Three Uses of the Knife

an excerpt from David Mamet:

"Mass media, similarly, are created(by what force we cannot say); they spring into existence, if you will, and offer the promise, in many cases the reality, of great wealth to entice talented people who would otherwise be uninterested. They offer, like any other dictator, the promise of freedom if the applicants consign themselves to slavery. [...] They are paid to remove themselves from the ranks of potential artists, to give up the desire to express, confront, connect, mourn, question, decry, unite; they are paid to serve the cause of censorship."

I read somewhere else once, I think it was an essay by Pierre Bourdeau, that artists occupy a dominated position within a dominant class. That the artist must choose to serve (and he was a Frenchman so forgive the melodrama) either society or the bourgeois in his art as patrons. The artist may wield culture as a tool to reinforce existing societal structures, build new ones, or can serve popular culture and receive the financial returns, but to serve art for art's sake requires that the artist already be independent of the power structures that would seek to employ him.

Personally, I think that we're all in the business of compromise as artists. No one with a knack for art aims for anything less than the stuff of transcendence in what they create, not while presuming to call themselves an artist. Yet at the same time, our own view of the world is reinforced in the art we create, we make judgement and on some level we support one cause or defame another either by representation or omission. Finally, we share our art with the world, which, in my mind at least, denotes some sort of desire to be connected to it, accepted by it, rewarded for our effort and insight. Any artist who claims to take joy, as Flaubert did, in not being understood by the masses is a creature completely incomprehensible to me. I live to connect.