Appreciation

While I understand the delightful buzz of a good review or the surprised elation at hearing that someone you’ve just met is aware and appreciative of your work, I’ve never fully understood how sensitive some people can be regarding their work.

I have a love of pulp, be it fiction, art, cinema, music... Pulp is mediocre, but competent. Good enough, but not really good.

Modern media, starting with publicly affordable photographic journalism through radio, television and nowadays teh intarwebz have poisoned our ability to appreciate works on a less absolute scale. While we were in Paris last year, my boyfriend drew a delightful sketch of the back of the Louvre while I sat beside him reading and taking notes, the two of us swapping pencils occasionally because my mechanical pencil has an eraser and his has a better tip size -- since then he hasn’t done much sketching since he wasn’t pleased with the results.

We saw very different things in the same sketch. He saw flawed proportions, crooked angles and clumsy detailing. I saw straight lines and a surprising resemblance to the actual building. He saw a drawing that would be sneered at in an architectural office, I saw a drawing that showed immense promise, especially since it was his first try.

Excellence is freely available to us, or at least, the knowledge of it. You can see pictures or films of the most beautiful and artful things ever devised by the hands of man for free after a few seconds of Googling. You can buy CD recordings of the most sublime music of the last few centuries for a few bucks in the drugstore bargain bin. In school, Shakespeare and Multatuli are thrown at young folk with such force they have to try to dodge them -- a few hundred years ago, in the town where I now live, the sight of a horse meant for riding rather than ploughing was news that kept buzzing around the area for months.

I’m not trying to argue that we should lower our expectations or worse, aspirations, simply that we re-evaluate the process by which we judge works of creativity. The movie Serenity didn’t change my life or my expectations of cinema, but it was good fun, well-written and, gorrammit, it had a hover-craft chase in it. Compare a product to its goal rather than its pinnacle, and all of a sudden mediocrity switches from being ‘less than good and much less than excellent’ and becomes a genre of its own.