When I was a kid, my dad had an idea that I was going to turn out funny.  How funny, he could not have known, but to this working class hero's credit, he saw I had an interest in art, and took it upon himself to cultivate it in me.  He enrolled me in art classes, brought me whatever supplies I wanted, took me to the art museum regularly, and gave me positive if pragmatic feedback on my various little projects — he was there with me from crayons on the wall to shoebox dioramas. 

Still, art is a sort of solitary sport, and when I started doing theater in high school, my dad was not amused. 

"I don't want you hanging around those theater people," he told me.

I think we all know why.  Ironically, while several of "those theater people" actually did make passes at me over the course of a couple of years I struggled through my nasty bout of the "theater bug," I was eventually deflowered by... a college wrestler.  But I don't think it was as much the deflowering that my father was afraid of — after all, what I did with the flower of my secret was my affair so long as it stayed secret — it was the "mincing and prancing" about in public that he associated with "theater types" that he wanted to avoid at all costs.  To this day I'm fairly sure my father minded less that I was gay than that I might give it away with a lispy word or wilting gesture.

But I do have to say that the couple of years I spent doing high school and community theater did convince me that while it had its moments of glory, the theater was not really for me.  Teaching provided the captive audience I craved and the stand-up comedy I enjoyed infinitely more than sharing the stage. But even that shtick got old. 

When I took up gardening some years ago, I felt I had finally found that zen thing we're all looking for, whether we always know it or not.  You know you've found it when you stop looking, though.  My garden, as humble as it is, is really another realm.  I was talking to another gardener the other day, and marveling at his garden's high-spring majesty I said, "it's your own little kingdom." 

"A grand duchy," he corrected me, showing his modesty. 

Gardening in the Fens is as good as it gets.  And as grand and wonderful as it is, there is something wonderfully colorful and yet perfectly self-contained about the gardeners there, as well.  God created gardeners first, and they alone have the tools for perfect contentedness. 

But urban gardening — community gardening — has its challenges, which I've discussed at length elsewhere — and the Fenway Victory Gardens, as the grandest community garden in Boston, also has greater challenges than most.  Foot traffic to and from the ball park is just the beginning.  Intravenous drug-users, hard-sleepers, and muddy-kneed strung-out semen-addicts we're used to.  But Monday afternoon a new threat emerged: theater people.

It was around three in the afternoon, I'd say, when a young woman came flailing down the path seemingly in real distress, except that she was screaming bloody murder in rhymed couplets that I recognized immediately from Shakespeare.  She was pursued by a gangly guy in pink, also in full-flail, imploring her in desperate iambs.  A little ways off a group of twenty or so students was gathered watching with smug little smirks as the young woman grabbed a passerby, shook him imploringly, shrieking Shakespeare at him while he looked on in stammering confusion to the amusement of the crowd.

Clearly satisfied with the effect, she tossed the interloper aside and flailed further down the path, bouncing off fences and banging and rattling on garden gates, screaming bloody murder all the while.  By now people all over the gardens had stopped what they were doing to see what was going on.  This only fueled her fake hysteria and the pleasure of her classmates at being in on a joke they gathered onlookers hadn't yet grasped. 

Next she flew down another path, shoving my elderly, nearly blind neighbor to the side, pursued by the boy, who tripped over her dog and sent it running for cover.  The two flailed off, screaming hysterical verse, while the old woman was left to collect herself and call after her dog despairingly. 

The scene ended shortly thereafter under an oak in the interior, the two actors bowing to the applause of their peers, who had followed them down the narrow paths.  But it left me puzzling over the precise point of the exercise.  Like a lot of contemporary art, it seemed  like an outward display of insularity.  The pleasure for the participants seemed to be in the earnest alarm and annoyance the performance provoked in the yokels all around them.  It was less art than assault.

I'm well aware that there is a school of modern aesthetics that places the highest value on eliciting alarm and annoyance in the general public.  But as I have said elsewhere...

I don't think you have to be a crusty old conservative to see that annoyance is not "a great emotional response"  — not in the sense of large or significant. And that to be pleased at such a response, whatever else it may be a mark of (low expectations, lack of standards), is certainly a mark of an "adolescent temperament."

The source of annoyance does not really engage us. It may confront us, but the tension is easily diffused: annoyance is like a stink in the room: it's alleviated when the source of annoyance is no longer present. Neither is annoyance an "emotion" that is difficult to produce.

