[MD] MOQ and Art

[Mike Craghead]

Peter Corteen wrote:
> One thing I do take issue with in Mike's exposition is: 'creating great art
> is "finding the balance between the heart and the head." '. The heart is an
> organ for pumping blood around the body - does he mean that you should keep
> a cool head so that you don't get over excited? or is it just poor use of
> words that really want to mean great art is emotional?  The heart plays a
> very minor part in painting - unless it is a very big canvas and involves
> climbing up ladders!
>
>   
Hi Peter!

The organs in question are purely metaphorical. The head is the 
intellect, where you store everything you know (SQ) about how to paint. 
The heart is your visceral feeling, sometimes irrational, but it's the 
part that's more receptive to DQ experience.
James Joyce ("Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man") might agree that a 
cool head is important, but I never liked his take on the subject. On 
the other hand, art that is "just" emotional can look like political 
propaganda.

At one extreme, when there is high SQ to the work but low DQ, the work 
can fall flat because there's nothing going on but technical execution. 
"Perfect" execution of a "canon" in any medium or genre of any art, and 
you get very high SQ and very low DQ. That's art that is 
photographically realistic, but which gives the viewer nothing more than 
a photograph would, or a country song with utterly predictable rhymes 
and chord progressions and lyrics, or an actor who is "sawing the air 
thusly" and "acting like," rather than "being" the character. You can 
play jazz with incredible technical skill, blaze through scales and play 
what is "correct" in each musical situation, and still give a lackluster 
performance. The work may have quality, but it lacks that undefinable 
resonance (DQ) that truly reaches the viewer and does what art can 
really do.
Then there's a whole lot out there that's low SQ and low DQ: In general, 
when I can see the intent of the artist too clearly, I'm not as 
impressed. All intellect, no emotion; i.e. the glass has three drops of 
brain and nothing else. When you can almost hear the artist saying "I am 
going to paint a ____ which will make the viewer feel ____," I feel like 
I'm a victim of a clumsy attempt at manipulation. Bad sitcoms and bad 
pop music work the same way... proportionately these kinds of works are 
100% brain and no heart, which is even scarier when the SQ is so low 
that there's barely anything there at all. That's my definition of 
waste-of-time-art.

At the other extreme, if the medium can't contain the DQ; if the artist 
lacks the technical skill to communicate their inspiration, then 
regardless of the Quality of their experience in creating the work, the 
viewer's experience is low-quality. I like this stuff better than the 
high-SQ/low-DQ stuff (above) because at least it's honest: someone with 
no artistic training can do it without pretense. But the DQ involved 
stays with the artist and is not shared with anyone else. At best, it's 
therapy for the artist. Which might be wonderful and cathartic to the 
artist, but leaves the viewer with nothing.

But when the artist finds balance; when the artist is using SQ intellect 
to highlight the DQ aspects of the work, the DQ comes through to the 
viewer (at least at the point of initial contact), and the work is as 
satisfying as art gets. Overwork the inspiration and it gets buried 
under paint (or sound or action or or jell-o; pick a medum!), but 
underwork the inspiration and nobody can see it.

Achieving balance during the creation of art is the point at which the 
whole becomes greater than the sum of it's parts. There is a kind of 
resonance that happens, when the artist just knows. That's when it's 
time to hang the painting and take the bow...

Mike Craghead
humboldtmusic.com
humboldtmusic.com/mc
humboldtmusic.com/sarimike