The Hollywood A/Effect

My students feel art must deliver everything to them on a clean platter with ample portions. They sit in their chairs and expect to eat, to gorge, to be engorged. Give them a new menu, an unusual recipe, they don't approach it with glee, with the hunger for new tastes, with forks poised and knives sharpened; they squirm, squeal, squeak in pitiful revolt. Give me my fast food.

We are entrenched in The Age of Lazy Intellect.

Comments

[Sloth]

Farblah too blahtrue! an-blah'd saddening blah blahat th-blah'at. An-blah'd ablahs blahy go on blathy Will blahnd blah grblah-owing DISSATISFACTION!!! blah LI-blahblahblah-FE when blah wo-blah-n't blahblahthefastfoodblah and blahy "have" to blaht up blah blahnd blah blahselves. BLAH BLAH BLAH YATTA YATTA YATTA long be living the Lazy Intellectual! forever not to give a shit, or two!, about empty Names making outdated cliches. welcome to hEDON, be sure to sample the fruit

[graywyvern]

incurious minds born to be techno peasants, trapped in this degree mill posing as an instrument of enlightenment. perhaps it is enough that they surprisingly encounter a different sort of person at all. and of course, every so often a born poet will be thrown into the works. who will find her way with or without help. m.

[Chris]

1. Are your students representative of people (Americans?) (younger Americans?) as a whole? 2. Are they more or less resistant to new art than a similar sample would have been 10 years ago? 5? 50? 3. Does their resistance carry across all genres? Are they as unexcited by new music as they are by new words or new images? 4. Do they feel that they enjoy a wide array of types of artwork? Do they feel that the various artworks that you think are varied are, in fact, varied, or do they think that they are rather similar compared to the range of artworks that they appreciate? 5. Is the goal of art appreciation the endless quest for novelty? Is the goal of art appreciation the ability to appreciate all art? Is the goal of art appreciation to make one happier? Is the goal of art appreciation to make one able to appreciate all types of art so that no matter what artistic situation you are in, you will be able to appreciate it, and thus be happy? (Substitute other words for "happy" ad lib.) 6. If your students loved novelty, what would your job as teacher be? If your students loved novelty, would they have already sought it out for themselves? If your students loved novelty, would it force you, as a teacher, to search even harder for novelty, in order to "stay ahead of them"? If your students loved novelty, would it lead to a situation where they were teaching you as much as you were teaching them? If your students loved novelty, would you be out of a job? 7. Which experimental poets have best taken advantage of audiences' love of being fast-fed their entertainment? Which experimental poets have used audiences' love of being fast-fed their entertainment to negotiate with the audience by giving them what they want in order to drag them to a place they didn't know they wanted to go to? Would such an approach still be "experimental"? Would it be "selling out"? Would it be "worthwhile"? Would it make you "unpopular in the experimental poetry community", perhaps like a populist historian among academic historians?

[R. A. Blum]

Far too true, and saddening at that. And as they go on they will find a growing dissatisfaction with life when it won't deliver the fast food and they have to get up and find it themselves.