Avant-Garde and Art as Pain

I was recently getting ready to re-watch the Ken Burns Jazz series, and decided to read up a little on the series' artistic director, Wynton Marsalis. When Jazz first aired I wasn't all that familiar with Marsalis, but I became a fan after watching him talk eloquently and musically about Jazz, race relations in the USA and the various musicians profiled in the series. I was interested but not surprised to read that there have been several criticisms of Marsalis's direction of the series, and the relatively little attention paid to developments in jazz music since 1960. Marsalis is criticized as a "classicist" or even worse as a poor musician who doesn't understand either blues or jazz.

The reason I am not surprised is that Marsalis critics come from the avant garde school of art. Avant-garde seems to have at its heart the premise that "anything goes" is a value rather than a dangerous shortcoming. With avant-garde, one can create a performance that is five minutes of a musician humping a piano and call it art. In fact, much of avant-garde art - be it music, dance, art, film, theater - seems to be about punishing its audience rather than entering into a communication with it. If one looks at an avant-garde piece and sees nothing of artistic merit in it, one is criticized as being too philistine or just plain stupid to truly "understand" what the art is about - never mind the basic fact that if a reasonable person cannot see any artistic merit in a creation it demonstrates a failure on the part of the artist to effectively communicate. "Dance" is now about throwing one's body around like a rag doll having an epilieptic siezure; "music" is about atonal, arrythmic squeals and growls; "art" is throwing cruxifixes in toilets or canvases painted one solid color. Art seems to be more about punishing the audience rather than enlightening them.

The constant cry of the artist is "you just don't get it," as if I am somewhat deficient because I fail to derive anything that feeds my soul from their spastic self-indulgence. The sad thing is that there is always a circle around the avant-garde artist that showers them with praise, mainly because they don't want to hear the dreaded "you just don't get it" attack directed at them.

If it makes me a philistine because I fail to see any talent or art in such behavior, so be it. I will devote more of my time to enjoying dance, music, and art where I can clearly see the artist has had to exert will and talent to create something new and to communicate with me, and less of my time trying to decipher the ramblings of a talentless hack.