In a message dated 3/6/10 8:14:48 PM, [email protected] writes:
> In a message dated 3/6/10 12:17:04 AM, [email protected] writes: > > > > (I myself won't be participating because myth does not > > engage me.) > > > > > > what are you thinking about now? > I am having an experience that is not atypical for "artists": deploring an earlier creation of mine. I have a playwright's website, with several downloadable playscripts of mine on it. I recently reread one after many months away from it, and, with the objectivity that passing time often brings, I now judge that though it has some good things in it, it fails utterly as a play. So I'm deleting the play from the site, and rewriting the Home page and other site copy. I have always been almost suspiciously non-brittle, so, though this deletion amounts to rejecting the work of several years, I am dismayed but non-shattered. Perversely, I ponder the experience with generic interest. I presume visual artists occasionally quit on a given work that isn't "working". But how often do they spend years on a work? What is most interesting is contemplating the self-delusion that most writers -- most "artists" of any genre-- are capable of. As an editor, I saw this on a daily basis, and yet that did not protect me from it when I became a writer myself. The experience itself is comparable to what I imagine certain divorces are like: the divorcing spouse, while not hating the spouse he is divorcing, is dizzied by the realization that he once was in love with her. "Yes, she was good looking, but I saw much more in him than just her looks -- I thought." The teacher of an "art" is comparable to an editor. A goodly part of the time he is working as a diagnostician: sensing an ailment in a student's work, identifying the ailment, and suggesting the remedy. Tell me: Do teachers of visual art ever find their diagnostic skill/gift deserting them when they try to apply it to themselves? At that point, complicating considerations arise. Just as it doesn't take an aesthetic sensibility in an editor to notice that the writer of a whodunit has failed to tell us who done it, an art teacher doesn't need much aesthetic responsiveness to detect that the student has drawn an arm that is anatomically monstrous. Such mundane observations call only for "skill", and I can imagine an art teacher saying that skill does not desert him in diagnosing his own work. So is it ever the case that a teacher can paint something that is "correct" in all "skill" regards, but nevertheless of no aesthetic reward -- which the teacher would register in a student's work but cannot detect in his own work? My next test may be this: Will I be like the guy who believes he doesn't have to divorce his spouse -- he can change her! (Oy.)
