In reviewing the photographic work of Ren Hang, the Chinese photographer and poet, who ended his life earlier this year, I realized that each of his photographs is a visual poem—much in the same way that the late poet/songwriter/composer/performer Leonard Cohen’s songs were poetry. Note that here I am using the secondary definition of poetry: “a quality of beauty and intensity of emotion regarded as characteristic of poems.” And those characteristics are specifically, “a concentrated awareness of experience” created with elements “arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm.”

One often hears about the poetry of a Tennessee Williams play, or the poetry of a particular ballerina, or the visual poetry of any number of painters and photographers. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the iconographic work in every genre of art, indeed in every sub-genre, is poetic in nature, i.e. they have some sort of concentrated awareness, the elements of which are arranged to work intricately with each other to generate a specific emotional or intellectual response.

A simplistic explanation would be that the “poetic” artist is simply following the Principles of Design. Although sources provide many different lists of these principles, the Getty list is a solid one and lists nine principles of design: balance, emphasis, movement, pattern, repetition, proportion, rhythm, variety, and unity. And yes, these principles do contribute to poetic possibilities of a work of art.

But that’s not enough. Many artists work to use all nine elements in their work, and that work (including poetry itself) may qualify as “good” or even “very good,” but it never quite rises to the level of poetry that I am talking about. We have all seen plays, movies, dance productions, paintings, photographs, sculptures, and have heard songs, concerts, readings that, upon analysis, did use all of the principles of design, but only a few reach that iconic level that I am calling poetry.

The question is why. If all the pieces are there, what prevents the work from reaching its absolute potential? The answer, I think, is all of those elements must not only be there, but must be interconnected and work together—along with form and content—like the wheels and cogs in an intricate mechanical device. Indeed these elements must be melded together integrally so that it is almost impossible for the viewer to isolate any one individual part. This fusion of all the components of the piece creates a beauty that is larger than the sum of the parts.

And that is what we who claim to be artists are trying to do—make work that transcends the components that we manipulate to create the work. And even though the Ren Hangs and Tennessee Williamses and Leonard Cohens make it look easy, it isn’t. (And if you dig, you‘ll discover it wasn’t easy for them either.) But, like them, we want our work to be the best it can be, and that requires constant effort and self-evaluation. But with effort, we too can make work that may not be perfect, but is certainly poetry.

Rita Dove is not only a woman who writes amazing poetry, she is the second African-American to win a Pulitzer prize for poetry and the youngest person ever to be named United States Poet Laureate. Moreover, she has received 25 honorary doctorates as well as a host of other prestigious awards. If you look on the internet, you can find a number of quotes that are attributed to her.

Most of those quotes have to do with things other than art, but there are a few that do, and those few describe an approach to art that would benefit almost any artist. Her art, of course, is poetry, but you do not have to be a poet to apply her words. Just substitute your own art or arts whenever she refers to poetry and you will see why what she has to say is important.

Concerning her creative goals, she says, “All I ever wanted to do was write the best damn poem that I could write – a poem that was true and honest and the very best I could write artistically and linguistically.” What could be a better goal for an artist? Work that is true and honest and the very best that one can create both artistically and mechanically is all any of us could strive for. How many of us have gone to our theatres or computers or studios and done work that was maybe just a little less than true and honest? Or perhaps, on an off day, we did not do the best that we could either artistically or mechanically or both. If so, maybe our own creative goals could stand a little re-examination.

Continuing on the subject of truth, she finds it important to be true to oneself and recognizes that in doing that, the artist is being true to a much larger constituency. She says, “Being true to yourself really means being true to all the complexities of the human spirit.” Because (1) we are all connected and (2) the complex being that is us reflects all those complexities that make up humanity, in being true to ourselves, we cannot but make more empathetic, more complex, or more truthful art.

