Great Art is Much Easier Said than Done

On the Mercilessness of Correct Standards

I am emerging from a dark cocoon of video editing and studio work. It is an absolute labour.

Few understand. Who has time for social media scrambling when your entire world is your craft? But I digress—a problem in general for artists I am trying to solve.

I’ve always had a taste for excellence, but saying it that way doesn’t go far enough. Perhaps it’s more of an obsession: is anything worth doing if you can’t do it well?

And yet, as is the case for many, I’ve often had to settle in my life as an artist for imperfect finished products, rather than the alternative of giving up entirely on the enterprise.

I’ve been thinking back to my school days, where getting into that upper strata of grading intensely followed the law of diminishing returns. In many categories, if you have some intellectual aptitude and interest, simply showing up and doing the work gets you over that 80%/B threshold.

(Not me in physics but that’s another story).

A little more time and attention and you find yourself over the next threshold, and the next.

Over 90 and into A+ territory, and you’re often dealing with a different beast, where the push of effort for that next little threshold becomes gargantuan. Most abandon ship, seeing the immense effort required, which is why marked excellence is both rare and commended.

In a lot of things in life, it’s wise to be content with a basic threshold of quality rather than run those last seemingly senseless miles of the marathon. Isn’t running 20 miles straight quite sufficient and impressive by almost every metric?

But an encouragement toward mediocrity is not what most of us in the modern world need, and especially not in the arts.

The arts, like building a bridge, are unforgiving. It either works or it doesn’t. It is either great, or it’s not. A quote that I can’t place or find comes to mind: “In art, intention matters not at all.” All that matters is whether it works, which is why there can be beautiful, hard-working, incredible people whose art can be absolute kitsch that should never be shared outside a therapy session.

(It’s a tragedy I don’t yet know how to navigate, as it badly needs to be corrected, especially in religious circles. My guess is that the best solution is to create great work and hold that up as the standard as often as possible, but some hard words are also probably due.)

One of the great torments of every good artist is that we know when we can’t get into that successful territory, when we have failed to reach the ideal we recognize and are attempting to reach, even if we also know how close we’ve approached it. We know when it’s not working, and unfortunately 95% of the way there in art falls flat, sometimes worse than the 50%, which can be charming in its own way, like a child’s work on a refrigerator. 95% engineering accuracy on a bridge means people die; a bridge half built means people don’t bother to use it but may find it fascinating for other reasons.

I have long been advocating for what I call a “basic threshold of quality” in any new arts movement we will be stewarding in the coming years. Not everything—very little—will be a work of genius. But getting to a point of it being real art verses the sentimental dross we are used to is a feat; artistic intuition and taste can cover a multitude of the sins of inadequate tools, which is an enormous challenge for any artist in a modern medium. Cameras, lenses, studio mics: these things aren’t cheap.

Sometimes, we have to accept the inadequacy of our tools means we can’t execute the vision in head and heart; other times, through creativity and ingenuity, we can make something valuable and compelling, even if visibly imperfect from a technical standpoint.

I hold this principle of a quality baseline to be true and important for us going forward. But I also realize that it is rare that the basic threshold is enough; too often the stark truth is the bridge comparison—the simple, harsh pass/fail—and I don’t have an easy answer for artists. We must do the best work we possibly can, and also accept that sometimes due to a number of factors, it won’t work and we will need to recalibrate for another time. This is critical humility.

I remember a seasoned playwright I knew in my late teens, and his advice has stayed with me as a lifeline: you have to always, always be willing, as an artist of any medium, to throw the entire thing out and start again—no matter how much you love it or have laboured and desperately want it to work.

Nothing is wasted; everything is a part of the treacherous journey toward the possibility of excellence.

But we have to have a firm detachment from our work when it has failed, recognizing an artistic failure doesn’t mean our gifts are useless, but rather that life is not like school grading, where “almost perfect” gets us the gold honour cord at graduation. Sometimes it fails, and it is irredeemable for this moment. Sometimes we don’t share the video even though we spent serious money; sometimes the painting which cost us hundreds of hours simply needs to burn; sometimes the manuscript needs to be forgotten forever. The mark of a great artist is as much what she wisely doesn’t share—what she resolutely, gently puts away—as what she does.

(Of course, the best artists also run the serious risk of throwing out something incredible! Please consult the most excellent artists around you first, and be willing to hear and act on the truth. Others with taste will often be able to tell you quickly if something is redeemable or has to be relegated to “useful practice.” Community for artists is critical.)

As most of you know, I am working to be someone who helps us envision a new artistic future, and am supporting the real artists who have been fighting long and hard, so they can be unhindered in their attempts to make and share something great—knowing that even with all practical obstacles removed for even the most inspired artists, great art is rare.

But I am also just an artist in the trenches, too, inside the challenges of my own work, abysmally aware that it is all risk, and that the expense, time, and dedication it takes to make anything of value that can communicate the substance of interior artistic inspiration is extreme. My art, too, can fail, regardless of any natural gifting, time, expense, and non-compromising dedication. It often has. And few will see how “close” I was when it does—few can fill in the gaps of an artist’s intention.

But I’ve accepted this tension, too, and am determined to find ways to not compromise on our standards of excellence while also retaining a quality of mercy for the artists placing their vulnerability before the world for its many merciless judgments. We have to be vigilant not to kill something prematurely; we need to develop an eye for genius potential lest we throw out those who could become some of the bastions of culture given time, resources, and proper cultivation.

(Please note, however, that I am not someone who believes everyone can learn. In almost every case, there is an obvious innate talent and intuition that I don’t believe can be taught. Sometimes it can be discovered later in life, depending on some factors. On that existing rough material, however, much cultivation has to also take place—as I often say, everyone needs an editor.)

I often come back to a decision I made years ago on a certain project I was involved in, and that was to balance the two aphorisms: The more general, “If anything is worth doing, it is worth doing well” and Chesterton’s important rebuttal, “If anything is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

These are both true, and the artist’s terrifying reality is to balance these without making either embarrassing art, or failing to ever create at all.

We press on.

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Here is a cover of a song from a songwriter from home, whose melody and lyrics haunted me for decades before I realized they were an adaptation of Yeats’ “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.” I was happy to know that I had been drawn to a great poet through the years, and it is a thesis in itself that greatness persists, lasts, and finds its way to us through even the thick mire of postmodernity.