How Seminar Made Me Angry About Art
Tonight I saw Seminar, the play with Alan Rickman as a writing teacher, one-act comedy, fairly tightly paced. And then I stomped home in a fugue of building irritation about what it means to be a writer, which is a topic that writers are obsessed with, and consistently, maddeningly, seem to get wrong.
( In which I am angry about this play as well as the literary world at large. )
( In which I am angry about this play as well as the literary world at large. )
He says "here is a piece of my soul" meaning that means you can't critique it and NOBODY CRITIQUES IT
LOL.
I always think of crits as just that, CRITIQUES. Your soul will (and should I think) be torn a fucking new one. Your most personal heartfelt piece may be ripped afuckingpart, and any tutor or class mate who doesn't do that makes the ridiculous amount of money you pay for art school fucking pointless.
To drop a Stoppard bomb here
Always a good option.
all artists are narcissists, in that we think our worlds are worth making
So fucking true. And thank you for having somebody else of my generation saying this, I said this in seminar a few weeks ago and this girl (who is a pretentious fucking pain in the ass anyway) was like, that's wrong and I'm just like "… … what the fuck are you doing here then to say I am going to create my own world, or depict the world like my point of view matters if you're not a fucking narcissist on some level?"
I have no time for "high art" earning its "high" designation because it looks like itself. That's a trend to break, not to laud
This is not just a problem for writers that is for all artists, the last hundred fucking years you can look at art critics and the art that has survived and it comes in such elitist cycles with a few people deciding what is good or not, and what is deemed not good isn't given a chance so then new artists just go against what the last generation did and it's just as self involved. …sorry this whole post may be talking about this play about writers but all I can fucking think of is my seminars and how much I want to bash people brains in and how maybe going to art school was a really bad idea because it is so fucking entrenched in this idea of art and artist and it's ridiculous.
And I'm in a sweary mood today. Sorry. :)
And I think Jane Austen is a pretty damn good role model, at least in her writing you never got the sense that she took herself seriously, which given her history comes out wrong, but rather there is a sense of lightness and which I think shows more humanity and truth than any self referential fucking I AM SO SERIOUS chauvinistic ideas that pervade in some writers.
As for the writer's aren't people line: BULLSHIT. You can say artists are a vessel for transcendental ideas whatever, I went through a period of being in love with Schelling and Mann I can stand that, but there is still the idea that they are people, their work is what makes them genius not themselves.
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That's why I don't want to study creative writing-aside from WHAT WOULD I DO WITH THAT DEGREE, I really hate the discipline, not even necessarily for the discipline itself but for the people it attracts. No one chooses to teach creative writing, and everyone who chooses to become a student of that goes in believing that their art supersedes everything else about them which means ego-jockeying in the name of artistic superiority, and no. No. I love writing! I want to get published! But I like writing stories about girl wizards and wicked queens and shamelessly aesthetically indulgent spy larks and everything under the sun, including young adult fiction, genre, pulp, and I don't want the constraint of being told that X art is better than Y art. I don't think it's worthless to be taught art; tutorial, critique, technique are invaluable things. But only if everyone involved cares and can take their ego out of it-critic and subject-and I don't see that happening in class. Not when we're culturally instilled to believe that we must either feel guilty or godly for making art with no in-between, when the only choice if you're part of the system is to convince yourself that you are doing the world a service BY EXISTING.
Ach. Incoherency. Frustration. This play is still getting to me, and so's the world.
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