Dove says this of her approach to creating: “Every time I sit down to write, I try to feel that I’m starting over. It’s all new. It’s all fresh, and I’m learning as we go.” And “I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.” How better to make art? Every project in brand new and fresh. The artist makes discoveries and learns both artistically and personally as he/she creates. This does not mean, of course, that the artist does not bring all his/her experience and learning to the project. But if the project is to be more than a recycling of old ideas and formulas and means of expression, it must be new and fresh and full of discovery. Otherwise the work is, in the words of Konstantin Stanislavski, imitative art or worse, hack work, and who wants to be associated with that?

So, perhaps if we were to follow Dove’s advice about creative goals and being true to ourselves, as well as adopting her approach to creation, we might find that our work is more honest, more reflective of us, fresher, more innovative—better.

When I was an undergraduate, I had an English professor who said that the accomplished student of literature should be able to read a poem and separate the quality of the work and whether or not it was personally appealing. The implications, of course, were that not all poetry is created equal and that liking something has nothing to do with whether it is good or not.

This has not been a popular position in the postmodern world, where all work is pretty much equal. And although postmodernism is, according to some, dead, it left a legacy. Daniel C. Dennett has said, “Postmodernism, the school of ‘thought’ that proclaimed ‘There are no truths, only interpretations’ has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for ‘conversations’ in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.”

And as elevated as the egalitarianism of postmodernism sounds, most of us who work in the arts know that it simply isn’t true. There is good acting and bad acting, good directing and not-so-good directing, good writing and bad writing. There are, in fact, qualitative differences in the performing arts. And other arts are no different. Given that, the problem is articulating what constitutes good art and less good art, and that, in turn, requires that we be able to distinguish art from non-art.

Although many have attempted this, novelist Leo Tolstoy is one of the few who not only distinguished art from non-art, but articulated the conditions which determine the qualitative levels of art. Tolstoy collected his views in a book called What is Art? It is not an easy read. Fortunately, Maria Popova has summarized and presented Tolstoy’s ideas in a recent posting to Brain Pickings. Essentially, Tolstoy said that art is a union between the artist and viewer or receiver of the art that allows the receiver to feel and experience the feelings and experiences that the artist put into the work. Additionally, this union works not only in one era, but across time and cultures. He says that what distinguishes real art is the presence of this infectiousness.

He goes on to say that the stronger the infection, the better the art, and that the degree of quality is dependent on three conditions:

1. The individuality of the feeling being transmitted. (More is better.)
2. The clarity of the expression. (Clearer is better.)
3. And the sincerity of the artist. (Sincere is better.) This is the most important condition.

Sincerity in Tolstoy’s view is what gives art it’s power and is the source of its infectiousness: “The chief peculiarity of this feeling is that the receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not someone else’s — as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express. A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.”

Whether or not we fully agree with Tolstoy, or even understand him, most of us instinctively know that all art is not created equal. There is excellent work and there is crap, and there are all sorts of levels in between. Most of us know that. It’s time that we quit pretending that it’s all about individual expression and acknowledge that Tolstoy has a point. Art is not just a matter of preference.

A friend of mine teaches high school English. This past week she was teaching poetry and had a student who was rather vocal about the silliness of poetry and how it was hard to read and why would you want to anyway. She asked him to read a part of a poem aloud and then suggested that he read to the punctuation rather than to the end of the line.  He did so. She said that she could literally see the light bulb going off. His assessment? “It makes so much more sense when you read it that way.” Now he got it. Poetry had become cool. It would never have been so without that small amount of education.

Having even a small amount of education about a work of art is not absolutely necessary for appreciation. The unlettered serf during the middle ages could appreciate a cathedral because of its size and grandeur, but think how much more there is to appreciate once you have educated yourself beyond “big and impressive.” If you know something of architecture, of art, of religious iconography, the architectural work can speak to you on more levels. And if you know even more, it is likely that it can speak to you on many more levels.

But do you really have to know something about the medium itself to appreciate the work? It may not be absolutely necessary, but it doesn’t hurt. I sometimes teach a course in the development of the motion picture. More than one student has told me after they completed the course that it changed the way they look at movies. Now that they have some idea about how film is put together and some background, they have developed a different perspective that allows them an appreciation that is both deeper and broader.

