Good art and the intricacies of expectation
By Lanre Apata
Our favourite TV shows may elicit joy or sadness while hope melts into despair in the texts we love dearly. Our beloved painting sometimes leaves peace or chaos in our minds, or both at the same time, when we trace its lines and colours with our eyes. We often visualize what we have read and attempt to reconstruct or rework the plot with a direction given by our inner protest. The ones we watched or listened are usually splayed before our eyes hours and days after as we replay scenes, reimagine episodes, murmur verses or fill the gaps we think the artist left unfilled. The emotion awakened by these feelings identifies us as an active part of the artistic process and also give a complicated identity to the artist. But this should only be said of good art, not the art and the artist we easily forget because they did not leave memories, did not drown or elevate, or did not lead us on a journey out of a familiar space to another world.
Good art is like a beautiful relationship with expectations. It raises and answers the question of identity. It evokes emotion in different shapes, with a longing that is strengthened or a sense of nostalgia revived by events. It promises roses, happiness, surprises, gifts, memories, certainties, and uncertainties. People watch its magnificence with joy or jealousy while some go further to build expectation for the lovers involved. And when it hits the rock, the most affected lover curls in their room, fighting the sun’s illumination as they sob, remembering the days they smiled, laughed, and loved. The emotion evoked is similar to the effect of good art on an audience in an artistic process.
The artistic product, the work of art, is at the centre of the relationship between the artist and the audience (listeners, spectators, readers). The audience, which is responsible for appreciation is naturally the last in the chain of production. The audience reacts to works of art that have always existed as clues, symbols, history, experiences, shapes or lines but are now created and improved by the artists. The beauty of the art, creative prowess of the artist, meaning embedded in the art, its uniqueness, and its ability to serve a purpose enhance the level of appreciation. However, the appreciation of good art is a process that should be seen beyond –outside perhaps — the elitism of formal criticism and a commitment to theory.
Although formal criticism or appreciation predicated on theory is essential for the growth of art and artists, art as entertainment before other purposes defeats the tag of elitism that often forces it to an esoteric realm. Appreciation of art bears informed, uninformed, emotional, sentimental opinions. It is therefore not a cause for surprise when art lovers argue the superiority of Achebe’s Arrow of God over Things Fall Apart or some people’s preference for Prince as against some’s unchanging belief that Michael Jackson is the greatest. The unpredictability in our reactions to good art and the need to let liberty triumph in our appreciation necessitates the need to ask Professor Charles Larson’s question again: ‘If someone does not react to something in our literature the same way that we do, then he is to be considered inferior?’
Larson, a Professor of literature, asked this crucial question in one of his essays centred on the universality of literature in an ethnocentrically sealed world. Art as a universal substance is subjected to the different perceptions of people and groups, people’s emotions, and ethnocentricity. This is why Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones are amazing TV shows but are always in the unending debate of the greatest TV show, or why some are so attached to Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun that they won’t stop probing the whereabouts of Kainene, forgetting its scope as a work of fiction and nothing more.
The visible bond between good art, the artist, and the audience is one to be looked at with sensitivity. In explaining the interaction between the audience and the work of art, Wolfgang Isner, a major figure in literary criticism, argues that the relationship enunciated here should be “virtual in character” because “it cannot be reduced to the reality of the text (art by extension) or to the subjectivity of the reader…,” but this does not invalidate the overt intent of the artist. Isner’s position favours a dynamism and a balance reached by according recognition to the outcome of the audience’s appreciation in the face of the reality of the art. This relationship clearly suggests the place of the artist’s commitment to art without disregarding the place of the audience. Like beautiful relationships that offer everything including heartbreak, a level of commitment ties the artist to the art and the audience when reckoning with good art.
Good art at the centre of this relationship also points to the intricacies of expectation. Likened to “a good marriage that completes a feeling inside you, something that lasts forever and grows with time” by Robert Shimshak, an art collector, good art drags along a baggage of intricacies as it engenders joy, laughter, pleasure, sobriety, lessons, and growth. Good art also pushes to the fore an understandable selfishness that keeps demanding from the artist after a taste of the quality they can offer, and a search for identity for the artist once their artistic production is termed good art.
When I read Igoni Barrett’s collection of short stories, Love is Power or Something Like That, I was selfish with my expectation when he published Blackass. Emotionally tied to his craft, I hoped he would exceed the beauty created in Love is Power or Something Like That. Thinking I had outgrown this selfishness in taste with how I loved Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negros to the extent of battling anxiety in my attempt to read another creative work of Hill, my expectation from good art and the concerned artist surfaced again when I read Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities years after his impressive debut, The Fishermen. I hoped a distant young writer is able to convince me of his brilliance — which I once believed would birth a classic — suggested in his first novel.
This quest for taste to a level of undying satisfaction occasionally burdens the creators of good art. But this expectation that builds when our favourite artists grow creates frustration and an identity artists sometimes do not embrace. This is the case with the different voices that repeatedly talked and wrote (passionately, at times with a tone of demand) at different times within the literary society about the need for a second novel in conversations on the brilliance and craft of Arundathi Roy and Harper Lee. It also reflects the criticism B.o.B, the American rapper, continuously receives as a part of his audience thinks he fell after “Don’t Let Me Fall,” a single that characterises the brilliance in his debut studio album, B.o.B Presents: The Adventures of Bobby Ray.
