I don’t know a lot about competing in the Olympics. I’m not good at figure skating, fencing, diving, basketball, or curling. But I have a rule of thumb that I nonetheless expect works for all Olympic sports:

If you’re not willing to break a sweat, you’re probably not going to the Olympics.

Art is the same. Not because suffering makes art better. Because many people do it, and no one is so much better than everyone else that they can be the best without working hard.

I say this because of some animations, some stories, an essay, and a blog post.

The animations were by the Quay Brothers. I had an extended argument online with several people, all of whom love the Quay Brothers’ animations for their quirky, creative visuals. I said that was all very fine, but they didn’t have interesting characters or interesting stories, so they were bad animations.

It may seem unfair to demand the kind of quality from homemade animations that I demand from an animated movie made by a team of 1000 people. But fairness doesn’t enter into it. If you’re not a writer, and you’re not willing to go the extra distance to hire a writer to write a story for your animation, you will make a bad animation. I don’t care how talented you are; there are other people who are willing to go that extra distance, and some of them can do the visuals every bit as well as you can.

The stories came from the Atlantic Monthly. I read them to learn what is currently considered a good short story by the literary elite. They were all written with great style. Most of them didn’t speak to me in any way. They were convincing, detailed, emotional stories about realistic characters doing stuff. But I couldn’t figure out how they connected with anything outside of themselves.

The essay, “Don’t write what you know”, by Bret Anthony Johnston, also came from the Atlantic Monthly. It cautioned writers against writing things in their stories because they happened in real life. As has often been said, “Stories must be truer than fiction.”

I thought that quote meant that real life doesn’t package things in a way that makes sense. The purpose of the artist, whether a writer or painter, is to draw connections, and interpret life meaningfully.

But Bret Johnston said the opposite. He said that stories should not be like life because they should not have meaning: "Aboutness is all but terminal in fiction. Stories aren’t about things. Stories are things.... The idea of a writer “wanting” to do something in a story unhinges me. At best, such desire smacks of nostalgia and, at worst, it betrays agenda.... And writing what you know is knotted up with intention, and intention in fiction is always related to control, to rigidity, and more often than not, a little solipsism. The writer seems to have chosen an event because it illustrates a point or mounts an argument."

Well, yes. That’s what writers do. I like Dramatica theory, which is a little crackpot-ish, but insightful. It says that every story is an extended argument for or against some proposition.

But now I understand why I don’t understand the stories in the Atlantic Monthly. I thought that I just wasn’t smart enough to make the connections and figure out what the stories were about. But this essay, probably selected by the same editor who chose those stories, says stories shouldn’t be about anything. The most difficult step in writing a story, of figuring out what it is about and directing everything towards that, is (Johnston says) superfluous.

Most of the writers I admire, like Fitzgerald, Kafka, Hemingway, Arthur Miller, Borges, Joseph Conrad, Dostoyevsky, Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell, deliberately wrote stories that were about something. Perhaps they didn’t know what their stories were about when they began, but they figured it out by the time they were through. If they were like me, they then went back and re-wrote them to focus on what they were about.

The blog post was by Amit. The post was about Fiddlebottom’s stories. Nothing I say here is about those stories, which are disturbing, but have a sense of about-ness to them.

In the post and the comments, some people explained why they like terribly violent and brutal stories. Amit said, A Fun Day “is a work of art; the unending, unyielding sadism and the depiction of Scootaloo's ever-present consciousness is continued well past the point one might expect it to go. There is no looking away or back; there is no cop-out or palliation. It is a constant train of the completely unabated infliction of misery. The characters stay as true as possible to their roots and in doing so they make me laugh a little even as the bile rises in my throat. It goes to the heights of delightful absurdity and masters the idea of saccharine horror.”

This sounds intellectual. But I don’t trust strings of big words. What do they really mean? Apparently to vary a story, and have some things extreme and others not extreme, or to have pacing sometimes fast and sometimes slow, or some characters who are sadistic and some who are not, is a cop-out. The very things that I think of as key to the art of a story disqualify a story from being art.

No. A Fun Day is not a work of art. I assert this even without really understanding what Amit is saying, because AFD is simple. See "If you're not willing to break a sweat" above. The author didn’t have to make any difficult choices or trade-offs. There’s no dramatic structure to speak of, no theme, no connecting arcs to draw together. One must simply begin with cruelty, and continue with it until Scootaloo is dead. It isn’t even as sophisticated as farce.

Several people commented on paintings that are simply a single color painted onto a canvas, and said why they are or are not art. I again say that if one can make a painting in 10 minutes, it is probably not good art. Someone equally skilled who is willing to take 20 minutes can probably make something better.

I also referred to John Cage’s song 4’33”, which is simply four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Again: Easy to make; not art. Or take twelve-step music, or art of any kind that is made according to a theory and a formula rather than by hard work.

I haven’t made any good arguments that these things are not art. That would make this a much longer blog post. I instead offer a single simple explanation for the praise heaped on all these things.

I think what has happened is that people have found it is easier to make impressive-sounding arguments that something is art, than to make art. Those who are adept at these arguments out-compete people who are skilled at art. They’re able to produce their “art” and their arguments faster than people who work hard at it. In an academic environment, where there is no consumer market to speak of, only those who have a stake in the outcome have any impact on what is judged to be art. What eventually dominates is whatever viewpoint is most advantageous to the most people in the debate. As most people can’t or won’t produce the best art, most people prefer arguments that imply that they can produce great art if they just have a moderately-clever idea.

Clever ideas may (let’s suppose) be necessary to produce great art, but they are not sufficient. I don’t mean that sweat itself makes art better. I mean that if someone shows you something and says it is art, and yet they haven’t bothered to do some of the basic work in that art form, such as getting a story for an animation, or having figures within a painting, or building a dramatic structure within a novel, or figuring out what a story is about, or trying to understand and confront a bleak situation rather than simply hyperbolizing it, it probably isn’t very good art compared to things made by other people who took those extra steps. If appreciating it depends more on listening to a complex explanation than on experiencing the work itself, it's suspect. If it could been produced by an eighth-grader, it’s more likely that it’s something people have persuaded themselves is art in order to persuade themselves that they can produce art without great effort.