And what is true for poetry and architecture and film is also true for any art. The more knowledgeable you are about cultural history and art, and perhaps aesthetics, the better able are you to appreciate a work on more than the superficial level.

And, of course, if you are an artist, the more you know, the more layered and complex you can make your work, even if that occurs on a subconscious level. Just as mastery of the techniques of your medium allow you to create more complicated, more challenging works, so general knowledge gives you more to draw from and informs your work, allowing it to have a richness of meaning and operate on multiple levels at once.

Essentially, the more you know, the more you can do and the more you can enjoy—or not: the more you know the easier it is to spot crap. And that, even though it might reduce your enjoyment of certain work, is wholly positive. Artistic value is often assigned by what the work brings at auction or in the marketplace, and many times what passes for “good art” is really just one-dimensional junk.

You don’t have to have a degree in art either to make good art or enjoy it fully. The student in the opening story didn’t need a year’s study in poesy to appreciate a poem, just a better way to approach it. Having knowledge can help you better understand a piece of art.

The next step, of course, is the development of taste.

The Domino Project, founded by Seth Godin, is about reimagining publishing in the twenty-first century.  Last week under the title Why publish poetry? The Domino Project introduced Sarah Kay to those of us who hadn’t heard of her.  Living up to the idea of using new media to spread ideas, the posting included a YouTube video of Sarah Kay at TED, where she earned not one but two standing ovations. Her presentation was a demonstration of her first love, spoken word poetry, followed by a talk about making spoken word poetry.

Kay, it turns out, is not only a remarkable poet, but has taken it as her mission to teach and encourage others to make spoken word poetry. The majority of her presentation was about this aspect of her career. As I listened to her, I realized that what she was saying not only applied to spoken word poetry, but to any creative undertaking, irrespective of the medium. And it is valuable advice—probably as important as her poetry.

Kay notes that her poems are for her a way of learning and “figuring things out;” I think this approach to creating may be true of a number of artists. She says that artists should bring all they know to bear on the project at hand, “gathering up all the knowledge and experience you’ve collected up to now to help you dive into the things you don’t know.” Of herself, she says, “I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else I’ve been.”

A second thing that Kay teaches is how to get to the poem. She uses a list-making exercise as a springboard for creativity. This exercise often takes the form, “list of 10 things you know to be true” or, in one case, “list of 10 things you should have learned by now.” One has the feeling that she has hundreds of list possibilities. In any case, the lists can be compared to the lists of others, or simply used as a way to discover an interesting story or idea, which in this case, can result in an interesting poem, or for those of us who are not poets (yet), an interesting painting or play or photograph or dance or sculpture or novel. It is truly an inspired creative tool, even for those who, like one of Kay’s students, think they don’t have anything interesting to say.

Another thing that Kay believes and tries to pass along to others is her belief that each artist is unique. “I’m trying to tell stories only I can tell.”  Then she combines the ideas of utilizing things you know to be true and allowing yourself to be unique. She says this of one of her students, Charlotte: “By putting the things she knows to be true into the work she’s doing, she can created poems that only Charlotte can write.”

All you have to do is take that statement, change the pronouns to “I,” change “poems” to whatever your art is, plug in your name instead of Charlotte’s, and you have a mantra that you can live by, at least artistically speaking.

Kay’s last piece of advice for artists is one that we have all heard before: “grow and explore and take risks.” But you have the feeling that when Kay says it, she not only means it, she lives by it. Perhaps we too can use her words to guide our artistic lives.

G. K. Chesterton said, “Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.” Frame has a number of meanings, but they all carry with them the idea of limitation.

First, of course, is the literal meaning of frame. Look at frameless images of paintings on the internet or in books and then examine the same paintings framed and hanging in a museum.  Aside from the difference of being in the presence of the real thing, you will find that the framed image actually looks different from the unframed one.

The impact of framing can be seen in something as simple as deciding what mat board and frame to put around a print. The mat and the frame so modify the image that many fine art photographers and print-makers demand only white mats and the simplest frames surround their images. For the same reason, many contemporary painters show their work sans frame.

