Thursday, January 27, 2011

Writing from the Heart AND for the Market

So much of life is a balancing act.  Not only do people like symmetry visually, but they find it practical functionally as well.  Too much weight on one side of the wheelbarrow might even tip it over, and then you'll be side-tracked by shoveling up all the s*** ("stuff") you were hauling all over again.


Artists grapple with balance all the time, and I'm not just talking about within their composition, arrangement of design elements, structure of literary flow, and so on and so forth... I'm talking about within their lives and their work practices.

In the imagination of on-lookers, the life of an artist is a carefree existence--one not ruled so much by the laws of logic as by the fancy of the heart.  We're right-brained, after all (which is a nice excuse for laziness, sloppiness, and erratic behavior.) The idea of a "Starving Artist" has been romanticized.  Some even look at an artiste who focuses too much on the business side of his profession as a sell-out, less of a true artist.

We declare with deep ardor that art must first of all be true to the heart of the artist.  Who cares what the people want?--I've gotta be me!  That's why novelists are admired for dark, probing prose, and Hollywood is mocked for whitewashing the intensity of truth when the novel is adapted to the screen and the ending is tweaked to satisfy an audience hungry for happy endings tied up in neatly trimmed packages.

I've been on a high horse like that plenty of times--from the times that I've mocked the "contrived" blockbuster to the times I've defended the cryptic ending of my own "art" film.  

One really must understand teeter-totter physics in order to fully appreciate the danger of mounting the proverbial "high horse."  

Looking at the incline of the board in the above illustration, a child who has never played on a teeter-totter might think that the best place for the horse to stand in order to be king of the hill would be on the end of the board that is higher in the air (the end to the right in the picture.)  It doesn't take long on the playground, however, for a child to learn the lesson of balance.  The horse will find his highest possible position on the board by distributing his weight in a manner that is balanced in relation to the fulcrum (or by throwing a REALLY fat kid on the other end--but that's an entirely different issue).  

1 comment:

  1. I'm glad you stuck to your premise to create what you know is a better piece than a formula piece just to "win." You won bigger in my book, and if I read your material, you'd likely have an audience of two.

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