Art

My wife went and got her degree in Fine Art at OCADU a couple of years ago, and I got a second-hand Art education along the way. The thing that struck me most about it was the schism between the 'pure' art vs 'commercial' art disciplines in the school; neither area has much time for the other one, though the school ostensibly embraces both.

As my second-hand education progressed, I learned that the fine artists work in service of a concept, an idea that informs their work and is expressed with the Artist's Statement as much or more than by the work itself. A weak concept can sink a whole show and although the strongest concepts don't require much help from the Artist's Statement, if the idea is too obvious it can also fail.

On the commercial side, the concept still informs the content, but with an eye to selling something, which inherently robs it of its sincerity. Working (as I do) with advertising, I am routinely exposed to this conflict, where the clients pull in the direction of selling while the creatives pull in the direction of art. Finding the sweet spot on that continuum can be a victory for the advertiser's bottom line, so it's important to get it just right, so that the target feels entertained rather than manipulated.
 
My exposure to my wife's immersion in the purity of art-for-art's-sake made me think about how all this applies to music. Some musical 'artists' wear the title well; as we listen, we believe they created this piece to express a concept, and the fact that we liked it well enough to buy it in droves and make them millionaires was a secondary side-effect. Other music doesn't fare so well on the sincerity scale; however competently the song is constructed and performed, it still feels like the 'artist's sole intent was to have a hit record and make lots of money. Many, many songs come to mind here, Elvis copycats in the 50's, Beatles copycats in the 60's, arena rock in the 70's, 80's cock-rock, etc. etc., all the way up to misogynistic modern dance tracks. Many of them were even appealing enough to earn their creators a place in music history, but it is a place that is much more rarely revisited.

Artists are artists; they cannot help creating, and often branch out into visual media as well as music. And when we listen to their work, we don't picture them slaving over their instrument to create the next Top Ten hit, we picture them feeling pangs of joy or sorrow and putting those into inexplicably resonant words and music. Like this: