Post 691 - December 14, 2024

Michael has written a play. He has been working on it in some way ever since I met him. This past week he performed it twice for an industry audience in a small off-Broadway theatre.

This is a play about Michael’s life. It’s funny, and moving, and he goes in deep. What he’s written is personal to a degree that I know cost him a great deal during its excavation. However much he may have suffered getting it out, it was much worse for him keeping it locked inside.

The wellspring for creativity is a murky, churning maelstrom of conflicting feelings and emotions, most of them rather dark. People write, or paint, or act, or dance, or sing, or draw, or sculpt, or make films, or any number of other things, because they must. That gunk, unexpressed, can destroy you.

In a musical, characters sing when their emotions become too heightened to be expressed in speech. The impetus behind the writing of the song, and indeed the creating of the musical, itself, both come from that same place.

AI will never be able to create art. The best that AI can do is synthesize what’s already out there and copy it. It will never be able to push past the boundary of what has been done before. An AI creation doesn’t cost so much as an emotional cent.

Not everyone is creative. Not everyone feels the urge to make something. Some people might have the urge but don’t know how to act upon it. Maybe they are too frightened to take an honest look inward. No judgment, it’s not always very pleasant in there. AI becomes an easy way to feel like something has been made, when, really, nothing has. The final product is just an empty imitation. Sometimes it might look like something real, but scratch at it, and the gold plating peels off.

The question, I suppose is, will anyone notice that they are being sold inferior goods? Are we becoming numb to genuine truth and passion? Even our basic interaction with each other is growing ever more artificial.

People feel free to say what they like to strangers online. We make comments that we might think twice about expressing were we speaking to that person face to face. There’s an online news outlet called Tangle. It’s run by a guy who reports the news then takes three or four right-leaning views on what happened and lists them with three or four left-leaning views. Then, this guy presents his own view.

A few days ago, he'd posted his take on the killing of the Health Insurance CEO. He ended up on the receiving end of a whole array of comments, some of them quite awful and personal. When he reached out to some of the people who’d said the most extreme things against him, their tones immediately changed, and they became more thoughtful and polite. Suddenly, they were talking to a flesh and blood human being and not just screaming out into the anonymous abyss.

Rage has to be directed somewhere for it to dissipate. It doesn’t just go away. The shooting of Brian Thompson has suddenly focused all our individual streams of anger against the entire insurance industry onto a common target. Yes, the taking of another life is a deplorable act, but just listen to what the crowd is saying about it. They are desperate, infuriated, and terrified.

The uproar is not about Brian Thompson, until a few days ago, nobody had ever heard of the guy. We are enraged to discover just how broken our Health care system truly is. Insurance companies are making billions upon billions of dollars in profits while denying their policyholders’ claims. In most countries, health insurance isn’t even a thing. Other governments take care of their citizens. Here, we bleed them dry.

The killing of Brian Thompson might not change anything, but all that collective rage, lasered in on a singular issue, very well might. It isn’t just going to go away.

I’ve stopped reading magazines with the President-elect on the cover. A recent issue of New York Magazine, however, devoted itself to the state of our National Press. Rather than publish one overall story, the magazine interviewed people from across the journalism spectrum. The gist of the coverage is that there is no more National Press.

Gone are the days when we all got our news from Walter Cronkite. We are now getting our information from a collection of individually collected streaming services. We are serving as our own curators. We are listening to the things that support what we already think.

The national platforms are locked in an endless struggle to keep attracting subscribers. Most of us only pay for one or two big platforms. We then add to those tentpoles by reading smaller blogs and Instagram posts and maybe listening to late-night comics to get our news.

There’s an interesting opinion piece in the New York Times today about the movie Wicked’s marketing strategy. Back in the day, you could place your advertising in a few highly visible papers and then get your stars on a few popular programs and by doing that reach millions of people. Because none of us are watching or reading the same things anymore, that model no longer works.

Wicked’s ad campaign involved partnering with over 400 individual collaborators. For the last few weeks, you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing pink and green. From Target stores to fast food restaurants, to high-end clothing boutiques, to toy stores, to coffee shops. They were everywhere. Wicked entered into agreements with anyone and everyone they could. They reached as many people as they could by targeting as many niches as they could.

The media blitz was total. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande allowed themselves to be interviewed by anyone and everyone. They talked to major outlets and small-time individuals with maybe only a few hundred followers. Those women worked much harder promoting the film than they ever did making it. Wicked blanketed the marketplace and it seems to have worked. Box office sales are now nearing the half-a-billion mark. Given how much the studio must have spent on making and pushing it, who knows how much more they need to make before they make a profit.

The Wicked movie is, even with that money machine driving it, a fun movie with something to say. Having stage managed the First National Tour, I spent a lot of time with the show. I think that the movie does a better job of telling the story than the stage version does. It comes much closer to Gregory Maguire’s novel.

Underneath all the out-of-control hype, glitz, and dazzle, there is still a glimmer of Maguire’s original artistic impulse. That kernel of truth has long been absent from other mainstream juggernauts like the Marvel movies. There have been one or two in the hundreds of superhero movies that have managed to inspire, but only one or two. The rest of them, however, are little more than money grabs designed by algorithms and marketing people to maximize profits.

After these readings, there is a lot of discussion about what the next steps with Michael’s play should be. Now it is art, but as it enters the marketplace it will need to be crafted into a commodity.

Michael’s vision is singular and unique even if he shares his story with countless other people. There is an audience for what he has to say. How large that audience might be depends upon how it is ultimately packaged and sold. It’s not going to appeal to everyone, but it might change the lives of some.

The two performances of the play for friends and industry people may be the last time the show exists purely on an artistic level.

Stephen Sondheim’s perfect summation of the artistic process happens in his show Sunday in the Park with George. The lead character, the painter Georges Seurat looks at one of his paintings and says, “Look I made a hat. Where there never was a hat.”

Artists create. Bankers sell.

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp bought an ordinary white porcelain bathroom urinal, signed it R. Mutt, and put it on display. In 1999, it sold for nearly two million dollars.

What is art? That was the question Duchamp was asking. In 2019, Maurizio Cattelan created a piece called Comedian. In truth, he made an edition of three of them. Cattelan took a fresh banana and affixed it to a wall with a piece of ordinary silver duct tape. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. One of them just sold at auction for nearly seven million dollars. Once the sale was finalized, the new owner then ate the banana.

All Cattelan did was ask the same question as Duchamp. What is art? Some financial people then took his impulse and figured out how to monetize it. That somebody decided to buy it is a separate event from its initial creation. Cattelan asked a valid question. What happened afterward has become an aspect of the piece, itself, but it wasn’t necessarily there at the beginning. Or maybe it was. Cattelan just made a hat. Some store then took it, put it on display, lit it well, and sold it to a customer who happened to see it as they passed by the shop window.

The experience of watching Michael perform his play and the feeling of standing in front of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night are not all that different. I am moved by both. Market value has not been assigned to Michael’s piece yet, but if Starry Night ever went to auction it would fetch well over a hundred million dollars. That’s just marketing. Van Gogh never saw a dime from his work. The so-called “worth” of art rarely enters one’s appreciation for it. My experience of them doesn’t have a price tag.

With the oceans rising, we are all in danger of ending up living on islands. When that happens, though, we will be ready for it because that’s how we are living now. Each of us is in our own little space. We talk to each other through our phones. We listen to the news we like and ignore the news we don’t.

The cultural landscape is just as fractured and compartmentalized as our political landscape. All we can do is keep trying to make our own hats. They will never be for everybody. Some will be experienced by millions, some by hundreds, and some by just a few. If we dig into the wells that we all have within us, it won’t matter. We need to do it. We can’t let the bankers do it and we truly can’t turn over the job to some passionless machine.

Michael’s written a remarkable play. I sincerely hope that everyone eventually gets to see it.