Art vs. Entertainment

This is something I've been meaning to talk about in a little more detail, and it was something that stuck out while I was at The Verge last weekend, so now's as good a time as ever. It's also something that's always on my mind because in my time at Emerson College--which, as of this posting, is OVER--I encountered a lot of people who might be characterized as snobs when it comes to certain subjects.

You'd think it was fairly obvious that the things we deal in--books, music, film, etc.--are art, but I'm always surprised how much debating people do about this. Harold Bloom comes to mind, but he's just one prominent example. People who, whenever genres of entertainment like science fiction or hip hop are mentioned, start making crosses with their fingers as if to ward of cooties, are never out of view.

What these people don't understand is that every form of entertainment essentially has two genres: commercial and high-art.

High art is easy to point out. Free-associating with the term, I think, Proust, Kubrick, Van Gogh, and some of my personal favorites--E.L. Doctorow, Oscar Micheaux, Gene Wolfe, and the list goes on. There's a lot of high art out there, and very little of it is ultimately influential or well-remembered, but most of what is highly influential and remembered--what we think of as ground-breaking--tends to belong to this category.

Commercial is a category that people tend to pay less attention to. If I was asked to define what it is, I'd say it's more or less what you expect it to be. My visual art professor from this past semester would call this "craft;" whatever it is--since I'm talking about The Verge I'll use a rock & roll song as an example--it's made according to the way that people expect a rock & roll song to be made. In terms of structure and content, most of it is highly similar to each other--I think of Weezer, or Foo Fighters.

My visual art professor was very explicit in his opinion that everything under the "commercial" label is NOT art. To me, though, saying this ignores the fact that all art is also entertainment, and it ultimately exists to serve the needs of its audience. More importantly, it ignores the fact that every medium, no matter how experimental it is in terms of content, is formula-driven to a significant degree.

I don't watch much TV, and what I do watch tends to be fairly unconventional. But I don't pretend that every episode isn't formatted to the same length, uses the same narrative and plot devices, and has a whole bunch of other identifying markers. What many people consider to be two of the greatest TV shows ever--The Simpsons and Seinfeld--aren't even about anything; they're pure formula.

More importantly, the commercial genre is the one on which the industry survives. Harold Bloom can deride Stephen King all he wants, but it was the formula authors who, in the early 20th century, created a market for literature in which it was possible to make writing a profession.

When I entered college--and I'm sure that it's the same for most of us, to a degree--I had these grand ideas of revolutionizing my art, etc. etc. If there's one thing I've learned since then (despite the efforts of certain of my professors), it would be that working in this field is inevitably going to involve working on the commercial side. And no matter what anyone tells you, there's nothing wrong with that. Formula exists because it works, after all.