I am not speaking here of purveyors of commercial or popular ‘art,’ otherwise known as entertainers. Those persons can make as much money as they want, and indulge themselves as much as they like, and nothing of their talent is really lost, or put at risk. For the talent of an entertainer is technical, but while the talent of an artist is also technical, the source of it is spiritual. And when you seek a life of ease and pleasure, your spiritual reserves dry up.
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I suppose, also, it is fair to say that even an artist who is already comfortable, whose existence can be described as, say, middle class, or upper middle class, can benefit from seeing their work bring profits to them, but only insofar as those profits do not cause them to become decadent or self-indulgent, for that is, I think, the surest and fastest way for an artist to destroy their talent. I guess an artist like Truman Capote, or Salvador Dalí, might disagree with me, for they tended toward extravagance in their personal lives, and perhaps their work did not suffer from it too much (at least not in the case of Dalí), but I think, unless you die young, and burn through your talent explosively, as many great artists have done, you should safeguard it the way a nun safeguards her chastity.
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Also, even while I admit that there is nothing objectionable in an artist taking an interest in the profitability of their work (once that work is done), I wouldn’t say that I think much good can come from doing so, at least where their art is concerned. The only good scenario I can imagine, involving an artist making large sums of money (which isn’t to say a modest profit), is if the artist is destitute to begin with, or is poor, and has been struggling to make ends meet, or is not even poor but has been ostracized and made to suffer in some other way, subjected to oppression, say, because of some aspect of their identity, so that a monetary award could not only provide them and their loved ones with the things they need to survive, but also might give them a boost in morale, and perhaps even an amount of happiness and peace that strengthens their resolve and their ambition, so that they continue to work.
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I do not mean that production companies or movie studios are ‘bad’ for wanting to protect their investment, but only that it is a rare occasion when decisions that are made in the interest of profit coincide with decisions that are made in the interest of art.
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In other words, for an artist to bring to the work any considerations besides those which are best for the work, in and of itself, is to compromise the work. Which is to undermine it, and to do a disservice to it.
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Which isn’t to say that artists have no interest in the profitability of their work, for of course they do (why shouldn’t they?) but that this interest should have no bearing on the work as they do the work.
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This is why, in filmmaking, there is such a thing as a ‘director’s cut,’ as differentiated from a ‘final cut,’ which refers to the version of a film that the production company or movie studio releases to the public, and which is determined not necessarily by the director, or the creative vision behind the project, but by the producers and investors who are trying to maximize profits, and who thus suggest edits that they imagine will serve that end.
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It is for this reason that one cannot, I don’t think, stage an abridged version of any of Shakespeare’s plays and not lose something beyond the scenes that are omitted. The parts are too interdependent, the whole is too organic for the meaning to be treated so categorically. You cannot cut, or abbreviate, or edit a work of art in the same way you can edit a restaurant menu, or even a work of journalism. You cannot even take out the boring parts of Moby-Dick.
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I do not mean that an artist won’t make missteps during the working process, or that missteps can’t be fixed, but that, as they revise, the artist must account for the peculiar constitution of their medium as they rearrange or omit the parts of the artifice they are creating.
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Which is why, in artworks that depend on chronology for their expression, one cannot remove some section, however small, without undermining the integrity of the whole. It is not so much that the audience or reader will miss some piece of information vital to the plot (though this can also happen) but that the incantatory effect of art, which is related to the Aristotelean principle of suspension of disbelief, is inextricable from the form or style of the work, which should be viscous in character, meaning not comprised of bricks that can be easily separated and moved around.
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The same can be said, I suppose, of the first sentence of every good novel, insofar as every word must matter in a work of literary art, and what a writer sets down at the beginning, revision notwithstanding, must have some bearing on everything that follows, until the novel is complete.
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It has the sudden and irrevocable quality of the first splash of paint on a blank canvas.
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Certainly one can speak of a muse, as it relates to Clarissa Dalloway, in some way, for its workings are evident in the novel’s opening line, so full of purpose and decision, even if that decision isn’t earth-shaking in its ambition: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
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Although, if somebody said to me that really her muse is of the first type, a figure from her past that became so important to her that all of her endeavors, from a certain point onward, were undertaken for that figure; and then identified that figure as Sally Seton, the friend from her youth who kissed her on the lips one summer evening, while they were walking back and forth on the verandah of a house in the countryside, in a moment that Clarissa, at fifty-one, still thinks of as “the most exquisite moment of her whole life”…yes, if somebody told me that really Clarissa’s muse is of this first type, and that the figure in question was Sally Seton, I don’t think I’d disagree with that person.
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So that, if Clarissa Dalloway can be said to have a muse, perhaps it’s of the second type, wherein a feeling or energy that would seem to dwell inside her, like a spirit, does bring about in her a drive that manifests, on the day that the novel takes place, as the preparations for, and hosting of, a party.
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Clarissa Dalloway, in the novel Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, has an interesting relationship to this notion of the muse, for although she is not an artist in the conventional sense of the word, she is so attuned to the vibrations of the city around her, and to the sensibilities and motivations of the people with whom she comes in contact, as well as to her own feelings and memories and desires and regrets, which affect her in ways that the reader is privy to, even when they are so nuanced as to be otherwise unobservable, that the party for which she is preparing throughout the day, and which she herself will host at the end of the novel, becomes for the reader not unlike some work of living art that depends for its success on the manifold ways it must be arranged and accounted for.
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Suffice it to say that, for some artists, a figure from their past can become so important to them that everything they make, from a certain time onward, is for that figure, or has some trace of that figure in it. While, for other artists, there is no figure, only some feeling or energy, not unlike a spirit, that seems to them to dwell inside them, and to bring about in them, explicably or not, some creative drive that is colored by any number of memories or traits that are particular to them. I suppose, as well, there can occur for an artist a combination of both of these forms of muse.
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It is difficult for me to say more about what a muse is without describing my own history, or speaking so specifically that the universality of the idea would evaporate a little, and I don’t think I want to do that here.
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In this sense, the role of a muse is to inflict something on an artist.
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Which isn’t to say that a wound is the same as a muse, but that the effect of a muse is similar to, if not indistinguishable from, the effect of the trauma that causes such a wound.