Please stop bashing today’s artists and calling it an homage to artists of the past.
The year of 2016 has been a sad one of deaths for art communities and audience members. The emotional strain of cultural icons dying has been felt on my various social media news feeds for more than a few complex and impressive artists and creators: David Bowie (z”k), Prince (z”k), Harper Lee (z’’k) and Alan Rickman (z”k) are just the start of a long list. Death is startling and upsetting and heartbreaking. Grief is a complex emotion that leads to irrational thoughts, but additionally, in this social media age it is bringing out some unnecessary cruelty.
I have witnessed some magnificent obituaries being written and memorial tributes being performed with Bowie and (I suspect soon) Prince in mind. The use of “Always” overlaid on Alan Rickman’s picture usually costumed as Snape still serves as profile images for some of my friends. It evokes a pull of my heart strings each time I see it. This is because quite simply musical performances, drama performances and promoted classic pieces of literature reach millions of people in profound ways, because that is the business of art. Artists of every variety who have been around for decades often have complex and diverse fans cultivated over many years. The blog posts, opinion editorials, and crowd sourced obituaries and homages to these artists are being created ever more quickly, but I suspect in some cases without enough awareness of what they cause.
I am speaking of the not-so-subtle (but maybe naive) damning of this generation of creators, musicians and artists that comes with memes like the one shown above. I am speaking about the the “in forty years there will be no one left to grieve for,” comments and the “can’t [insert deity] take a lousy politician instead of an artist” memes…
This is the part of the essay where I ask you to envision yourself for a moment in a situation…
Imagine for a moment that your cousin, Gregory who is 57 has just died, to the surprise of your family and his friends. Gregory loved making crocheted art pieces of every shape, color and possible size. (Remember the time he spent 4 months crafting the magnificent dragon pillow for his niece, Emily?) At the memorial service people bring some of his crocheted creations with to honor his memory. They tell stories at the open mic, to the kind nodding of the funeral director and then Joanna, 74 takes over the open microphone. She spends her well over the acceptable 3 minutes of story time explaining how while Gregory was cute, her crocheted creations were much more impressive. Joanna says, “Gregory was alright but he wasn’t one of our greats. He was no Jean Leinhauser, so it wasn’t the worst loss I’ve been through.” The crowd is shocked and silent, partially because in all our minds is the polite mantra “everyone grieves in their own way.”
An extreme example certainly, but one that raises the question: why would anyone turn someone’s death into a competition? What makes people think it acceptable to recommend the Fates, or God or the weather take another living human being, instead of who died? Bartering is thought to be one of the traditional five stages of grief, but it is damaging to pretend we have control over death. And this sort of trolling, is not the spirit I want the Internet to leave behind in the wake of culturally felt deaths.
You need not like today’s artists, but to suggest they have no potential to be great? To suggest that today’s creators will never be as memorable as those who have died in 2016, is short-sighted and hurtful. To suggest that all the good of the world is already gone, is cynical and lazy.
The media landscape of trolls is unlikely to go anywhere, so I posit an idea into the vast Internet, to maybe spark a more tender approach to today’s artists. One that acknowledges that no one knows the potential of another human being, and that claiming to know such things damages others willingness to express (or share) their creations.
Deji Olukotun, an author and past PEN America fellow, says that self-censorship in simply researching topics is on the rise, and says “the stories we’ve lost” to online surveillance are uncountable. This Internet is also a new place for creators to try and exist, brainstorm, grow-up and dare I say it, even to create. And unlike Bowie and Rickman and Lee, today’s young artists are under scrutiny of the Internet community before they even have the chance to create their “great” pieces. Craft development and training and honing is part of what makes any artist great… I do not believe that damning a generation for not being their predecessors is part of inspiring the sharing of great art.
Incredible art is being made by young people and old people everyday — and I believe will continue to be. The human condition is to create… the creation will occur, but the sharing is becoming hidden to communities of support. So instead of saying artists will never be good enough for the public sphere (never be the masters) why don’t we focus on welcoming creators as they come? Why don’t we nourish the stories, and music and plays that inspire us even when they are not with the original cast? Artists will keep creating, I just hope to live in a world where art is welcomed in its many stages, and not shut down before it gets up on the stage.
