What's Necessary for Art?

 Lincoln Michel won me over with his The Unnecessary Is the Only Thing Necessary in Art:

These days, there is a strange focus on what is “necessary” in fiction whether it’s complaining that it’s not necessary to show sex scenes or violence when you can “just imply it” or the perennial dunks on Moby-Dick for having those damn whale chapters. If you press people on these complaints, they explain these things are “unnecessary” or “pointless” because they don’t move the plot forward. Can’t you just cut the whale chapters and get the same story? Couldn’t you skip past depictions of horror / violence / sex / jokes etc. and lose nothing? For these types of consumers—and consumer feels the right word here—the ideal story seems to be a Wikipedia plot summary. The story beats with everything else removed. Efficient and streamlined. Why waste time on atmosphere, thematic exploration, or mere funny or thought provoking sentences? Get to the point!

I imagine there are a lot of roots to this mindset. The tech-driven obsession with optimization and efficiency. The corporate thinking that art is just another widget and the customer is always right. Social media algorithms that reward hot takes and takedowns. And perhaps just the desperation of artists themselves to find easy rules to follow in the hopes to survive in a culture that cares little about supporting the arts. Even in spaces where art is prioritized, like say creative writing workshops, there is a tendency to look for what is “unnecessary” or “pointless” in a work when critiquing. And I get it. It makes sense to look for easy guidelines to judge art by. A way to channel our messy feelings into objective values.

That last paragraph plays to a particular bias of mine towards our tech ruled world. The first reminds of what I am seeing in the literary journals to which I am submitting—and being rejected – that tackling difficult ideas is given shrift.

Yet I would like to humbly suggest this thinking is entirely wrong. The unnecessary is most necessary part of art. Art is exactly the place to let your eye linger on what fascinates it. Art isn’t an SEO optimized app or a rubric for overworked teachers to grade five-paragraph essays. Art is exactly the space—perhaps the last space left—where we can indulge, explore, and expand ourselves. If we can’t be weird, extraneous, over-the-top, discursive, and hedonistic in our art, where can we be?

What a better goal than relieving the world from some of its ugliness and brutality and cruelty?

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Updating 2/21/23, when I should be writing what is in my head, I procrastinate instead. Except the following seems important to me, a bit of wisdom to keep in mind, which I am pairing with the stuff above since I am not sure if I would read the following without having read the preceding.

Incuriosity is thriving at the moment. People seem incredibly proud of publicly renouncing critical thinking in favor of asserting a frustratingly simplistic “thing good or thing bad” mind-set. I think this is due to a confluence of factors, many of them corporate. Identity has been so totally enmeshed with consumer habits that we’ve arrived at the misguided belief that the media we consume should perfectly align with our good politics or else it is evil and an endorsement of our enemies.

This is how you end up with conclusions like “A character in this show did something homophobic, therefore the show itself is homophobic.” We’ve been so thoroughly conditioned by the ubiquity and the loneliness of capitalism to think of media properties as our friends, and when our friends do a bad thing, it feels like a betrayal.

Worse yet, we’ve come to think of art — all art — as commercial goods that warrant this assessment of their “moral nutrition facts” to ensure we’re not feeding anything “bad” to our brains. So we arrive at a place where art is constantly screaming its own virtues at us. All the rough edges get sanded away, and the lines between “good person” and “bad person” are boldly drawn with one of those ridiculously large Sharpies in mass-produced, infantilizing literature that reassures us that we are good people for putting it on our shelves.

That's from ‘I Hate My Writing Group’ by J.P. Brammer (also of interest for those seeking or belonging to a writing group.)

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