Does a True Artist Care What His Audience Thinks?

Thank goodness I don't believe in the concept of the "True Artist", so I don't have to care. However, after studying Spanish-American literature for several years, I decided to take a grad course in the English Dept: Non-fiction prose.
While writing and commenting on our own essays, we read two selections of personal essays, one by Eula Biss and one by Dagoberto Gilb. Biss' was the one that spoke to me because unlike Gilb's work, Biss' work spoke to her, to me, and to the wider society. Gilb's work was mostly written by Gilb for Gilb.
But what struck me most about the course is that almost all of the 20 or so novice writing students seemed to writing strictly about themselves...for themselves...to exorcise their own demons. While the incidents they wrote about were, no doubt, traumatic or life-changing to the individual writers, no one seemed to be writing to talk to others through their writing. There seemed to be only two of us who actually thought we wanted our writings to go beyond the writer to have an impact on others.

It would be a mistake to entitle a Bookends conversation 'Does a True Artist Care What His Audience Thinks?' and expect that someone wouldn't point out that writers are not the only artists who exist.

That said, and keeping the discussion confined to a literary perspective, I couldn't agree more with Ayana (except, perhaps, the mention of a tinge of paternalism -- I can't quite figure out what this is in reference to). The William Faulkner interview (Paris Review, 1956) goes on just a few paragraphs later:

INTERVIEWER: But even if there seems nothing more to be said, isn't perhaps the individuality of the writer important?

FAULKNER: Very important to himself. Everybody else should be too busy with the work to care about the individuality.

Who can deny this is true, that the reader in rapture doesn't care (or, at least, cares very little) about the individuality of the writer while in the grips of the work? People pretend to care that Harper Lee might have been taken advantage of, but will the general public have the the level of restraint it would take to protest their suspicion by not purchasing and devouring the novel?

Will they, whilst reading 'Go Set a Watchman' pause intermittently to weep or shake their heads and lament the idea or possibility that the work was never meant to be released?

I doubt it very much.

A writer cares very much about his audience. Offspring are conceived of to live and thrive, not perish. Any other relationship is an unwholesome fantasy.

Don't know what Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo would say but I'm guessing "no" and they're both well served by not seeming to care much about pleasing their readers.

How nice for Adam Kirsch that he has immediate access to what Sophocles and Shakespeare were thinking! He must have been using a ouija board. Others, with less access and more humility, might actually contextualize the term audience and ask about whether audiences are those illimitable masses of consumers characteristic of contemporary capitalism or whether they are defined by a multiitude of exclusions. As for instance in Shakespeare's time, where the man took care to publish some of his poems, for the delectation of a narrow circle of poets and aristocrats, and neglected to publish his plays, from which he made his money. This would seem to say something about what Shakespeare thought he was doing - at least for those of us who don't possess a magical access into his thinking process.

"And once the object is created, it wants to be seen, just as a flower or a wave wants to be seen." It is an absurd statement. I am certain that neither flower nor wave have any capacity to reason or wish for fame or obscurity.

Words about words about words - I am so glad that I left the MFA program I was in. My wise workshop instructor said, "Get out there and write." I've done just that. Now I teach my students: "We serve the writing; the writing doesn't serve us."

We are all trying to understand the world, ourselves, the experience of being alive, etc. Fortunately some people, artists, think out loud, so to speak, and we can share and appreciate their thoughts. To some extent they are aware of us and happy to have their musings well received. I doubt though that the most successful (according to us) succeed in proportion to how motivated they are by the reception their efforts will get. I doubt too that what sets them in motion is the desire to be well received. Perhaps Joyce should not have written Finnegan's Wake. Nobody gets it. I read it and felt pretty left out most of the time. But, when I did get it, the experience was unequalled. Ere aware in the whorl would you hear such a din again? (It's been twenty years, and I remember the sentence. Maybe even partially correctly. Auto-correct went nuts with the sentence. I gave up and left an ere o'er which I think Joyce would enjoy.)

"Surely they would have been dismayed if their tricks had worked too well and no one had ever read them at all."

No, they would be dead. Some people write because they must, not because they need an audience, fame, or anything else ephemeral. Writing is a mixture of obsession and therapy for them. Some people write to pay the bills while they are alive. If Kafka and Dickinson had been found out and deemed unworthy of consideration, they would still be dead and we would not have their works think about. I'm glad they wrote them. Maybe they wrote well because they did not have to care about what an audience wanted to read and just wrote what was in them to write.

Mind you, if William Shakespeare's friends hadn't gotten together to publish the First Folio of his plays in a rugged bound book we may only have a few fragile Quarto editions of individual plays to ponder over. That was another chap whose working papers were burned or sold. What a loss.

