ART IN THE AGE OF THE MEDIA-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
“Poetry is a waste of time,” my roommate asserted, settling himself at the kitchen table; “it doesn’t do anything.” This sentiment, hailing from a political activist, wasn’t too surprising, but it was oddly reminiscent of a remark made earlier by my brother, a moderately liberal civil engineer. “I don’t know if I’ll ever respect what you do,” he had said unapologetically. No, he said, he had not read my new book of poems, nor did he intend to. “I wrote a book on traffic safety for work—would you like to read that?”
Like most American poets and artists, my life is full of people who believe that art and poetry—two practices I love—are utterly valueless. As artists, we are repeatedly told that our work is best relegated to periods of leisure or, perhaps, insanity. At least in the United States, we have become so accustomed to the idea that art and poetry lack value that it has become something of an article of faith, normalized and even naturalized. As artists and writers, we are so busy fending off blows that we forget to interrogate this assumption. Specifically, why is it so pervasive, invasive, and insistent? Why the need to tell artists and writers that our work is worthless, over and over again? Don’t we have enough trouble doing our work as it is? Whose interests does this assertion actually serve? And why, if art and poetry make no difference, the implicit hostility toward the creative process?
The fact that this belief is not, in fact, universal, is evidenced by a Nuyorican poet I heard read many years ago at the Folger Shakespeare Series. “In my neighborhood,, and to share that making, are arguably among humanity’s defining features. Witness cultures in which art-making is viewed as an integral part of life, as basic and unquestionable as the need to cook and the desire to share that meal with others.
