Pet Rocks

Back in the seventies, 1975 to be precise, a Californian, Gary Dahl, from Los Gatos decided to put a stone in a box and sell it (for $3.95) as if it were a live pet. He called it, appropriately, a “Pet Rock.” This new kind of pet came with a training manual with instructions on how to raise and care for it, as well as a set of commands: while “sit” and “stay” were fairly easy to accomplish, “roll over” usually required extra help on the part of the trainer and “come” was found to be impossible to teach reliably. Now, to you, the reader, this may sound trite, but to a pot-smoking hippie in 1975 it was the funniest thing since Reefer Madness—and by 1975 some 95% of Californians were pot-smoking hippies—and, accordingly, Mr. Dahl became a millionaire.

Later, in the 1980s, thanks to a clever needle-point seamster from Georgia, the world was introduced to little dolls called the “Cabbage Patch Kids.” For a $40.00 “adoption fee” you could be the proud parent of one of these orphans, which may not sound attractive to you, but America went wild, camping out in front of Wal-Mart, depleting their bank accounts at auctions, and dissolving marriages over custody issues; and by 1990, 65 million of these “kids” had found homes. Their creator, Xavier Roberts, found himself in a new home.

You may be asking yourself: “What is happening here?” Anthropologically speaking, the situation is easy enough to explain. This is what could be called a cultural phenomenon: that is, the deep-seated need of people to belong to a group expressing itself suddenly, and commercially, when a product hits the right market at the right time—or, to put it another way: consciously or subconsciously, we all desire shared experience, and material objects may act as proof of collective identity. In a word, it’s all about being human; and, dear reader, if you like it or not, humans buy Pet Rocks and Cabbage Patch Kids.

It is very important that the reader understands that cultural phenomena rise up from the human spirit, and certain aspects of human behavior cannot be quantified by scientific methodology or deconstructed by logical means. Just as what happens in your synapses has yet to be mapped, there is no blueprint to the absurdity of men and women, and woe to those who waste precious time attempting to define and discern the missing links between Pet Rocks, Cabbage Patch Kids, Big Macs and Harry Potter. And yet this is precisely what a special minority of us do: they are called art critics.

All too many critics make the mistake of confusing cultural phenomena with creative genius. They use the word “great” to denote an artist of grandeur, and yet they forget to define the word “art.” Provided the object is absurd, identifying it as a cultural phenomenon is not difficult. When the object shows a degree of expertise, however, questions of creativity wax uncontrollably, and the critics begin to laud the happy chap who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Indeed, history has seen the coming and going of many “pet rocks”—some of them have been “great,” although this is purely incidental. Case in point, Franz Kafka, who, at the risk of shocking certain readers, was not a great novelist. After all, how can he be called a great novelist if in his lifetime he never finished a novel?

If Kafka has earned the title “great” over the years, it has not been as a novelist, but as a paradox—and it is beyond the scope of this essay to explain how that happened. What can be said is that thanks to the labor of a cohort of writers, his mysterious and morbid world has grown like only something cultural can grow. It’s no longer a question of whether you think he is good or bad (for the record, he is good), but whether you have read him or not. Well, have you read him or not? Did you make it from page one to page 298 of The Castle without putting the book down? Are you a scholar? A student? Or a tourist in Prague looking to while away some time?

Kitsch

Kitsch exists. Some of us deny it, others would like to wish it away, and still others disregard it. It is the bane of art, which is why artists fight it. There is only one problem: what is it? Everyone agrees: it is bad art, sentimental schmaltz characterized by bad taste and imitation, art colored by emotion rather than reason or realism. On the other hand, Picasso once said: “Nothing destroys creativity like good taste.” Was Picasso kitsch? Hermann Broch, the Viennese writer, saw in kitsch a confusion of ethical and esthetic categories: “Kitsch wants to produce not the ‘good’ but the ‘beautiful,’” he says. The sentence rings of Goethe. Could it be kitsch, too? Indeed, so much has been written on the subject. Can one write about it without succumbing to it?