There are still literary artists who practice art for art's sake. We have day jobs.

www.hardoakpress.com

A novelist has his prospective readers carefully in mind at every turn. Novels have to SELL, or else!

The relationship between artist and audience is quite complex. Kirsch does a nice job of wandering around this complexity, but Mathis seems so busy being sarcastic and dismissive of the "True Artist," or her fantasy of the "True Artist," that her essay reads like a self-justifying diatribe.

In all the words written so far, whether about publicity or marketing, the arrogance of this columnist or that, or the using of an art form for less than artistic purposes, the things which seems to have been forgotten are the 3rd and 4th words of the original question.
Too many people these days seem to equate the title of "True Artist" with someone who gets paid to do it.
I would contend that at least as many "True Artists", and probably a great deal more, are those who do it for no renumeration at all.
But the other side of that coin must be taken into account as well. Of course the TA cares what the 'audience' thinks. If s/he is truly an artist, then they have to believe not only in the truth of what they're trying to say, but also in the 'rightness' of their chosen method of delivery.
It's true that we mere mortals do need to be shaken up, and shocked out of our complacencies from time to time. But what good does it do the TA to deliver a universal truth that no one but he can understand?
The TA must believe that what they're saying is palatable.
Otherwise, why say it at all?

Title is already sexist - referring to artists in the male gender encourages and prolongs the awful discrimination against women in the art world. Shame, shame.

The joy is in the 'making.'

A “true” visual artist is anyone who creates art whether or not he or she has a motivating drive to “care.” Newbie with crayons or oldster with success in mind; the artist is a doer and creates. You either do or you don’t.

Whether using a new and first pack of Crayolas or older, in her nineties. The artist is of course seeking an audience and “cares” in (most instances) in the sense that, he or she expects an audience to be there at some point.

Care? They must care what others think, and based on the artists inner values or lack of grace, let’s say — the artist will welcome audiences with intent to curse rather than to exalt them. Care to arouse contempt and disgust (low brow) instead of exalt and bless (high brow).

Will the art’s impact on the viewer/audience be sweet or offensive? Vulgar or sublime, the artist must “ask” and answer this question, at some inner level as he busies himself with the very choices that go into making his creations.

Artists who choose ( and “care”) to shock and offend, for what is often disguise of their own, individual misanthropic “works of revenge” - forced on captive viewing audiences; for example, pathological artists will gladly shock and offend. They care to be and decide to get revenge on captive audiences. They reveal their ill will and twisted form of care in low brow ways. Exalted types choose to exalt others with sublime art.

After reading the comments of Mathis, I see arrogance, not in the idea that all creators don't need the approval of an audience, but in her comments. It would never occur to her that art can be an internal dialogue of importance to that individual, a private act, never meant for public consumption. Art doesn't have to be a public performance to be art. And to incorporate the assumption that art is only art when it is consumed by others and approved by others that has no relation to the unimportant person who made it after is is made is grotesque, as if the artist is nothing but a shell through which things flow. It is a dehumanizing approach.

In a comparison to the biological sciences, a logical question to ask is how idiosyncratic can an author's DNA probes be so that her assays do not lose contact with a large enough audience to make her art form marketable? With a very small but refined target audience, her work can be comparable to an "orphan drug," designed to remedy a rarer genetic disorder. Or, in cost/benefit terms, where does the equilibrium point exist where the artist's marginal utility from gaining additional market share becomes counterbalanced by the cost of diluting the artist's unique brand of art? And, in daily pushing out a set number of pages or words of art, which an artist must attempt to do to maintain his craftmanship, in terms of artistic prioritization or triage; how to balance a high valuation for his vital core of targeted readers under such a quota mandate, without pushing out artificial or contrived art, could easily become an obsession. A bipolar condition could develop with Ralph Ellison's path of little added work after a pluperfect artwork, juxtaposed with John Updike's many valuable and not so valuable works, at the other extreme. For example, one of Updike's later novels, "Terrorist," was described by Robert Stone in the Times as follows: "Its tensions are well calibrated ... " and "... also furthers the didactic purposes of 'Terrorist,' which seem to be its primary concern;" hopefully illustrating a case of an artist producing too utilitarian art. 6/23/2015 1:15 p Greenville NC

As a retirement gift to myself, I wanted to learn to write. One of the many magical nuggets I have discovered hidden within the art of writing is the ability through cleverly crafted words to say almost anything to anybody. On one end of the spectrum, a point of view, on the other, ' the other out there,' words brild the bridge connecting both in insubstantial space.