A friend recently told my husband she wished he were more pretentious and brooding as an artist. It’s a strange statement to make. She was being facetious, to be sure, but still, why would she say it? And for that matter, why would the residents of California elect Arnold Schwarzenegger as their “Governator”? These may seem completely unrelated points, but I don’t think they are. Bear with me.
I was thinking about these things and having trouble clarifying my ideas until I read Daphne Merkin’s article in last week’s Beauty issue of the New York Times Magazine. She wrote about the sensibility of Camp, as defined by Susan Sontag, that has pervaded the way we live and think. More particularly, the way we think about he way we live, and most particularly, that we do think about it.
According to Merkin, Sontag defines Camp as “the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of 'style' over 'content,' 'aesthetics' over 'morality.” In other words, we are constantly thinking of ourselves, our actions, and our surroundings, in terms of how we relate to some kind of aesthetic ideal. It’s a way of relating to ourselves with a critical distance, as Merkin puts it, “a sense of radical disjunction between one's interior experience of self and one's stylized...self.”
My friend’s statement reflects this Camp sensibility. When she thinks of the idea of an “Artist” what she sees is a caricature, a pretentious and brooding figure, probably wearing a beret and railing against the bourgeois cretins and hacks who know nothing about real art, in a French accent (we can table my friend’s lack of sophistication for later discussion). She was thinking less of an artist and more of what might be called a “Fartist.”
When she says she wants my husband to be more like that, it’s because it appeals to her aesthetic sense of what an artist should be, in a funny, ironic way. Her statement was not concerned with the content or quality of his work, or even with his career as an artist. Her statement was not really concerned with anything, for that matter, beyond that ironic, aesthetic sense: true concern implies a morality and sincerity that does not jibe with the detachment inherent in Camp.
Don’t think I forgot about the Governator. I’m convinced that Schwarzenneger won the election because people thought it was funny. Though I live in New York, that election caused a big fight between two of my coworkers at the time. We’ll call them D and … (shoot both of their names begin with D)… and F. Both D and F were in their early twenties, both graduates of prestigious universities, both Democrats, and both fairly hip. But they were hip in different ways, and there, I think, lay the difference in their reactions to the election.
D was a partier from Miami, with a lot of passion for everything she did and a lot of sincerity when it came to politics. F was a hipster nerd from suburban New York, who watched movies obsessively, prided himself on liking obscure bands, and approached everything with a bitter sense of humor. D would have liked to be famous, while F was more interested in the study of Fame as an idea.
When F came in to work one day excitedly waving the New York Post with the headline about the “Governator,” exclaiming how “awesome “ it was, D flew off the handle, not understanding how on Earth what she saw as the ruin of the fine state of California was an “awesome” state of affairs. She just didn’t get it.
I, hailing from New York and being more of the sarcastic hipster nerd (or just plain nerd) sensibility, understood that F found this whole thing funny. For the Camp aesthetic, or at least the brand I am thinking of, is an Absurdist one. Had F lived in California, I’m sure he would have voted for Schwarzenegger precisely because it appealed to his sense of the ridiculous.
But back to my husband. What I think is great about him – one of the many things - is that he is NOT that kind of artist. His work and his ambition come out of genuine creativity, not out of the desire to be “an Artist.” He has standards and takes art seriously and thinks about what he does, but in order to create work that is aesthetically good, not in order to match an aesthetic ideal of himself.
Which to my mind makes him a real artist, and decidedly not a fartist.
