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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 632482" data-attributes="member: 4937">Mallus: I think understand what you are saying, and granted both of us may feel that the truth is not quite as simple as the demands of rhetoric are forcing us to make it, but I honestly find the sort of criticism you are leveling to be no more effective than suggesting 'All the entertainment of the kids these days is junk.  Back in my day, we had real artists'.  It seems to me to be that same Victorian conservatism mangled into its latest elitist form.Are you suggesting that a cute puppy is a banal work?  Is the implicit thought behind this the suggestion that you are somehow being deep if you don't paint cute puppies and instead paint dead bodies and other cynical things?  Is there one possible reaction to either?  More to the point, am I deeper if I try to encourage my audience to have more than one reaction to a dead body, than it has to a cute puppy?I disagree with your assumptions.I don't think that the functional purpose of art, if indeed it has a functional purpose, is necessarily to elevate the human spirit - albeit that this is a noble and worthwhile goal of any pursuit.   I certainly don't think that the noblest purpose of art is to "convey a little of what its like to experience the world from anothers point to view", and in fact I consider this a vain and conceited goal of art.   I detest the modernist movement to judge literature on the basis of how it tricks someone into believing that they suddenly can sympathize with how it must have felt to have been X in Y situation - especially if X is some ethnic minority and Y is a situation of oppression.  Doesn't the reader realize that even the most honest expression of art is artifice?  Doesn't the viewer realize that the only way to hook the reader is to appear truer than the truth?  You probably won't ever find anyone less interested in Adam Sandler films and the music of N-Sync than myself (prejudged without exposure to be sure), but to be frank they are selling and who am I to sit here and trash the art of someone else.  Do I think that Stephen King is the greatest word smith of our age?  No, but neither do I snear at his works because I don't find them literary, and I find Stephen King's works more honest than the fashionably ironic works of say Kurt Vonnegat - no matter how much talent Kurt clearly has.Artists start talking about the personal experience of art and I want to barf.  If I were to write something, and someone said, "You know your work really touched me in a uniquely personal way.", I'd probably say, "Thank you."  But, what I'd probably be thinking was, "Damn, I screwed up.  God help me, that work must have been worse written than I thought.  He didn't get it at all.   Here I was trying to entertain and maybe in the process convey some specific truth I think I have discovered and instead of understanding what I said, he's off relating it to something in his childhood growing up in Chicago.  I'm glad for him, but I never even gave a moment's thought to Chicago when I wrote the book."  Lord, save me from the reveiwer that thinks because I grew up in the south, my alien race is an allogory for the plight of African Americans, or the struggle of civil rights when what I mean is that people - just people - are often cruel to each other without meaning to be.  Save me from the person that thinks that this means that I was abused as child, when all I really mean is that growing up is a tough.  The last thing I want the reader to think is "Now I understand how X people living in Y feel", because frankly that is a bunch of self serving bull <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />.  I don't want you to get something out of the story that no one else is getting.   I want everyone to sit down and get the same thing out of the story, and afterwards maybe go 'Wow, I never realized we all had so much in common.', or maybe just 'That was fun.'I completely sympathize with Steinbeck, who after puplishing Tortilla Flats, got back all this praise having to do with quaint presentation of ethnic culture, and criticism having to do with unflattering portrayal of ethnic sterotypes and was forced to explain himself and appologize for being unable to convey with his limited talent what he wanted to convey to the reader.I don't think that the 'sorry state of Western/American/Popular/Republican/insert your favorite politically correct bugaboo' is directly related to the fact that money is involved or that it is played down to the lowest common demoninator.   I think we are on safer ground attributing it to Sturgeon's Law, even if Sturgeon was largely full of crap.</blockquote>

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