The City.
Why do people come here? Choose to live in discomfort, cramped spaces and surrounded by unpleasant, unfriendly strangers? A hundred years ago, they would have flocked to ports for work and the ready availability of goods. Manufacturing, shipping and receiving… The holy trinity of trade.
So what brings them here now, when the ‘Net and mail order business allow the right kind of business to make just as much money in rural Wisconsin as this megapolis. The answer is relatively easy. We are gulls, flocking to great heaps our of nations greatest export: Bullshit.
It comes in by the metaphorical barge-full, with us converging on these bright spots on an otherwise dull map to lap it up. We bring it with us, we create it here, and almost above all else: we participate in it here.
The “art” scene is a vibrant pastiche of scammers. They exploit their shamelessness, lazily creating diversions for all of us. Minimal effort, maximum noise. Most of it is deritive, but even when it isn’t, one man’s “experimental” is the everyman’s bullshit, if you look close enough. The worst part, of course, is that we are complicit. We allow and indeed encourage the wool to be pulled over our eyes.
One could easily think that the key to success in the creative arts in this place is pure, unbridled confidence. Whether innate or merited, realistic or fictional, confidence keeps the wheels turning. Belief in the importance of one’s ideas… Enough to convince financiers and the audience itself, that is true power. And this is the only environment wherein that power can really be exercised.
Of course, there are oases in this desert of pompous noise. There must be. Not because it’s true that this place provokes or promotes creativity, but because the odds support it. Wade through enough garbage, you’re bound to find something worthwhile. And there’s an awful lot of garbage here.
Downer.
But that means there should be more good stuff than somewhere else?
Upper?
RJC
Comments are disabled for this post