That’s Not Serious, It’s Art

I arrogantly like to think my friends at Aerostich created their “Not Art” sticker in honor of an essay in Geezer my motorcycle column that explained how I do not consider motorcycles to be any sort of art and don’t want anything to do with a motorcycle that could be considered “art.” In that column, I made a somewhat related comment, “I've been some kind of musician almost all of my adult life and I know what I could play and what I couldn't and I try to spend as little time listening to something I do myself. When it comes to musicianship, I am my own definition of ‘artistic.’” And that definition is “if it ain’t fun to listen to, it’s not worth listening to.” I do not take art seriously under any circumstances, but if I’m playing music the best you can hope for is that it might be fun.

I have a theory that a rational society would determine income levels by the contribution made by each citizen. So, the highest paid people would always be those who society could, literally, not live or thrive without: farmers, scientists, physicians, engineers, technicians, firemen/persons, sanitation workers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and so on. The people who get paid the most are the ones who would be missed the most if they vanished from the planet. Bankers, hedge fund banksters, lawyers, Republicans, actors and television/movie people, professional athletes and artists, etc. get paid the least because no one would notice them missing if they were to vanish. Their jobs would be filled immediately by perfectly untrained and sufficiently skilled people who would also be paid minimum wages. Yeah, we’d miss the Jeff Becks, the LaBron James, and Jake Gyllenaals, but we’d replace them quickly with even more talented unknowns. There is a world full of amazing amateurs and their skills will more than good enough. At the other end of the values and value spectrum, if all of the doctors in the world vanished, a whole lot of people would die.

When I first re-started my career in audio/music in 2001, one of my customers (later a co-worker) was in his usual state of panic when he said to me, “How come you’re always so calm when everybody else around here (mostly me) is freaked out and in a total panic?” I told him that in the industry I’d just left it was pretty common to get a call from someone that started out with “your piece of shit product killed my kid/spouse/parent/grandparent.” That puts piddly shit like a pop music recording at a pretty low stress level. Yeah, people make a living worrying about silly crap like that, but if they didn’t who would it inconvenience?

When I wrote “We’re Releasing A Record,” I definitely had this thought in mind. The seriousness that kids take when they say that phrase is, even in a historical perspective, laughable. When he read that essay, a friend commented “. . . If you factor in revenue from sync, 'releasing a record' appears to be driven by something other than revenue, or very silly indeed. So Tom, is art driving these folks or are you suggesting that they are silly? Say it ain't so.” Sorry, Rob, it’s so. I mostly think non-essential functions are silly/fun or they are just pompous and ridiculous. I’m ok with silly, but I don’t take it seriously. If it was serious, it would be critical and necessary. Pretty much everyone is some sort of artist and the difference between good, great, and professional art is just not important by any definition of the word.

Fifty years ago, I took a “recording engineering” seminar through the Audio Engineering Society with Stephen Temmer, the founder of Gotham Audio and a legendary recording technician and grumpy old man. We immediately got into an argument about what “serious music” is because he said we wouldn’t be recording anything but serious music in his course and I said “serious music is an oxymoron.” After a bad start, he and I became friends when I discovered that he sang along with classical music (a genre I’d previous thought was painfully boring) on his car radio as if it were a pop song. He immediately saw my point, too. Anything that makes a 50-ish (he seemed ancient to me at the time) man wave his arms conducting a radio-orchestra while driving a full size rental car across an Iowa dirt road could not be serious; and either is the man.

Art is not a serious subject, at least not for me. I only look at or listen to “art” for entertainment. My life would go on without it, in any form. If it weren’t available, I’d make some when and if I had the time.