This expectation typifies the audience’s elevation of emotions over logic since good art, like a beautiful relationship, sometimes occludes the opening of logic and sensitivity for the manifestation of emotions, thirst, and a longing for more. However, this does not hurt good art or leave a lasting damage on the artist. It creates a problem of identity that takes different forms and different arguments, depending on the artist’s leaning, consistency and progress. For some artists that produce works of unmatchable or outstanding quality which stood out, ‘natural geniuses’ like Milton, Achebe, and George R.R Martin; or artists that create brilliant works either as ‘flight’ or a ‘means of conquering’ as Jean-Paul Sartre describes in “From What is Literature?”; or artists that have their works conditioned by social-cultural or political events, their audience at times are devoid of the knowledge of the ease or the difficulty of their artistic process and what inspires or sustains their craft.
The absence of this knowledge frustrates the audience and at times frustrates the artists. This easily elucidates the tone of the YouTube comments on B.o.B’s “Don’t Let Me Fall” video. With no desire to know if the artistic production at that moment (2010) was an escape (flight as used above) or a means of conquering for B.o.B, comments about let-down, his fall off a pedestal and the disappointing nature of his music after 2010 form the core of the numerous comments on the video. And if it is established that B.o.B’s effort in the said album is down to escape or conquest, what is the assurance that same level of brilliance would be present in his other artistic productions if they do not serve the same purpose or inspired by the same need?
Another intricate issue in the triangular relationship of art, artist and audience as it concerns good art is the trouble of identity. Achebe was a better essayists to some, but some have his novels as their fondest memories of the artist he was. For Soyinka too, his plays and poetry also divide opinions: a few see him as a poet while some think of him as a playwright. The issue of identity as it frustrates or helps the artist was recently talked about by Arundathi Roy in her 2019 Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture on the invitation of PEN America. She recounts how she is dealing with the problem of identity in her arrival at a compromise of being seen as a “writer-activist.” Seated in the middle of a university vice chancellor and a professor of poetry at an academic event in India, she narrates how she was implored to concentrate on her political writing by the vice chancellor. Moments later, the poetry professor also whispered: “when will you get back to writing fiction? That is your true calling. This other stuff you do is just ephemeral.”
The poetry professor’s words may not induce deep thought if Roy’s craft is not considered from different positions. Lovers of Roy’s award winning debut novel, The God of Small Things, are within their rights to thirst for more fictional works sharing resemblance with the work of genius that drew people in with her first novel. What a large part of this type of audience do not seem to understand is the place of the urgency and the pain that runs through Roy’s pen. Writing for a society enmeshed in political instability, upper-caste violence, and corruption, Roy’s political writing took the centre of her craft as she felt the need to talk directly to the politics of her society as it affects her and her people. But lovers of Roy’s fiction within and outside India may not see this urgency and how her commitment to her country conditioned her writing.
The dilemma in giving Roy an identity is not fully detached from how art lovers slowly fall in love with good art because “the best art is that which affects you as an individual.” Hugh Moss, a writer and a painter, quoted in an article in The Irish Times further explains: “First it must catch your attention, then draw you in, then move you in some way — whether it makes you think or changes the way you think or, like great music, just makes you feel so much better for having become involved.” The effect of good art and how it influences judgement and the process of appreciation points out the intricacies of good art in its ability to make an audience apotheosize a good artist and exalt an artistic product. The same effect also exposes the audience’s disappointment when the artist’s artistic production takes a turn from what endeared them to the audience.
In paying attention to this triangular relationship that is anchored by a commitment to good art, a recognition of an audience and an obvious connection to the art and the artist, mocking the thousands that signed the petition for the remake of the final season of Game of Thrones is like a mockery of a lover reacting to hurt or heartbreak. Knowing the best art affects you as an individual, in different ways too, the poetry professor’s utter dismissal of Roy’s political writing as ‘ephemeral,’ considering the insensitivity it bears, should not be looked at with scorn too but should also be seen in the same breath as the petition for the remake of the final season of Game of Thrones.
Comprehending the science of good art is the responsibility of the artist and the audience when art leaves the artist’s womb for the touch, attention, care and the pleasure of its prospective lovers. The artist owes the art genuine commitment, and the audience quality and clarity as symbols of their commitment. Fairness to the art and the artist is also expected of the audience even when the art is smeared with blotches because it does not need to be the Mona Lisa before it is called a good painting, and every artistic production of an artist may not emit the spark we saw in their work that drew us to them. But the relationship with good art affects us in different ways knowing it comes with a lot: thirst, love, passion, pain, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, friendship, hope, uncertainty or certainty, and yearnings that don’t die.
About the author: Lanre Apata is a fulltime reader of literature, a part-time writer and an editor. He also works in Nigeria’s educational sector. His other interests are African prose, African politics and sport. He resides in Nigeria.
