May 2024

Road House and Self-Inflicted Anxiety

Another semester has come and gone. Another exhibition has come and gone. I am grateful for both. Thank you to everyone who could make it out to see Fragments at David Lusk Gallery in Nashville. There is always something else to do, so I understand the effort required to get to an art exhibition. I had some nice conversations with people and received enough text messages and “likes” to get a decent injection of dopamine into my system to carry me for a while.

It was good to see all the work together instead of stacked against the wall in my studio. It clarified some ideas and will help me move forward. I felt a bit paralyzed between February and March, but that has lifted. For right now, I do not have any shows booked for the future. I may try to change that during the summer and fall. The studio goal is to make smaller pieces for a while.

Book(s):

The only one I have finished in the past month was The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. It is a summary of articles, personal stories, and mental health data centered on youth since the introduction of smartphones. I do not think Haidt wants to be the “old man yelling about your phone” guy, but the evidence is there. I see anecdotal proof of it at school. It is not just Gen Z that has suffered. Every generation has been negatively impacted by nonstop connectivity. The book focuses on the effects of social media on Gen Z, but the lessons are applicable across the board. It made me take my dumbed-down phone and dumb it down even more.

I finished this book just before attending a lecture on Gen Z, metamodernism, and the language of the multiverse in contemporary film. The talk, given by a self-identified Gen Zer, was enlightening from the perspective of an aging man like myself. If possible, I had forgotten that metamodernism was even a thing. It is a term I heard about 12 years ago and filed away. I wonder if there is an online quiz to help you find out what you are. I am not a metamodernist, a postmodernist, or a modernist. Maybe I do not like labels. I never cared about enneagrams, introvert vs. extrovert, or what “season” my complexion was. The contemporary world prides itself on being fluid and ever-shifting, so why put substantial time into these categories if everything is going to change again?

The lecture also fleshed out why I did not like certain recent movies: Everything Everywhere All At Once, Barbie, and Asteroid City. I already had “art” reasons for not liking these three, but the lecture also reminded me that I do not like what they add up to: life is pointless, so you must create meaning. I know that 99% of the people reading this agree with that because that is where we are as a culture. I happen not to see it that way.

The part of the talk that resonated with me the most was the reactions after. Gen Zers said the talk expressed their feelings but had never had the words for it. There are things that I do understand but need reminding of. The most basic concept was that I can retreat to a pre-digital world, but people in their teens and twenties cannot. There is no safe haven. I lived 32 years without a cellphone and 35 without a smartphone. There is plenty of space in my brain to retreat to. Like I told a friend, “It is whatever year I want it to be when I go for my daily walk.” Is that healthy? I do not know. What I do know is that human brains are not equipped for constant connectivity, but I am beginning to believe that younger people do not understand that because they have not experienced it or been taught it.

The Anxious Generation came up in the talk. Someone had read it and correctly said Haidt wants to wind all of this back and remove access to kids. That is true. He believes the age of digital consent should be 16, not 13. But the person at the talk who said this also said, “But it’s too late for that. It would destroy the digital communities of teenagers.” Yeah. That is the point. Destroy it. How long would it take for teenagers to figure out a new pattern? Not as long as it would take adults.

Is it too late? We are about twelve years into this. The majority of people alive can remember the “before days.” It is hardly too late. Very bad and arbitrary decisions regarding adolescent access to the digital world were made from a position of total ignorance before it was apparent how all-consuming this world would become. It is hardly too late to fix it, but the clock is ticking. I recommend reading or listening to the book. If you do not have the time, you can listen to this podcast episode.

The book and the lecture confirmed some things that need to be addressed in my school. This is a list of ideas to consider when moving into the arts. I might organize it into a booklet for students. I have the summer to add, take away, and fine-tune it. We will see what happens:

1. Embrace Ambiguity: You are a visual artist. The spoken and written word cannot fully express the human condition, especially in an age where “literally” and “obsessed” have lost all meaning. You are going into visual art, music, or film because there are so many complexities to being human that cannot be captured in speech. If you do not understand subtext, quite honestly, you cannot be an artist. You can be a craftsperson but not an artist. Allow yourself and your work to exist in a space that is difficult to define but can be felt instead. You do not need an answer for everything. Everything does not require a full explanation or an origin story. What an audience needs from you is room to form their own reaction and not have everything spoon-fed to them. Give them some credit even if they are unprepared for responsibility. If you give people all the answers, you are giving them entertainment, content, or propaganda, but not art.

