Calling all local talent to the scene

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of columns that will feature a different,… Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of columns that will feature a different, locally based talent each week. Keep reading to find out how you can contact Zak and be one of his featured artists.

Usually I glare at people who refer to these as the latter days, but lately I’ve started to hope they might be right. I’m not sure I want to live in a world where Mariah Carey can be the best-selling musical artist of 2005.

It’s not the mere existence of such fluff, of such crap, that bothers me. It’s how popular this teddy-bear approach to art has become. I am perpetually in shock at how many people seem willing to worship either the inane or the contrived.

I simply can’t believe that people voluntarily wallow in current popular culture, completely ignoring the contributions of true artists including Homer, Rilke and Cummings; Marlowe, Beckett and Mamet; Chaucer, Voltaire and Lawrence; Beethoven, Lennon and Aiken.

Well, the last of these, at least, still gets the attention he deserves for inspiring automatons of every social class to stay the course. Nevertheless, the potential for greatness is out there and we have the means to spread it across the world almost instantaneously, so why are we left with movies like the new version of “King Kong” in our theaters?

I spent quite a bit of my spring break thinking about this problem, and it occurred to me that there are two main causes: the distribution system and the audience. That’s quite the revelation, I know, but I realized something I hadn’t before about each and the way they depend on each other.

Everyone knows that the primary goal of every company in every industry, be it arms, energy or entertainment, is to make money. I knew the main goal of the entertainment industry is to make money, but I’d always assumed the only way it did that was by delivering entertainment to us, the consumer, the audience.

The primary function of the entertainment industry is not to collect and distribute entertainment. It is to divide us. Divided, we’re dependent on what they give us. Divided, we’re a statistically predictable consumer base.

They find out the average amount of money we spend and give us something to buy with it, and what else are we going to do? Where else are we going to get our music? Where else will we go to pay $8 to watch a movie and $56 to eat a small popcorn and drink a small soda?

What else can we put into our DVD players or download onto our iPods? Sure, we steal some of it over the Net, but we’re still depending on them to provide us with something to steal.

Their greatest success has been in infiltrating our minds and planting the notion of “the artist” to filter out alternatives. There are two sides to it. They’ve recruited academia (perhaps unwillingly and certainly unknowingly). These masters of the esoteric and the important educate us in the tradition of the great artist. Whether or not one agrees with this definition in any of its forms, it is still the yardstick for true art.

Then the industry puts on an award show where they bestow titles like “Best New Recording Artist of 2005.” They take that same word and throw it at those who are almost always undeserving (according to our academic definition). They flood our world with images and noises that are supposed to be some part of this continuum spanning Homer and Clay Aiken.

We don’t buy that, and they expect us not to. We break into two camps: the people who prefer that art stuff, and the people who celebrate that trite drivel. I am more guilty than most of having allowed myself to be shoved into the true art trench, but everyone feels the pull one way or another.

Now we’ve got talented people who want to create real art and are frustrated because they can’t measure up to Picasso or Tennyson or to that implanted notion of a true artist, so they create in silence or give up eventually.

Despite the fact that their work is still several planes above most of the crap that’s winning MTV awards, they feel alone and isolated because there’s no mechanism to connect those people.

There’s a mechanism to connect the other camp – “American Idol,” for one, and there’s a mechanism to shove the entertainment industry’s products into our souls. But there’s no mechanism to connect and to share the thoughts and works of individual artists, because that kind of connection, of community, would make us harder to predict as a consumer.

What if, instead of spending $20 on one CD, a bunch of us spent $20 each helping someone whose music we respect record a few songs and upload them on a popular Web site, where they would be free for everyone to download?

What if coffee shops around here played those songs and displayed the band’s information instead of selling the industry’s CDs? What if our art hung in the walls of our classrooms? What if our poetry painted the landscape for these, the latter days?

Paint, write, play in a band, act in a play or do anything even vaguely artistic and want Pitt News readers to know about it? E-mail Zak Sharif at rzs8@pitt.edu to be the topic of his next column.