Michael is asking the fundamental question. He wants to know why there is two and more instead of one. Let's get to the most famous basic question of all: Why is there something instead of nothing?
These kinds of questions are good to ponder but they don't really go anywhere. It's much more fun to deal with the other questions Michael raised; such as, What is a mistake? What is mediocrity? I've been pondering Michael's comments about artists. He mentioned artists who don't know if their work is good or mediocre. I have to say I'm one of them. I have no idea if what I make as art is really art, or good art-- or not mediocre art. I have my hopes, let's call them delusions, of course. The trouble is the identity of artworks is determined least of all by the artist, to say nothing of quality. We can say today that Van Gogh made artworks of superior quality. We can compare them to hundreds of thousands of other 'good' artworks before and after Van Gogh's time. He could not have known those comparisons. He actually knew fairly little of other art -- like most artists, really. Further, his work was not part of the western art canon until after 1906 or, to be more accurate, until the 1940s. I worry about kitsch. My own work skirts kitschy methods. I know that. I do it anyway. I think of myself as a pretty sophisticated artist. I don't do borderline kitschy stuff because I'm dumb or have bad taste. I like to think Van Gogh and many others, Picasso for one, also got as close as they could to kitsch without jumping in out of ignorance or aesthetic numbness. Good art often looks mediocre because it is so easily blurred with the kitschy when it's really quite separate. It takes a little time to see that separation. Always. Which leads to the ultimate paradoxical reality of art. Smart people who make art and people who seriously look at it realize that the first presence of art is always dumb, kitschy, mediocre, bad, unskilled, trite, a rip-off, redundant , imitative, you name it. That's because art is born of culture and up close culture is a stinking mess. The worthwhile newborn art needs time to exhibit its stability or incorruptibility. At first nobody can be sure what's just more stinky mess and what's not .... but --- and here's the paradox -- they insist that art must be done and looked at anyway. They are guided by their delusions. They fly blind. They are adventurers. They look for hints and possibilities and throw their trust into them. But they don't know quality from mediocrity or even kitsch from the real thing. Everyone goes into the future gazing backwards. There is no other option. wc
