Once again, long overdue…

Three billion monkeys stroking away at their keyboards… is it any wonder that some of them are going to come up with a few great ideas now and then?

I have been thinking long and hard on this topic, and the more I reflect upon it, the more closely I relate it to our society as a whole. How different is the plight of the artist from the struggles of the banker, the politician, the scientist or the schoolteacher. We all have moments of relative greatness and moments we would rather have wiped from our hard drives. Why is it we have come to expect so much from artists?…so much from people?…so much more than we might be willing to give of ourselves. What gives us the right to expect intellectual immortality of them when we so often dream of not having to work so hard at what it is we do?

The late 20th century has brought us an unprecedented access to and inundation of media and entertainment that has warped (or simply changed) our perspective on pop culture and art… and where do we draw the line between art and pop culture. One must be careful not to confuse one for the other. They are neither mutually exclusive nor one in the same and sometimes when we refer to artists I think we should be referring to pop culturists. The line draw between the two is grey, fuzzy and fraught with interpretation.

Never before has society had access to and consumed so much media…of all sorts. We gobble it up. We consume so much of it that some of us have to leave it unwrapped on our shelves for a time when we have room to digest more!!! Would you like to supersize that sir? Through all the belly aching of the record companies and the entertainment industry, unit sales for cd’s have risen once again to outstrip the growth rate of our GDP. More music than ever with ever less to be said…so it would seem. One of the more ironic tales I have heard, is of how The Wallflowers firs Album grossed more to Jacob Dylan than all of Bob’s albums had combined to that point in time. Hard to comprehend.


It is interesting when one compares art and artists of the time before the advent of mass media with those of the 20th century. I think that many of what we deem to be great artists, were, ahead of their time, unnoticed in their time, excommunicated by the church, starving, prone to cutting of their ears, and none were as rich as the richest have become today! Art was never about wealth. It was something that had to be done in spite of its financial shortcomings and lack of recognition. A hardship that had to be endured and that informed the work. Something that came from the heart. The ability to create art is a luxury and a self indulgence and yet people have come to complain about how hard it is to make a living as an artist. Supply and demand baby! If you can’t make a living at it, you ain’t no good at it! Give it up and get a real job!…sorry I don’t really believe that, but there are far too many people who feel that it is within their right to make a living as an artist. Truly great art is seems to bear little relation to its value.

Art is a tapestry…a time and place cross with a mind that expresses a new and significant idea…the threads are woven together to form a fabric that is a critical reflection of society. Time and place make ideas significant, without them, provocative concepts become meaningless. The fabric of the tapestry is delicate and forever in flux. Work created yesterday can be relevant and brilliant but meaningless and insignificant if created tomorrow. The interesting thing is that great works of art usually remain great maintain their significance over time.

Someone mentioned Louis Armstrong, and he was without a doubt, one of the key figures in defining modern jazz. You work a theme through for a few decades and that becomes who you are…what you play…it is part of your core value…the way you play your music….what did you want him to do next? invent jazz-fusion?

The problem is that we are all a product of a time and a place …a great artist makes a statement about the world in which they live… the world changes, in part due to the contribution that the artist made and the statement becomes valuable and viewed for its value in changing society. An artist can only explore an avenue so far. At a certain point the artist needs to redefine himself. The better the artist, the more readily the artist can redefine themselves. In our day and age, change seems to be occurring on a logarithmic curve . Through sexual revolutions , cultural revolutions and technological revolutions, an artists world changes but the artists core values can no longer change the world since the world has changed around them. Compounding this problem, the lives we live are becoming longer and longer and it becomes more difficult to live out a lifetime of creativity when so much change occurs though our lives. People are still alive who saw the birth of the automobile, flight, the radio and the telephone, the world at war (twice) space travel and the computer…what changes did J.S. Bach see in his 65 years on earth…probably seemed like a lot to him…what changes will your children see in the years to come? And speaking of J.S….there is a very good example of someone whose artistic contribution was largely written off for about a century…how did that happen…who has been overlooked within our generation?



As we grow older our bodies and souls change and our core value change. Things that were important to us when we young (like getting laid in the back of Dodge) seem to be replaced with more meaningful pursuits (like getting laid in the back of our X5 or Land Cruiser). You need to grow and change as an artist as the values in your life change but it might well be that you are not able to successfully translate your matured values into art. Maybe the matured you does not care at all about anything…you are numbed by the existence of your success. It is an impossibility to isolate yourself from the reactions to your art, be they monetary or critical.


Geniuses are hard to come by but we have come to look for them all around us…the next big thing. Through the escalating changes in the world we seem to reject and accept icons of pop culture and art and discard them with ever increasing rapidity.

Art is never something we do in isolation. We draw from those around us whether they be lovers, family, friends, partners or collaborators. Would U2 be what they are without Lylywhite, Eno or Lanois? The dynamics of these relationships are always in flux and that will invariably affect the quality and content of our work. I think that we can never underestimate the contribution that others make in the support of the artist; after all, if the there ain’t no audience there just ain’t no show!

The flow of an artistic career has much to do with the discipline in question and the way it changes in society. Musical pop stars seem to reach their pinnacle shortly after puberty these days while the saying still goes that you are not an Architect until you are 40! (and yes I believe that good architects are artist, as few and far between as they may be)…..(but in this I have experience…I might hazard to say, that an architect is only as good as their client)….hmmm, if the there ain’t no audience there just ain’t no show! Language and the stories that are told in print seem to change at a much slower pace than film or music that seem to be much more affected by progresses in technologies and are so much more quickly digested by pop culture and run quickly through change. This might have a lot to do with the way that the product it consumed. Good books tend to be consumed slowly, sit on shelves and are borrowed from libraries and are around for a lifetime while movies are publicized to death, are run for a few weeks and then go to dvd where they are once again publicized to death, consumed and put in the delete bin. It is no wonder that the career of a writer can be so much more enduring than that of a musical pop star (artist) or film maker?…or can it?

What are you going to do to change the world?