Shove a Little Art Down Their Throats
Don’t Stop Believin’
A friend recently turned me on to a podcast called Search Engine. It’s a little like This American Life meets Stuff You Should Know, with a pinch of one of those Channel 7 Action Team “consumer-response” shows, since you can submit queries for them to investigate. It’s cool.
I bring it up not to plug it (though, hey, why not), but because I recently listened to an episode that intersected with an essay I was planning (this very essay, in fact).
The episode, “A stubborn lunatic’s guide to making great art,” is an interview with the director Alex Gibney about his recent documentary Wise Guy. The documentary examines how David Chase managed to make The Sopranos within an American television industry that seemed to have zero appetite for anything of that quality or novelty.
The podcast host, PJ Vogt, makes it quite clear that he thinks The Sopranos is the greatest TV show of all time. Yet he’s also just about as impressed with Gibney’s ability to get the documentary made within an industry lacking appetite for anything of that quality or novelty.
So, then there’s me: writing an essay about a podcast that’s an interview with a director who made a movie about a writer who made a TV show. Sigh.
Let’s be honest.
But this isn’t really an essay about the podcast. Rather, I was taken by Gibney’s stories of standing strong with his creative vision in the face of commercial pressures while he tried to tell the story of someone who stood strong with his creative vision in the face of commercial pressures.
The stories from the birth of The Sopranos are wild. At one point an executive said something like, “can we lose the therapy angle?”, which, if you’ve seen the show, is a pretty wild thing to suggest. The literal founding notion of the show is “mobster goes to therapy.” The exec wanted shoot-outs and beat-downs and car chases and good-guys-vs-bad-guys.
But look, David Chase is a great writer, and he probably could have acquiesced and still been successful. He probably could have written a gripping and compelling mafia story that was, nonetheless, totally by-the-numbers. It would have been good enough to make a hit TV show.
And the executive might have been a philistine, but they probably weren’t an idiot. It would have been a safer bet. Chase didn’t want a safe bet. He was trying to do something riskier.
The great compromise of creative endeavor on behalf of commercial interests is that often “good enough” is as good as it’s going to get. In Art & Fear, the authors briefly tackle this notion. While they note that for the artist, “making art is dangerous and revealing,” they propose that:
“With commercial art this issue is often less troublesome since approval from the client is primary, and other rewards appropriately secondary. But for most art there is no client, and in making it you lay bare a truth you perhaps never anticipated: that by your very contact with what you love, you have exposed yourself to the world.”
I get their point, but I don’t really agree. While a boorish executive may give you some cover as a creative professional (“hey, I just gave them what they wanted”), eventually the work does go out to the world. Making it good is still vulnerable and terrifying.
Good is what David Chase was after.
There’s a phrase — I originally heard it from the world of architecture, but I think it’s pretty widespread — “good design doesn’t cost any more than bad design.” If you’ve got to go through the process of designing something, the thinking goes, you may as well do it well.
Jim Collins, in the classic book Good to Great, wrote:
“It is no harder to build something great than to build something good. It might be statistically more rare to reach greatness, but it does not require more suffering than perpetuating mediocrity.”
In the real world, of course, this is maybe a little disingenuous. In many cases, good design actually might cost significantly more to implement or realize.1 It really might be “harder” to achieve greatness. And as creative leaders, it’s important that we recognize what fights are worth pursuing — all decision is compromise.
Still, I have also heard a similar, if somewhat more realistic, sentiment: “good design is expensive, bad design is costly.” That rings true for a lot of endeavor…though a little like a designer preemptively defending their elevated rate, too. It follows in a grand tradition of phrases like, “do it right the first time or find time to do it again.” Sometimes folk wisdom does have something to teach us.
But, alas, let’s be honest: we know that in many cases “bad design” might not really come with any great cost. “Perpetuating mediocrity” might be just fine.
Hang some wallpaper, spruce this place up.
But I don’t want to be too cynical.
For example, there’s nothing wrong with “background music,” in and of itself. It’s…fine. It isn’t without craft — it’s harder than one might think to shave all the edges off of something!2 And it isn’t necessarily less expensive to make than good music.