The second meaning has to do with what is included within the boundaries of an image. Photographer Gary Winogrand said, “Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put 4 edges around some facts, you change those facts.” John Sexton also talked about edges: “And then as I frequently do, some times I’ll peek out from underneath the focusing cloth and just look around the edges of the frame that I’m not seeing, see if there’s something that should be adjusted in terms of changing the camera position.

This notion applies not only to still photography. Martin Scorsese has said, “Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.” And that is the essence of the matter for all arts. What is incorporated and what is left out determine what the art work is and what the art work is about. So framing is really editing: deciding what is to be included and what is to be excluded. It is a problem with which every artist is familiar, and perhaps one of the more difficult things to do in any art.

And third there is the idea of frame meaning the framework or the structure of the piece. Organizing the information of the artwork into a structure alters the facts of the art work. Again, as Winogrand commented, “putting four edges around a collection of information or facts transforms it.”

We can see this in nearly every art. The “wrapping,” the form of the piece transforms and controls the content of the piece. The ideas contained in some of Shakespeare’s sonnets is also are also found in some of his plays, but how different the experiences of reading a sonnet and watching a play are.

This is true even within a genre; one can find many different poets who tackle the same subjects, yet organize their poetry into different formats, which, in turn, modifies the meaning, creating unique experiences for their readers. Compare any of the first-person novels of Kazuo Ishiguro and the first-person novel The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen. Yes, there is a difference in material, but, more importantly, there is a great difference in the framing of the novels in question. Consequently, the novels impact the reader in very different ways.

Even a thing as simple as deciding where to put the act breaks in a play can significantly change the experience, if not the meaning of the play. Ask any producer who has tried to squeeze a three-act play into two acts with a single intermission.

So the issue of frames becomes not only how a piece of art is framed and the nature of that frame, but what the artist puts in and what he/she leaves out of the piece. And it also includes how that material is arranged and formatted. It’s an area of art that is discussed very little, but one that should be.

This was the week to read the journals of the students in the acting class I am teaching. They are asked to write every day of the semester something related to acting. The task is intentionally broad and has a number of purposes: to get them into the habit of thinking about their art every day, to provide them with the opportunity to verbalize ideas about acting and theatre, to provide a safe vehicle through which they can communicate thoughts they might not otherwise express. (Nobody except the writer and me reads the journals).

Going through the journals is always an interesting exercise. One of the things that I find is that there is direct correlation between the quality of work that the students do in class and the complexity and frequency of the thoughts that they put into the journal. Another thing that I find is that there are, particularly among those who are not yet fully committed to any of the arts, a number of statements that run something like, “I didn’t get a chance to think about acting today because [fill in excuse here].”

It is fairly well documented that successful artists are thinking about art, if not all the time, certainly every day. They may not be thinking about their artistic specialty, but sometime during the day, ideas about art, or their practice, or art business, or some aspect of art will have play in their minds. Some, like Minor White, try to make this a habit; he said, “I am always mentally photographing everything as practice.” Others just recognize it as habitual. Many have no choice; they can’t not think about art.

Reading journals this week set me to wondering how many of us who consider ourselves practicing artists make the same justifications for not at least thinking about art or our art practices on a daily basis. As these acting students will attest, it’s hard to keep your art on your mind every day; there are other things to do. And for us who are no longer formal students it is no different; there are a thousand other things that demand our attention: families, bills, chores, day jobs, and the list goes on and on. For some it is not situations that divert them from art, but mental or physical states: exhaustion, frustration, depression, anxiety, love, physical pain or disability. The distractors are manifold.

We can’t presume that those who are “successful” in the art world are living lives without all of those same distractors. All practicing artists have physical bodies and lives that are not perfect. Regardless of our situation, and we have to deal with it and keep making our art. Susan Holland makes this point very clearly in her blog “When Life Gives you Lemons…Paint!” on Empty Easel. Holland says that when life “kills the motivation to create,” the artist should “paint about it.”