Kitsch is merely unloved art—or, more correctly: art that never found its place in the great orphanage of criticism. This is the reason that many of us find it so attractive in a lonely, big-eyed sort of way. We return from the museum—having been bumped and pushed, distracted by tour groups ‘ooing’ and ‘ahing’ over the genius of a squiggle, intimidated by women in berets and men in turtleneck sweaters—and find ourselves stopped in front of the window of a second hand shop. There’s Mickey Mouse waving up at us, and in this sublime moment the history of art dissipates. We can think of nothing else than having that little plastic piece of love.

Is it not true that art doted on by critics can become spoiled? What was once a darling baby has, thanks to cocky parents and hordes of admirers, become a capricious brat. Honorable reader, the next time you’re looking at a painting of a black dot (or something that looks like the painter accidentally spilled his can of paint onto the canvas), look into your soul and ask yourself what emotions are born of the experience: inspiration or envy? Have you not asked yourself the question: How did this guy end up in here and not me? If so, then he is not portraying all of his qualities on the canvas.

Modern Art is typified by a fear of kitsch, which can be explained by Modern Art’s inability to love. In its quest to elevate art, to maintain purity and uniqueness in art, to push art forward into maturity, it has forgotten to love it. Like the son of the coach, art has become exemplary and neurotic. For the hard, cold truth of the matter is thus: the invention of kitsch is no better than the invention of a master race. Its polemical ‘us-and-them’ approach is inextricably linked with arrogance and elitism, which step dangerously close to conceit and racism. Kitsch is the creed of angry old men frustrated that the masses haven’t invested as much time as they learning about art.

The Eucharistic Artist

There is a popular idea that artistic genius demands the martyrdom of the artist; that by cutting off one’s ear the product will benefit. The artist is expected to live in a state of perpetual pain and frustration, struggling with the fickle muse inside him, agonizing over the inability to express the beauty within him. Art is born of work, not divine intervention. Thus the cliché: genius is one-percent inspiration, 99% perspiration. And to attempt to produce something of beauty while being riddled with personal problems is not an easy task. In the end, the work suffers.

Western art during the 20th century has been driven by the idea that craziness is next to godliness. Drug abuse, schizophrenia and life in the fast lane have been unanimously accepted as the secret to artistic success. At the cutting edge of this trend were artists like Toulouse-Lautrec who drank himself into oblivion and Van Gogh who, almost always in a state of depression and often in a state of debauchery, ended up killing himself. Later came Kafka—“I intentionally walk through the streets where there are whores”—followed by the Surrealists with their equivocal respect for the criminally insane. And to mention the rock stars of the 1960s is to belabor the point.

It is time to wake up to the hard, cold reality that men who frequent prostitutes are no more creative than the rest of us. The decadent lifestyles of these artists did not benefit, but hinder their product. Yes, this is to say that what has been called innovative during the past century is all-too-often second rate. Indeed, expressly primitive images existed before the Post-Impressionists made their mark on art. The difference was that such art was not accepted in museums and salons. The reason Van Gogh couldn’t sell any painting during his lifetime was not because he was misunderstood. It was because he was bad. For ethical art requires work, which in turn demands patience, and alcoholics usually lack this virtue.

To glorify hoodlums, drunkards and drug addicts as misunderstood geniuses is to pursue a dangerous delusion. How often we forget that for every whacked-out genius there are a dozen businessmen pushing the career along. In this sense, the Eucharistic artist truly becomes the martyr he aspires to be. The irony is that he is the sacrificial lamb of an industry indifferent to artistic sensibility. Even more tragic is the public who naively believes the wild exploits and fatal mistakes were part and parcel to the success. The young at heart and weak of mind blindly mimic the artistic martyr not realizing that copy cats don’t possess the same charm.