STARVING ARTISTS 101

A Workshop for Ontologically Impoverished Creatives

The Comic Muse Academy Proudly Presents…

STARVING ARTISTS 101

A Workshop for Ontologically Impoverished Creatives

Instructor: Dr. Daniel McInerny

Time & Location: regularly at danielmcinerny.substack.com

Spring 2024

COURSE SYNOPSIS

The aim of this workshop is to awaken artists, art lovers, and miscellaneous “creatives” to the possibility of their ontological impoverishment. What is “ontological impoverishment”? Simply: a paucity of being (ontos in the ancient Greek); an alarming “thinning out” of reality; an inability or perhaps even refusal to contend with the self’s fascinating but too often frustrating attempts to make itself sovereign by blocking itself from the world beyond the self—with the result that the substance of one’s art, and indeed one’s own substance, is gravely diminished. The workshop is aimed both at Beginning Students, i.e., those who have just begun to realize their impoverishment (if only by feeling a certain nausea after bingeing an entire season of their favorite Netflix series); and Intermediate Students, i.e., those who have achieved a certain expertise, and perhaps even financial success, in making the puppets that cast shadows on the wall of Plato’s Cave. As this is a workshop, students must be prepared for those who have already managed to escape their ontological impoverishment to come down and release them from their bondage, turn them around, and drag them (most likely by the hair) kicking and screaming up the rough, steep path to freedom. 3 credits.

PREREQUISITES

Anyone may join the workshop. But artists/creatives/lovers of the arts who have experienced a certain transcendence in the making or enjoyment of art, only to come crashing down again when that art has proved itself incapable of sustaining that transcendence, are preferred, and will be given pride of place.

STRUCTURE OF THE WORKSHOP

Unit 1: What Is Art, and How Is It Possible That Jeff Koons Makes a Living At It?

It is often said that art is a matter of emotional expression. Does this explain why the Renaissance happened among Italians, and why northern Minnesota is not the Paris of the Midwest? The workshop will debate which emotion Michelangelo was feeling while supine on his scaffolding painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling: (a) Awe? (b) Anger at the pope for being behind in his payments? (c) Irritation at the nagging pain in his lower lumbar region? Aristotle thought art was not emotional expression but an imitation of nature. Bob Ross, after all, painted forests and lakes. But then again, it doesn’t seem natural to want to paint like Bob Ross.

Classic conundrums related to the definition of art will animate this part of the workshop. Such as: If a work of art falls down in a forest, and one person thinks it’s beautiful and another doesn’t, does it make a sound?

Further: If there is no such thing as bad art, how do we explain what’s on the walls of our hotels?

And finally: If an AI is capable of creating popular music, is it also capable, like the Beatles and Bob Dylan, of going through a “religious phase”?

UNIT 2: Why Do Human Beings Watch Netflix—Especially Now with Commercials?

This unit begins with the apparently uncontroversial observation that cats have no myths. Cats, unlike humans, do not sit in the family room on Saturday nights watching other cats in costume pretending to be other cats. Unless Cats is the movie of choice. Or unless we humans have gone to bed and missed it. But those possibilities aside, why do we human beings watch pictures of ourselves? Is it because just looking at one another for two hours is an experience too awful to contemplate? What are we looking for in all those works of the imagination? And why, moreover, do we read or watch the same story over and over again? Are we hoping a different ending will magically appear? Would we be excited, or rather disappointed, if it did?

Marx’s famous question, whether beauty is in the eye of the shareholder, will be discussed.

UNIT 3: Why Didn’t Trollope Call Himself a “Creative,” or, How to Make a Packet Running Your Own MFA in Creative Writing

Every morning the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope would rise early, have his man bring him a cup of coffee, and then write for 2-3 hours, producing 250 words of prose every 15 minutes—all before going off to his job at the post office (where he sold 3 books of stamps every 15 minutes). With this routine, over the course of 38 years, Trollope published 47 novels, 18 works of non-fiction, 12 short stories, two plays, and an assortment of articles and letters. Question: What might Trollope have produced if his man had brought him a double espresso every 15 minutes? Question: Why didn’t Trollope call himself a “creative”? Was he shy? Did he not want to come off as pretentious? Was he too busy writing? Morever, why didn’t anyone use the word “creative” until, approximately, 2005? And why is the paradigm of the creative so characteristic of the self-understanding of late modernity?

This unit will feature a Creative Writing Lab in which, over blank laptop screens, students will have the chance to express their anxiety over “not being creative.”    

UNIT 4: What Is the Significance of Primitive Art and/or Taylor Swift?

Researchers tell us that the kind of prehistoric cave art that has been discovered at places like Peche Merle and Lascaux (some of which is nearly 30,000-years-old) seems to be symbolic and perhaps even religious (shamanistic?) in character. Reflecting on such cave art, G.K. Chesterton observed: “Art is the signature of man.” Granting that Chesterton never witnessed Christo wrapping an entire island, this unit will nonetheless be devoted to asking what it means to say that art is man’s signature. Sub-topics will include: Do chimpanzees create art, or at least art installations? Is the art that students draw on the walls of their own dwellings symbolic and perhaps even religious (shamanistic?) in character? And why, for that matter, do fans of Taylor Swift call themselves “Swifties”? Are they identifying as a tribe like the cave dwellers of Peche Merle and Lascaux, and if so, then do Taylor Swift concerts possess some strange shamanistic significance?

Other, more metaphysical, questions will be pursued en plein air.

MID-TERM EXERCISE

In this single class period students will compose a 60,000-word draft of a supernatural thriller (those finishing before the bell will be allowed to leave). The plot must involve the hero or heroine journeying through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, and in the novel’s final line achieving a glimpse of the Beatific Vision.

FIELD TRIPS

The workshop will take one field trip to the art museum. (Students who do not leave the gift shop and actually look at the art for at least 10 minutes will be docked half a letter grade.) As we meander through the rooms of the museum, we will ponder the perennial question: Why didn’t Raphael or Giotto or Meatloaf put his work in a museum? Why weren’t there museums in the Renaissance? Where did all those Cinquecento Italians put their art—and where did they buy t-shirts and coffee mugs with images on them of the Mona Lisa?  

FINAL ESSAY TOPICS

As a culmination of the workshop, students will be asked to write a five-paragraph essay on one of the following topics:

1.      The ancient Athenians enjoyed their drama within the context of a religious festival. But after seeing a play (often a staged adaptation of a 90s Disney movie), 21^st-century theatergoers go out for a drink or even a midnight breakfast. Discuss.

2.     If aliens freshly arrived on earth were to examine the Catholic churches built in the late 60s and 70s, is it possible they would think that we Earthlings worship pizza, given the uncanny resemblance between these structures and pizza restaurants? Explain your answer with pictorial reference to at least three pizza restaurants.

3.     If Andy Warhol’s faux Brillo Boxes are art, are real Brillo Boxes faux art?   

MANDATORY COURSE READING

Plato, Republic

Aristotle, Poetics

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos

Surprisingly, given the ontological thinness of the participants, this workshop is filling up fast, so register today!

*** The touching image of Plato’s Cave, by 4edges, is used under a Creative Commons license, and may or may not challenge your way of looking at reality.