In a previous post about a friend I had when I was younger, I wrote :

Once upon a time he had smart, witty, and ambitious young ladies swooning over him and girls of modelesque beauty competing for him and the last two girlfriends of his that I met were mediocre-looking art school dropouts crafting the lowest form of amateur adolescent/post-adolescent art… poetry.

My friend Kyle and I went to hang out at a mutual friend’s house last week. The mutual friend’s wife is a professional graphic designer and a visual artist of many stripes. While I feel a bit self-conscious about the bare 12 year old anime character hanging on the wall of our bedroom, our apartment has nothing on their house. Hanging on their wall is some abstract piece with an unclothed woman on all fours. The front half of her is on the bottom left of the piece and the back half is on the upper right. That’s about all their is to the painting.

Kyle’s wife commented that she was unimpressed. They’d also apparently been to an art showing a while back where he was similarly unimpressed. Kyle’s a pretty culturally liberal guy, but there’s only so much art with genitalia placed against a backdrop of this or that before it gets sort of boring.

I responded:

You don’t UNDERSTAND! They’re SPEAKING OUT against our SEXUALLY REPRESSIVE CULTURE. They’re expressing their SEXUAL FREEDOM by exposing our PURITANICAL SOCIETY and all its taboos. If you fail to appreciate their artwork, you’ve been BRAINWASHED by the religious zealotry of our culture that seeks to control us by making us ASHAMED OF OUR BODIES!!!!

Or… alternately…

They’re EXPOSING THE POINTLESSNESS OF LIFE AND MORALITY by taking our most private parts and putting it out there for all the world to see! They are taking that which we see as SACRED and DEFILING IT as a grand tribute to the NIHILISM that is our culture, every culture, and LIFE ITSELF!!!!

I don’t know if that’s what the guy with the painting of the penis in the wine glass was aiming for, and it’s almost certainly not the terminology that he would use, but I’d be surprised it wasn’t along the lines of one of the above options or something else equally inane.

But it’s not the point that they’re making that bothers me. Yeah, sure, exploring what we do believe (sexual freedom or opposition to it) or don’t believe (nihilism) has been done, but there are few areas of art that haven’t. It’s not even the repetitiveness of it within the anti-commercial art world, necessarily. What irritates me a little bit about it is that they do something simple, assign the more complicated task of interpretation to the viewer, dismiss criticism of it as a failure on the part of the viewer, and take credit for the viewer’s ability to see the patterns in the static and find some grand meaning in the image of a penis wrapped around a can of aerosol or a Jesus dumped in a jar of urine or whatever.

The problem with a lot of abstract art, of freestyle poetry, or of any sort of extremely abstract art, is two-fold:

1. Bad art is incredibly easy to make.
2. Good art and bad art are not easily compared or differentiated from one another.

Take the absolute worst action film you’ve ever seen. The worse, the better for our purposes. For me it was a movie called Terminal Impact, about a cop trying to bust an organization that’s taking college students (that look way too old to be college students) and turning them into cyborg warriors. The movie was so bad and so destined for obvious failure that the only hope they had of selling it was to name it similar to a Charlie Sheen movie called Terminal Velocity that came out a couple years earlier, replicate the font of the movie’s title, and cross their fingers and hope that people get confused in the video store and say “Hey, Terminal Impact. That’s the one with Charlie Sheen, right? Let’s not even look on the back and rent it anyway!” Notably, after the Terminal Velocity is forgotten, Terminal Impact was renamed Cyborg Cop III so that they could sell it as a trilogy with two completely unrelated movies with the guy who played the American Ninja in the third and fourth American Ninja movies.

Despite all this, Terminal Impact is in some ways more impressive to me than Piss Christ. Say what I will about the movie, but TI took quite of big of effort to make. Sure, they didn’t have the special effects of the Terminator, but their were motorcycle chases and some explosions. More than that, though, there were sound people and lighting people and people that played their parts (I hesitate to call them “actors”). Production costs I’m sure ran somewhere into the thousands. Money was raised, allocated, and spent. Piss Christ required a crucifix, urine, a jar, and some great lighting.

Further, Terminal Impact can rather easily be judged on its own merits. I judged it and found it lacking. Compare Terminal Impact with its namesake or any Jean Claude Van Damme movie or even American Ninja IV (which coincidentally was the worst action movie I’d seen prior to TI). You not only have something to compare it to, you but you have technical merits in addition to artistic ones that you can judge it with. With the aerosol can, all you can say technically is “Yep, that looks like a weewee. Yep, that’s a spray can that says ‘aerosol’ on it.”

I’m not saying that abstract art isn’t art and that it cannot be really, really good. It really can. The problem is the “e. e. cummings Effect”, wherein the comparatively few good artists are swamped by the lazy ones that don’t want to put any effort into adhering to any guidelines or doing any of the work that less abstract art work requires.

When I was in junior high I used to write comic books. The original ones weren’t very good, but I did put some effort into them and the thought and effort I put into them became the building blocks with which I started producing works that were good (in my opinion, at least). But for a while after the original ones, I got lazy. I found a formula to use to used it over and over and over again (though, to my credit, I was able to use the established pattern to make later deviations more interesting and humorous than they otherwise would have been). By virtue of the comic book medium, it wasn’t hard to tell that they sucked. With abstract art, there’s no way to tell, and thus for people that don’t want to make the effort, it’s an extremely easy way out. Just let the audience to the heavy lifting.

When it comes to the creation of something — most things — there is a mixture of artistry and craftsmanship. Even utilitarian things things such as cars that are meant to drive us places have artistry impressed upon it to make it look like something we want to be seen in. Carpentry is making something useful but also making it aesthetically pleasing. Movies are meant to entertain us, but pre-production requires a lot of thought and the production requires a lot of work. Novels are a mixture of ideas (artistry) and presentation (craftsmanship). Art without craft leads to the proliferation of crap.

And so it is with poetry. I was a bad poet once. I wrote poetry because I didn’t know how to write prose well. A poem is much easier to write than a book and if you go all “freestyle” you remove any effort at all. Maddox nailed it when he offered the following tips on writing (bad) poetry:

Writing bad poetry is easy when you disregard meter, pace, and rhyming scheme. Just make sure to follow a few simple guidelines:
1. Never write about anything cheerful. Remember, you are a tortured artist. Be one.
2. Be sure to use the following words at least once per sentence, no fewer than 50 times per poem: lament, loathe, soul, darkness, bitter, agony, despair, misery, anguish, pain, suffer, woe, hate, death, love, sultry, angel, rose, acrid and nihilism. Nihilism is a good one because it comes up all the time in normal conversations.

It’s easy, here’s a sample to get you started:

fire… burning… agony…
sultry shivers of a dark essence
why am i tortured with this nihilistic existence?
bitter… darkness… despair.

notice the constant lower case? i added that touch to be unique. unique people type in lower case.

That is the tragedy which e. e. cummings has wrought. Generations of young people that can just string together some sentences with some basic idea in mind and allow themselves to think that they’ve created something worthwhile.