The advice holds for any artist, of course. When life gets too painful or too distracting or simply in the way, incorporate it into your acting, or your directing, or your photography, or your novel, or your poetry, or your dance, or your music, or your choreography, or your sculpture. Use it. That’s what all those artists you admire have done. Think how disordered their lives are/were. Theirs, like ours, are/were messy and imperfect, but they have managed to create art anyway, sometimes even masterpieces.

If they can do it, we can do it too. If we are to call ourselves artists, we must.

Denis Dutton in The Art Instinct argues that in fiction there is a “communicative transaction between reader and author.” Citing Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author,” Hazel Dooney presents a very different view, maintaining that “a creator’s role is to produce and neither to explain nor to try to control the response to their work. It’s the reader (or viewer or listener) who gives it meaning through their individual interpretation,” a notion which is also explained here.

While I cannot argue with Dutton’s assertion that the author is “trying to control the show—the interpretation of characters, their actions, and the events that befall them,” I must agree with Dooney when she says “Even if people understand the concept of a work, their interpretations and deeper, emotional responses are always at a remove from the creator’s.”  My experience is that both are correct.

For example, in a recent rehearsal of a musical, an associate and I were discussing how an actress rendered a particular song. He was struck by the intensity of the piece while I was concerned that she had missed the feeling of the piece entirely, and, being the director, made a note to correct the problem. For a time I was convinced that our differences were caused by our differing functions on the show, but I came to realize that it was just that we, because of our different experiences, backgrounds, and internal reference materials, had interpreted what we saw very differently.

I have experienced similar reactions with audience members. Sometimes I am able to see their point of view and sometimes I wonder what show they have seen, because it wasn’t the same show that I saw, and it certainly wasn’t the one that I directed.

So what has all of this got to do with anything? All that holds true for fiction according to Dutton and Barthes and all that holds true for theatre according to my experience holds true for all arts. We make photographs and paintings and sculptures and collages and write haikus and novels and short stories and we have no idea how they will be received. We have no clue whether our audience will “get it” or not. We will attempt, in Dutton’s words, “by persuading, manipulating, wheedling, planting hints, adopting a tone” to control the audience’s response. We will fail.

There are simply too many factors outside our ability to control. There is all the stuff going on in the audience’s mind when they encounter our work. There is the experience of the audience, their education, their belief structure, their aesthetic. There is all of that and more. There are ins and outs and corners and nuances that we could not possibly know about or plan for when we built our art.

And no clever titles, explanations, artist statements, biographies, statements of philosophies will ever convey to them exactly the interpretation that we think they ought to give our work. Dooney has said that’s not our job, and she’s right.

We make our art and it is what it is. No matter how much we try to “control the show,” we will always fall short. That doesn’t mean that we should stop trying. It just means that we must recognize that the audience brings its own baggage to the party. Our work will always be viewed through someone else’s filters, interpreted in ways that we cannot imagine. Things we have been careful to insert will be missed; things we had not consciously intended will be seen. It will always be so.

The best that we can do is to continue working to create our visions, to manipulate the materials so as to minimize misunderstanding, to make our work sufficiently clear that our message is unmistakable. Then stand out of the way.

Yesterday afternoon I was reminded of one of the skills of a stage director that seldom gets noticed or discussed: deciding the how and when of giving specific notes to actors. For the words you say to actors to be maximally effective, ideas have to be couched in the right phraseology and then timed right. You have to know when to cajole, when to confront, when to use humor, when to be severe. It’s a thing that most directors do instinctively, although sometimes I find myself calculating so as to have the most impact. It is also a thing that is never, to my knowledge, taught in directing classes. Most of us learn by trial and error that developing these skills will allow us to become better directors and produce better shows.

This conversation caused me to start wondering how many things there are that fall into this same category: skills that are never taught in formal training and are hardly ever noticed or mentioned. Every once in a while you will run across a reference to something that “was not taught in art school” or “is never discussed in a seminar on photography” or was never explored in any teaching/learning environment, but not often.

For example, I know from experience that order in processing images matters, that  performing individual adjustments to an image in a certain sequence makes the process easier to control than doing it another way, yet no one, it seems, teaches that. I am sure that in every art there are skills and procedures that are analogous to image processing and giving notes.

