“…I’m in complete agreement with all those people who say, regarding movies, ‘I just want to be entertained.’ This populist position is much derided by my academic colleagues as simpleminded and unsophisticated, evidence of questionable analytical and critical acuity. But I agree with the premise, and I too just want to be entertained. That I am almost never entertained by what entertains other people who just want to be entertained doesn’t make us philosophically incompatible. It just means we shouldn’t go to movies together.”

Consider this dead horse beaten. On to other questions, like, “when will the sun shine again?”

PS: I went to a movie with John Gossage a couple of months ago.

Embarrassingly enough, I saw this quote yesterday in an in-flight magazine while flying home to upstate New York from the Pacific Northwest. I also saw a blurb from you in a travel piece about the Twin Cities in the same magazine. The two collided in my multiple time-zone-addled brain and I thought about this post you made last November on the subject of art vs entertainment.

I tend to fall on the *Gossage side of this debate in terms of how I approach and develop my projects. The few times I’ve tried to second-guess my audience (all three or four of them), I’ve ended up making my most uninspired, unimaginative work. I tend to make my best work when I think of everything as an experiment. It’s impossible to experiment when you already know the outcome.

To a large degree, I think this is a question of intent and working process and not one of final product. In terms of intent, artists always want to find an audience, but they want to find that audience on their own terms, and they would rather fail than pander. Entertainers give the audience something pre-defined, something the audience already knew they wanted. Entertainers consider audience validation a part of the success or failure of the work. Artists, on the other hand, want to give the audience something they didn’t know they wanted, something they might not know they want for another twenty years. Artists are patient, and they’re just as interested in redefining things for themselves as they are in being lauded for their efforts.

Ultimately, however, I don’t think art that aims to challenge and art that aims to entertain are mutually exclusive. (The best examples of this can be found in music and cinema.) If a revolutionary, challenging work is entertaining as hell, that aspect of its function certainly doesn’t disqualify it from being “art.” I’m thinking specifically here of a piece like “Day is Done” by Mike Kelley, which simultaneously punched me in the gut and the brain. I’m also thinking of the early music of Will Oldham, and the experience I had when I saw David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” when I was twenty years old. These examples, I think, represent the ideal. It’s art in the sense that the makers risked failure to redefine things for their audience, and it’s entertainment in the sense that they also knew how to take the audience for a joyride.

*I should qualify my allegiance to Mr. Gossage’s thinking with the fact that I’ve known him since I was an impressionable young graduate student. He has a very convincing, Svengali way about him.

Sorry about the tardy response. I have to think on things a while.

- Ron Jude

It’s a tough one, because entertainment seems to come to you while oftentimes one needs to come to the art. This is off-putting to a lot of people perhaps, but this is that gossage territory where the artist needs to see himself not as some detached alien to the culture but a participant whose views and thoughts will be recognized by his brothers and sisters. The pleasure of connecting in this way is more than just entertainment.

Infinite Jest is one of the most entertaining books I’ve ever read, but it also has kept me up at night. It seems to know too much, but it’s not dictating to me or having me coast along – in fact, it sort of violently refuses you that comfort (you’re coasting along and then BAM, you’re on the page and vunerable wherever you sit). Not because of what’s written specifically (no single quote or passage), but because it keeps you present. I feel that way about great photobooks, too. When a photographer uses this thing we think we know so well and just pops off the page with understanding you can’t explain. The pleasure and pain of it can be called entertaining, but it’s probably more than that.

I’m attracted to the romantic notion of artists working only for themselves. But if I’m honest, that has never been the case for me. I’m not content to play musique concrète in my basement. I want a stage and a rhythm section and I want the audience to dance.

But really, whatever you’re doing is certainly working for you, and if it ain’t broke…