2. Be sincere/reject irony: Irony is insufficient to protect yourself from the risk of sincerity. Forget it. Be sincere. Do not apologize. There is a line separating sincere from earnest; it is good to locate that because earnest people are annoying. If you are nervous about expressing yourself, you are wasting your time and your audience’s time. Be confident. Keep it simple.

3. Opinions are biased (and that’s OK): You have a right to your opinion. You have a right for that opinion to offend someone. They have a right to be offended. You have a right not to care if they are offended as long as you are sincere. A civil dialogue should follow that disagreement. Everyone should listen and not act like a child when they do not get their way. Be respectful. Pushing buttons for the sake of pushing buttons is a waste of time. Be intelligent in your criticisms. Use critiques to learn what you do to improve a work and critique others to help them.

4. Figure it out: Teach yourself. The most that art school can do is give you a few tools and point you in the right direction to learn on your own. You do not need a series of steps described to you to make something. Just do it. Fail. Fail repeatedly. Fail quickly. Do not get paralyzed at the thought of failing. You are going to fail anyway. Just do it, learn from it, and move forward. Students want to know what the next step is. The next step is whatever gets you closer to resolving the work. The next step might be a failure that leads you to a solution you would have never gotten to otherwise. That is potentially different for everyone. Figure it out. No one ever learned anything by doing something right on the first try.

5. Surprise your instructor: I cannot speak for every instructor, but some of us are desperate for you to break a rule to make our assignments more interesting. I am tired of looking at “assignments.” I want to look at art. Instructors evolve from students breaking the rules.

6. Put your screen away: You see your phone as a source of comfort. It is not. You have Stockholm Syndrome, not with a person, but with an object. Your phone is your captor, not your friend. Turn off your notifications. Delete your social media, video streaming, games, and news apps. You do not need to watch reruns of The Office, play video games, check the news, or check social media apps while making art. Your art requires the synchronized functioning of your brain and your hands. You can still have social media. You can still have entertainment, read the news, and play games. Do it at home for a small window of time on a computer. Contain those sites in a corner of your house, and do not carry them with you. You will lose some functionality for some of these sites. Ask yourself why. Why can an app do more work than a website? To keep you on your phone. Why do they want you on your phone? Because your phone goes where you go. Your computer does not. Developers spread across the planet are vying for your attention. Humans are not forever distracted by art or entertainment, but they can be sucked in by content. None of these developers care about you. They want to distract you until you die. You do not have to participate. You can build a real community instead of a digital one. More than anything, you do not need to know everything all the time, and it is ok to be missed. No one, including me, is so important that the world cannot live without them for hours at a time.

Music:

Spring’s arrival reignited my interest in pop. I have been listening to the Nashville pop station 107.5. It has been years since I have done this. You only need to listen for two hours a week to hear their entire programming. The repetition of the same ten songs is tedious, but liking two out of ten songs seems like a win for a 50-year-old. That said, only two albums listed below result from listening to this station. Fair warning- Usher has a song about a girl from Atlanta that reinterprets Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl,” it is an instant skip.

Usher - Coming Home

Ariana Grande - eternal sunshine

Fabiana Palladino - s/t

Mount Kimbie - The Sunset Violent

Drahla - angeltape

Tourist - Memory Morning

Pet Shop Boys - Nonetheless

Dua Lipa - Radical Optimism

Camera Obscura - Look to the East, Look to the West

Jessica Pratt - Here in the Pitch

Jim White - All Hits: Memories

Shabaka - Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis - Back to Black

Red Hot Org and Meshell Ndegeocello - Red Hot & Ra: The Magic City

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross - Challengers soundtrack

Bill Frisell - Orchestras

Jonathan Biss/Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra - Beethoven 5, Vol. 1 (Live)

Jeff Beal - New York Études

Isabelle Faust/Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra - Britten: Violin Concerto…

Kirill Gerstein - Debussy/Komitas: Music in Time of War

Lang Lang - Saint-Saëns

Yuja Wang - The Vienna Recital

Movie(s):

The only movies I watched this month were the original Road House and American Fiction. I liked American Fiction until the final 15 minutes when I thought they punted on the ending. I know why it ended the way it did, but that does not mean I have to like it.

Road House holds up. There is such commitment to both absurdity and sincerity. Swayze believes in his character’s goodness. I might watch the new one, but I am suspicious they would take this approach. I watched a video showing the fights partially created by CGI—guys hitting green pillows. Patrick Swayze and Marshall Teague really fought one another in the original. Granted, Swayze did not really tear out Teague’s throat, but the punches and kicks were real.

That’s it for now. See you in June.

Enjoy the late spring/early summer.