So the question is, how do these untaught things impact us? And the answer is that they are elements of style. The way that you talk to actors, the way that you process images, the way that you handle the clay, the order in which you assemble phrases, the way that you layer the paint are pieces that, when assembled with other pieces, comprise your personal style. Aside from your vision and your subject matter, it’s what separates you from all the other directors and photographers and ceramicists and poets and painters. It’s part of what makes your art unique.

These untaught things may not influence the way that you see the world, but they certainly impact the way you express what you see. The fact that they are evolved rather than learned is reason your style develops rather than appearing full-blown when you begin your art career. Every day that you work adds to your experience which adds to your style. The things that you develop yourself, whether they are built on a foundation of formal schooling, apprenticeship, or self-education, become part of the work that you do, become part of your style, become part of your art. As Berenice Abbott has put it, “You have to evolve on your own.”

And these untaught things may be the most important part of your art, the part that makes your art distinctive, the part that makes your disparate works form a cohesive whole. Hans Hofmann said that a work of art “is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist’s world.” Your style is, in large part, responsible for that reflection, for the delineation of your artistic world. No matter what you have learned from others, your style, that you have evolved yourself, is what defines your art.

Censorship has been a big topic lately in the art world. First there was the situation at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery involving a 4 minute portion of a film by David Wojnarowicz and the disapproval of the religious right.  Martin E. Sullivan, the museum’s director said that the offending film was removed in order to protect the rest of the exhibit. Then in Los Angeles, there was the whitewashing of the wall art of the Italian street artist Blu instigated not by any political body, but by the curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art who said that the art in question was insensitive, given its proximity to a VA hospital and war memorial.

In both instances the reasons given were not accepted by bloggers and pundits. Cries of “No censorship!” were heard throughout the land. Instead of being swayed by the opinions of the internet writers, I tried instead to gather the facts and decide if the logic put forward by curators was valid.  Would the wall in Los Angeles really have offended veterans and their families? Would that have been a bad thing, or does that matter? Did removing Wojnarowicz’s piece from Hide/Seek in Washington really save the rest of the exhibit from further censorship?  Was it worth it? There is really no way to know.

Theatrical producers have always made these sorts of judgments: if they exceed the audience’s expectation by too much or fall short of audience expectation by too much, ticket sales dwindle, so producers bring to the stage plays that fall into that “acceptable” range of audience appeal.

The American film industry followed suit over a century ago, and chose self-censorship as the best option available. The MPPC, through its National Board of Censorship decided that if the movie industry could successfully censor itself, the government would not. They were right.

There are other examples.  Galleries and museums hire curators to decide what to collect and display and what not. That’s what curators do, and unless there is public controversy, they do it quietly and efficiently, and sometimes artfully. This is nothing more than institutional censorship in the person of the curator.

Sometimes, however, outside influences intervene; Cynthia Freeland in her book, Is it Art? notes, “But if a corporation is funding an exhibit, museum directors and curators may feel restricted in what kinds or art can and cannot be shown.”  We all know this, but it’s the way art is exhibited, so we say nothing.

Editing is used to shape the final version of the story, novel, poem, collection of images. This, you say, is not censorship; this is editing; it’s different. But is it? Editing, by definition, includes “selection…correction…and other modification,” deciding what to leave in, what to leave out. It’s just curation on a smaller scale.

Even before our work gets to an editor, we self-edit, that is we self-censor. We decide which images to show and which to throw away. We censor ourselves for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes those reasons can be less than artistic: “That won’t sell.” “This is not representative of the niche I am trying to establish.” “This will confuse potential collectors.” Sometimes there are other issues; consider Charles Darwin: “It took him a long time to publish his ideas, mainly because he was afraid of being attacked as an atheist.”

Some would argue that we should be afraid of nothing, that we should eschew self-censorship as much as outside censorship. I have to disagree. Not all of our product is of the highest quality. We must edit our output in order to exhibit only what we deem worthy of show. Self-censorship is part of the artistic process; it helps define who we are as artists. Indeed, self-censorship is the only valid censorship.