Arts vs Crafts

Pretending It's Art
(Or Justifying Throwing Ashtrays at Actors)

This site is meant to better the theatre, but sometimes, you have to focus on the problem to make an improvement.  It's not bitching, it's a diagnosis. If throwing rocks at false idols is what's necessary, I fully condone it.  Pointing out unhealthy behavior is what Doctor's do.

Waiting tables. Mopping Floors. Doing Shitty Plays about Marilyn Monroe or plays with gratuitous  male nudity - They're all a fact of life for a young person in the theatre. They're hopefully a harmless means to an end, but what if you start buying into the means, there's a danger. Believing your work as a waiter is of global importance is delusional; yet, I meet actors every day doing shitty plays, paying their dues, but proclaiming the work to be important. Quite quickly, they become convinced that it is high art.  They may be even doing some good work in it, but that doesn't mean it's art. (This is usually from a lack of education, not meaning classroom learning- but once it become truth, they become "Born Again" artists, speaking loudly and handing out postcards in the subway.)

By art, I don't mean something aristocratic, snobbish or even purely skilled. Look at paintings, Thomas Kinkaide was a very skilled painter, but I'd bite my tongue off before I called him an artist.  Craftmanship is different than artistry.  Skill isn't to be scoffed at, but it's confusing a rhinestone for a diamond. They both sparkle! Yet one is carefully manufactured and one is a tiny miracle that can take people's breath away.

Actors are tricky characters though. (Often, it's part of tricking themselves.) It's fine to do a shit show for experience, but losing sight of quality is a huge danger.  It gets even more dangerous when they try to convince the public that fool's gold is the real goods.  Even more damaging is taking a known  great piece of work, and having merely competent craftsmen go to work on it.   It's akin to having Mr. Kinkaide repaint Starry Night and try to pass it off as the real deal. With the sources of mass-publicity and lazy, horribly uneducated critics, this knock-off soon becomes what people know as the real thing. The next poor knock off will gain the same fortune. It's like a photocopy, where every version gets a little more blurred.  

WHERE ARE THE PEOPLE WITH SENSE AND KNOWLEDGE TO POINT THIS OUT?! There is a point where educated critics are needed  - when any asshole can blog (once again, point noted - I take the work very seriously, I don't take myself seriously).   We live in such a 'politically correct' world, where everyone receives a participation trophy, we lose signs of greatness. Call out rottenness and falseness (see our last post). And when critics pat themselves on the back for sharing the same ignorant response, while chastising those with real knowledge, it's a sad,sad world.  (And THOSE critics are usually the ones that sit and bitch about the theatre.) Don't bitch. Get educated. Create better.

The more I learn and see, the more I can understand the great teachers that berated you to the bone for your failings or threw ashtrays at your head, maybe there was something to it. They CARED about the work so much that they'd weed out anyone that was trying to adulterate it and wasn't totally committed AND for the right reasons - reasons bigger than ourselves. If you brought in a 3 week  prepared scene of Baby Want a Kiss to Stella Adler and she stopped you before you spoke a word and told you to start over, she was teaching you a very valuable lesson. If Sandy Meisner threw a glass ashtray at you while performing Willy Wax from Rocket to the Moon, he didn't do it out of meanness, but out of absolute love for the higher theatre. What do you want to be a part of? LCD (Lowest Common Denominator or revolutionary theatre?)

SO get educated, get experience, fall on your face and know when to throw ashtrays even though people will  crucify you.

“A Straightforward statement made without an ambiguous grimace may be considered dogmatic. As dogma it is an affront to your listener (who may not agree) or it will embarrass the speaker should he be proved wrong. To defend it, you may have to fight, perhaps shame, your adversary: and if you are not strong enough to defend it, you will be held either a boor or a fool yourself. Any belief set forth without an evasive or apologetic grin is both bad manners and bad salesmanship. Behind it all is the need to be free, to pick up or drop any notion according to conveniences, to avoid choice, lest one be caught in the rigidity of a definite position, for in that lies difficulty and even danger.” - Harold Clurman