This Is Just to Say

 

One of the features of the Saint John Exhibition—formerly the Atlantic National Exhibition—which I attended yesterday, was an art competition featuring entries from across the region.

And the work of these amateurs was remarkably good—a few things worthy of hanging in a genuine art museum.

I have found the same from a Facebook page I follow, “Artists trying to make a living with their art.”

But what do we so often see in art museums? Drek. Sometimes literally. Things like a room filled with actual garbage.

One has to wonder why.

I credit it to the academicization of art. True art needs inspiration, and inspiration does not come on call, or with regular attendance at class.  Nor can one be educated into it. So something else must be substituted to fill those classroom seats; something must be taught.

What is taught must not require talent, let alone genius. It must also be counter-intuitive. You cannot teach what everyone already knows.

From the point of view of the professional artist, as well, it is best to find some trick that does not require actual inspiration or even fine craftsmanship--so that you can crank it out. Inspiration is a shaky foundation on which to build anything like a career. And spending too long on any one piece is going to hurt your income.

So stuff must be made up, which would appear to the average person to actually be bad art, to keep out the amateurs, and then those who do not appreciate it can be scorned as the philistines.

The philistines with fat wallets will buy it if told to, because it makes them look sensitive and bohemian and not the philistines they are.

Hence all this conceptual nonsense. Hence the only good art left will be folk art and popular art. The art of amateurs.

It is the same in poetry. I recall a book fair at which I overheard one well-dressed woman pick up and read to another William Carlos Williams’ poem “This Is Just to Say”:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Ending with “Isn’t it marvellous?”

And her acquaintance was obliged to assent or lose face by admitting she saw nothing in it.

Anyone without talent can write like this, but it conforms to and illustrates an academic theory. By appreciating it, you show you know what “imagism” wants in a poem: essentially, just an image, of something perfectly ordinary and mundane, with no comment or obvious symbolism.

It is anti-art, which is most often these days the point.