But the more generic it is the more widely it might be used, and therefore the less expensive it might be to acquire. Supply and demand, at your service. And if being inoffensive and unremarkable makes it more fit for purpose, it is therefore “good design,” in a way. I mean no shade on library music composers.
But when this sort of music is either proffered or deployed as something it’s not, it’s bad design: background music foregrounded can be truly insidious.
When we hear that, if we notice it at all, we think the creators just didn’t care. It devalues the rest of the work. In that sort of case it probably is less expensive to use that music for that purpose, and, unfortunately, probably won’t have any meaningful cost. But the result is so much less good than it could be.3
Better than it needs to be.
I remember seeing the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall in 2008.
I know, I know, it’s another scintillatingly current reference…but bear with me. It was an important time in my career: my teams and budgets were getting bigger, and I was having to make more critical decisions about the fundamental compromises inherent in artistic pursuits on behalf of commercial ventures.
Anyway, I came out of the movie thinking: that movie was a lot better than it needed to be. I remember this because I blathered on about it constantly for weeks after seeing it.
In part, the observation was born of the fact that it wasn’t that good. It’s not any kind of great cinema — it’s a silly, low stakes, rom-com romp. But the script is clever, the acting is charismatic, the characters go on some arcs that are unexpectedly nuanced, and it is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. It also ends with a Dracula-themed puppet musical, so…I mean, c’mon.
The people making the movie surely knew that plenty of successful ensemble pictures feature one-dimensional characters, plenty of successful comedies aren’t really very funny, and plenty of successful rom-coms don’t end with Dracula-themed puppet musicals.4 Surely they knew that the beautiful Hawaiian setting, the attractive, affable cast, and the fundamentally relatable story would probably be enough.
It could have succeeded being much worse than it actually was.
It felt like the people making it thought, sure, most folks are going to see this with pretty low expectations, while making out on a date, or baked stupid, but we’re still going to try and give them something a little better. It stuck with me.
Well, maybe art is too strong a word.
If you’re in a position to make art for its own sake — for the act of expression, communication, aesthetics, whatever it is you’re trying to do — and are not burdened by having to earn a living from it, bully for you. And if you do have to make a living from it, but you’re able to do that strictly on your own terms, well, hey, that’s great too! In my experience, it’s a rare opportunity.
At some point in the early 2000s, on one of my teams we had started throwing around a sort of rallying cry: “Let’s shove a little art down their throats!”5 Weirdly aggressive, admittedly, but also pretty inspiring. It was a way of acknowledging that a lot of our work would go unappreciated, and that we could probably try less hard and be fine — but that we would choose, instead, to try and do a little better.
In other words, we tried to imagine that as long as we cleared the “good enough” bar, there was no upper ceiling. We could try our best to make the best thing we could. Even if it was a little scarier, a little more vulnerable, it would ultimately be much more fulfilling.
If it were true that “good” didn’t cost more than “bad” then there would be infinite headroom to improve. It isn’t and there’s not, but there’s a hell of a lot more blue sky than I think we sometimes convince ourselves there is.
We may not be able to achieve “David Chase writing The Sopranos” levels of artistry within our own commercial constraints (or, frankly, within our own artistic limitations). For that matter, we may not achieve “Alex Gibney making a documentary about David Chase writing The Sopranos” levels of artistry. But it’s always worth the reach.
What I’m listening to.
I can’t listen to music while writing, but while editing and preparing for publication I often have some jams going. Thought I’d share! This week I’ve been deep into “Keep Pushing” by clipping. It’s aspirational…in its way.
I suppose we could talk ourselves in circles about whether or not “design” per se needs to incorporate its own implementation or realization, and therefore take all that into account in the first place…
That’s not sarcastic. Making something vaguely pleasant but completely inoffensive and unmemorable is, if maybe not art, a real skill. For better or worse.
It might be worth an aside to note that I employ “free to use” stock photos to illustrate almost all of these essays, including this one. I do put in some effort to find good ones, and I do a little light editing. Most of the photos are pretty well made — the compromise is not on the photographer. It’s on me.
I know, right?
I’m not sure who coined it, but it certainly sounds like something I would say.