another by Kanye West, of a much more destructive variety in the Beatle’s case.

The emptiness of Lady Gaga and Kanye West are so obvious, there’s really no point in exploring them further. But what’s being done around the Beatles library is something else entirely. No new music has been produced or can be produced by the collaborative efforts of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr. Copyright holders, record companies and estates (apparently those of Starr and McCartney included) now see the Beatles collection not as a cultural treasure to be preserved but as a capital resource to be mined to exhaustion. What the band accomplished between 1963 and 1969 was remarkable, if not unprecedented. Through their music, they somehow managed to artistically presage while simultaneously express the feelings of a generation through their music and personal explorations. How rare: To be both at the cutting edge and at the center of a culture.

Of course they didn’t stay there. Who could? But that it was done at all, and done well for six or seven years, is a landmark accomplishment. They spoke in, of and to their time. And they can’t be separated from it. All of this repackaging is more insidious than nostalgia, it’s fantasy of the pornographic order. Only worse. It’s a kind of vandalism by exploitation, in the same way the beauty of a young woman might be vandalized by her pimp and johns; in the same way Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta is being exploited as Lady Gaga; in the same way a smart and talented and creative young man like Kanye West exploits himself to grab attention and push record sales; in the same way a clever comedian like Jay Leno exploits West’s stunt to drive up viewership… It keeps going until we can’t tell the difference between the cultural significance of a “Strawberry Fields” and a “Poker Face” or a “Run This Town.” The situation is no better in publishing, film, painting, dance or any of the arts.

So what should the serious artist do? What position should that artist take when counterculture is mainstream and money is the single motivating force in that stream?

The only aesthetic appropriate to our times is rebellion. Not the rebellious poses feigned by the likes of a Kanye West or a Lady Gaga, but true rebellion. Total rebellion. Which is harder to do than you might think, because rebellion in this culture means rebellion against the accumulation of capital and, in a sense, against self interest. Money is the one constant. Money in this culture is both motivator and measure. It drives behavior and its accumulation is the measure of success. And in large enough amounts, we even seem to confuse it with quality.

The artists of rebellion must learn to aspire to a living wage from their labor and be satisfied with no more. They must assault the exploitative forces that vandalize and loot art and human beings. Our work must subvert the dominant values and desires of powerful people; which means we must stop thinking of networking opportunities and, instead, of chances to embarrass and shame the rich and powerful, of ways to call out the middle class and inspire the poor through our work and in our social interactions. The aesthetic of rebellion includes a lifestyle of true nonconformity with this hyper-commercialized society. One cannot put out a book or movie decrying the crimes of capitalism while maintaining a stock portfolio and an accountant to manage millions or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. The successful artists of today are fully co-opted creatures. They own a lot, and they are owned. Insofar as they are owned, they are castrated as artists.

None of this is easy. All of us fall short. Everyone and everything of quality  ultimately faces the temptation of being absorbed by this culture, of being co-opted into supporting its values and economy. Why? Because life is hard and money has a way of making it seem so much easier. Even when it’s not a lot of money. We’ve been trained to measure others and ourselves by how much money is made.

Who among us would be proud to tell friends at a party that we make minimum wage? Who really looks his nose down at the investment banker or the overpaid business consultant? It just doesn’t happen. Guys like Bill Gates and George Soros are still people we want to meet and talk to, even if they have less of real substance to say than the kid who flips burgers or the woman who cleans toilets. We want to talk to men and women who can make things happen. Who can make things happen for us. This thinking is ingrained in our being. It’s fundamental to our natures as Americans. Yet it is a lie. It is a lie that the rich and powerful and successful have more insight than the flunkies and losers. But if you agree with me, you are admitting that we are programmed to judge people and things by a metric that is factually incorrect and flawed at its core.

So what will you do? Will you stop living by that faulty metric and choose rebellion? Or will you concede to the lie because reality is just too hard to confront?

To the artist again: Art can prick consciences and motivate revolutions. It has done so in the past. It can do it again. I’m reminded of the apocryphal question Steve Job’s is said to have asked John Sculley back in the 1980’s, “Would you rather sell sugar water to kids for the rest of your life or would you like a chance to change the world?” Every time artists set out to work, that’s the option before them. Sugar water or revolution. Selling sugar water can make you a living. There’s no doubt about it. Taking the chance to change the world can make you poor and despised. But it can actually hit its mark and the world can be changed. No guarantees. But the world needs changing. Do you doubt that?