Artistic charisma

Whenever I start watching a Bollywood film, I'm always astounded at how clumsy it is. There's a lot of overacting; cuts are abrupt; outfits are ridiculous; plots are preposterous and take off without much development.

Yet at a certain point I always wind up being sucked in by the sheer spectacle of it all, and by the end of the film always feel that things have smoothed out and-- although I can recall the blemishes--am much more likely to remember how good the overall film was.

By contrast, Hollywood films are usually 'well-made', but I'm rarely left thinking wow, that was good.

Good art is hard. It's not just about craftsmanship; otherwise, Albrecht Dürer would be as widely acclaimed as Leonardo da Vinci. To a certain extent, too much meticulousness can detract--especially in forms like film and books and music, we want there to be some sense of growth, some building. We don't want the beginning, middle and end to be flat, even if at a high level of excellence; it somehow feels less good that way.

Here, for example, is Joan Didion's notes while developing the play version of her Year of Magical Thinking:

On Oct. 16, back from Boston that morning, leaving for Dallas and Minneapolis the next, I again met with Scott. “SR sees the form as six or eight ‘sections,’ or ‘chunks’ — call them movements,” my notes read that day. “The movements should build sequentially, repeated refrains taking on new meaning as they build. The speaker is urgent, driven to tell us something we don’t want to know. She is reporting, bringing us a dispatch from a far country.”

More notes: “At some point we notice a slippage in this. We begin to suspect that the delivery of this report is all that holds the speaker together. We begin to sense a tension between what we are being told and what we are not being told — What’s going on here? Is she crazy? Or is she aware that we think she’s crazy and doesn’t care?

“Is that the risk she is taking? Why is she taking it?

“Think of the Greeks, how ragged they are, how apparently careless of logical transition. Is there a deeper logic?”

And that's exactly it--apparently careless. Because it's one thing to do things sloppily out of ignorance or neglect; another thing altogether when such 'defects' wind up serving a greater purpose.

Logic is not the be-all and end-all in life, and especially in the realm of art. I often thing the great directors purposely put in illogical and even 'un-understandable' scenes to remind us of that. They don't want us so hung up on everything making sense that we miss the gestalt of the film.

It's so tricky to say what's good art, but one thing for sure--good art, like good speech, is never too smooth, too pat, too apt. It's always slightly ragged and usually rough; because we're never quite ready for it.

Maybe the 30th time through it smooths out, we get it; but never the first. When experiencing great art we're always overloaded, not sure what to pay attention to, a little confused--so we take refuge in logic, in noticing when things don't process according to our expectations; we're really all control freaks when it comes to encounters with something we fear as larger than ourselves.

The trick is to acknowledge your brain noticing, but not judge, and to let it go; and definitely not get annoyed. Otherwise, you miss taking away what's valuable or interesting out of the work.

I think it's clearest in music--you just go along for the ride, even if you don't like all the stops along the way. Maybe part of it is because nobody expects music to be logical; it's a priori an emotional experience, so when some guy's up there prancing around on stage and screaming random things during a song it doesn't faze us, any more than all the bad dancing going on around us does.

It's a defining part of what we call charisma--the ability to get others to come along with you, to not process every step and agree yes/no to continue like in a flow chart, but rather--to let it flow.

It's what Ben Yagoda touches on in his review, Song of Myself, of The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music:

Another problem is the book's insularity. Barker, a former musician and songwriter, and Taylor, the author of ''The Future of Jazz,'' show no awareness that for a century or so, authenticity has been a crucial and highly charged word and concept in philosophy, psychology and aesthetics. If they had made use of Lionel Trilling's classic 1972 book, ''Sincerity and Authenticity,'' for example, they would have been able to trace the lineage of such tortured neo-Romantics as Neil Young, Kurt Cobain and John Lydon back to Edmund Burke's denigration of ''beauty'' in favor of the energy and power of the sublime. In this conception, Trilling wrote, ''the artist ... ceases to be the craftsman or the performer, dependent upon the approval of the audience. His reference is to himself only, or to some transcendent power which -- or who -- has decreed his enterprise and alone is worthy to judge it.''

Or, as Lydon (better known as Johnny Rotten) put it: ''No gimmicks, no theater, just us. Take it or leave it.''

Of course, gimmickry is in the eye of the beholder--as in everything else, we may have to change our traditional definitions once the Chinese show up. As the Times noted in a recent piece profiling the Chinese artists who are taking the modern art world where concept is everything by storm:

Ai Weiwei was both the driving force behind the revolutionary Stars Group of artists in the late 1970s and the idea man behind Herzog & de Meuron’s bird’s-nest design for the 2008 Olympic stadium. His bad-boy stance can seem like shtick. Take, for example, his iconic photo series ‘‘Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,’’ in which he does exactly that, or the groundbreaking if not defamatory exhibition he curated alongside the Shanghai Biennale in 2000. But he is anything but disingenuous. His blog, read by some 10,000 people a day, mixes astute political and social commentary with unflagging daily photographic journal entries. His architecture firm, Fake Design, has 50 projects under way. And his artistic career is only just taking off. An almost $4 million project, set to highlight the opening of Documenta XII in June, will encamp 1,001 Chinese citizens in the center of Kassel, Germany. Their clothing and furnishings, like so much in the Chinese art world, will be of Ai’s design. ...

The merry prankster of Shanghai, Xu Zhen makes slyly provocative art out of the foibles of the party state. When a team of Chinese mountaineers revised the official height of Mount Everest in 2005, lowering it by four meters, he produced an elaborate ‘‘documentary’’ of himself scaling the summit with a group of friends and then displayed the mountaineering paraphernalia from this Photoshopped expedition — along with a papier-mâché pyramid purported to be Everest’s missing peak. For the Shanghai Biennale in 2004, he sped up the clock atop the British Racing Club building (which now houses the Shanghai Art Museum) so that during the exhibition the hours passed in mere seconds. His piece ‘‘OKmyclub’’ (shown here) took the form of a widely forwarded e-mail message that solicited funding for him and a gang of thugs to travel around the world ‘‘beating up’’ celebrities and politicians. He now oversees a curatorial space in Shanghai’s Moganshan gallery district as well as an online community populated by young Chinese hipsters.

This sort of jokey art that hints at something more profound has been around forever, of course. David Kirby makes it explicit in his Times review of Brad Leithauser's Curves and Angles:

Nor does the natural world have a sense of humor. For that, fully evolved bipeds are needed. The last part of this book is cold, and one must scamper to the first section of ''Curves and Angles'' for the warmth of human company. Thoreau's more gregarious friend Emerson once said, ''I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim,'' a reminder that humans are the joke-making species. Whim is the flashlight, the can opener, the universal solvent that allows the observant to see beneath the monotony of the day-to-day: to take notice of a boy using his finger to print ''OTTO'' on a steamed-up train window, for example, and wonder whether the little fellow is writing his own name or just a word that can be read both by those within and outside the car. And whim is the tool Leithauser uses to paint the spread of television's blue light throughout a Detroit neighborhood in 1948, first bathing the Nutleys in its innocent-seeming glow and then engulfing the Daleys, the Floods, the Markses. But he relies on music as well as visuals in his poetry, both in his overt tributes to the lyricist Lorenz Hart and in the characteristic postponed rhymes he sets up and then completes lines later.