When You Were the Brightest Star Who Were the Shadows?

This started out as a response to Sweet Li'l Gal's comment to yesterday's post, but I rambled on so long I decided to just post it as a entry of its own. Thanks, SLG.

I finally broke down and read The DaVinci Code last spring right around the time the movie came out. I had successfully avoided it for three years or so, but my curiosity over what all they hype was about got the best of me. While I certainly wouldn't consider it great literature, nor would I give much credence to its historical assertions, I do have to admit I was entertained. But I think you (and Ducasse) make a good point about it. It amused me for a weekend, but then I moved on. However, some books like Kerouac's On the Road or Camus' The Stranger have struck me deeply, and I have read them both at least 4 or 5 times over (and probably will read them many more times in the course of my lifetime). I can think of many other books that have had similar lingering effects on me, even though I may have only read through them only once. Those are the ones that I consider "greats" and pass on as recommendations to other people. Sometimes people come back and thank me, other times people tell me that they couldn't get past the first few chapters. I guess everyone is different in that way. It drives my English teacher mother absolutely crazy when I trash Jane Austen (every plot's the same, a bunch of sisters all get married to landed gentry) yet I can safely bet that she's never read any works by my faves Kerouac or Bret Easton Ellis (I do think she's had to teach Dostoevsky, though). In fact, I'm sure many "high-brow" readers would dismiss Ellis as sensationalistic garbage, but I personally consider Less Than Zero to be a masterpiece of style and modern existentialism (the 80's movie sucked, though, IMO). But this goes back to the question I posed yesterday: is "art" just in the eye of the beholder? Doing a quick internet search on The DaVinci Code would demonstrate that the book has had a long, lingering effect on innumerable conspiracy theorists. Does that make it art? I'm afraid that the controversy kicked up by this book will keep it in the minds of the populace for quite some time. Does this count as a lingering effect? I wouldn't consider The DVC as art, but then again, Truman Capote once said that Kerouac wasn't writing, he was typing. Whose opinion counts? As Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (another book I loved but a fellow blogger recently disclosed she hated) asks, how do we define quality?

I personally am a fan of technique. Those who can master a technique deserve to be acclaimed. Those who invent a technique deserve to be celebrated. However, strong technique can only get you so far. For example, I was raised in a household where proper writing skills were highly valued (back to the English teacher mother). However, even though I feel that I can write well, that doesn't mean I can write well. Just because I can create grammatically correct, non-passive sentences with correctly used adverbs doesn't mean that these statements will actually convey anything of value to the reader. In fact, that is where a majority of my frustration with writing comes from. I know how, I just don't know what. In the reverse, there are many people who are quite profuse with expressing their ideas, but do so in a very poor manner. Consider the poor teacher who each year hears the same argument from students: why do you count off for grammar mistakes in a (non-language arts) class? Shouldn't you be grading me on knowing the information? Or how about the junior high misfit who has notebook after notebook of bad amateur poetry? Sure, there may be a great emotional outpouring of creativity involved with composing these poems, but they would pale in comparison to the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare or even the juxtapositions of Alan Ginsberg (I won't even bring T.S. Eliot into the mix...).

But there does come the point where even the best of techniques simply becomes imitation if new ground is never broken or no new ideas come to light. So, I'm inclined to say that quality art is the middle ground between technique and creativity. But is compromise, or middle ground, what we want to use to measure appreciation? Can we even measure qualitative with quantitative? I don't know. I'm starting to ramble. In the end, I like your definition. The best way to know if a work of art (inclusive of music, literature, film, etc) is of quality is to know if you felt an emotional response from experiencing it. Whether it is attraction or repulsion, I think the ends have been achieved. Art should be provocative; otherwise it is just superficial amusement that will quickly fade away from memory.