To prove that last point, please turn your speakers to full-blast and follow me here. 

It's that easy.

When we are reduced to seeing art as a means to annoy in a culture where almost everything is already annoying — I'm struggling to see how art provides any alternative or real insight.  And art that presumes that its audience's deepest emotion is annoyance is really little more than a tepid attempt at insult. We shrug it off and move on, unfazed.

Art should embrace and enlarge our experience. It certainly can be painful. When Kafka says "A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul" he's not speaking of the irritation we feel at an insect bite. When Rilke marvels at the message of a broken Greek sculpture — "You must change your life" — he is not talking about his underwear. What they are getting at is what is real.  What is really real.  That's what art does.  That's why it's scary, why it pierces us, why it moves us and gives us a glimpse of a soul realer than our selves.

The likes of Martin Creed, with his lights going on and off, on the other hand, are rehashing an insular art-world argument that was settled at the birth of the modern era.  The cynicism is compressed and sedimented, layers deep by now. It's an inside joke among artists, curators and critics that everyone else got long ago. 

You want the Cliffs Notes version of Modern Art all you have to do is look at Van Gogh.  The narrative has to do with artists' brief, vaunted role as outsiders and misfits, often unknowing critics of capitalism, and their eventual co-optation and absorption into the very system that crushed them. Van Gogh, who had lived in poverty, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, his last words: "La tristesse durera toujours" — "the sadness will last forever".  A hundred years later his painting Irises sold for $53 million.

If Van Gogh typifies modern art, Warhol is the poster-boy for postmodern art.  But even his coyly ironic collusion with consumerism seems quaint to us now. What is left for artists conscious of their collusion with capitalism is to close ranks and to trace smaller and smaller circles that divide the us from the them.  Art becomes an exercise in identification and affiliation, mimicking consumerism's dialectic of false dichotomies we call demographics.  Facile provocation for a reaction serves to delineate the us and them that is the fundament of our society and culture. 

In other words, while on the surface much of contemporary art seems counter-cultural in, say, its rebellion against beauty or its strained politics, it is, nudge-nudge-wink-wink, playing by the very rules it superficially reviles.  And artists crave validation from the very institutions whose legitimacy they ostensibly reject.  Those institutions in turn certify the artistic rebellion du jour. 

Not to dwell, but Martin Creed is praised by the establishment that sponsors and promotes his work for rudely outing the cynicism of the establishment that sponsors and promotes his work.  Creed is a nihilist.  His art is all negation.  This makes it the perfect complement to a system that, as we have recently seen, creates value from nothing.  His oeuvre is an object lesson in junk bond capitalism.

The value of his works to the establishment is in the power relations they depict:  the impotence of the rudest gesture against the all-powerful commodifying forces of capitalism.  But in the end Creed's work and much of what we call contemporary art is not really art at all, but criticism.  We should make the distinction because both are valuable but have different functions.

So, hmm.  Back to The Great Fenway Theater Offensive of 2009.  I didn't sense any generosity in the gesture. I wasn't feeling the love. In fact, part of the point seemed to be a grand display of disregard.  While the fledgling actors were breaking through the fourth wall, there was no intention to engage an audience outside of themselves, except as props.  And yet, implicit in the public display was the validation an unknowing and unwilling audience would provide. 

This seems to sum up not only contemporary art, but the paradox of the contemporary personality itself: conscious disregard of others coupled with a need for the validation of their rejection.  It's like this young couple on the T from a few years back:

A proud mama and papa with a baby in a pram. Papa had a green Mohawk and was wearing a wicked gnarly leather jacket with the inscription “Stink of Oblivion” or something in Gothic script on it, with green flames and ghouls all over it. I noticed Mama first because she had several tattoos. On her face. People. Please. Later when I saw papa, he did, too, of course. I mean, obviously they met at the tattoo parlor. It was love at first sight. “I knew he was the one for me when I saw that spiderweb tattoo on his chin and ‘Rot in Hell’ written across his forehead!” She had a tattooed teardrop under her left eye. She was also wearing his cock-ring though her nose.

Everyone tried to ignore them, and rightly so. People who impose their face-tattoos on the rest of us should be ignored. I mean, they’re not the ones who have to look at them. We are. And then they have these looks on their faces, like, “why is everyone staring at us—what is everyone looking at?” AT YOUR FRIGGIN FACE TATTOOS. WHAT DO YOU THINK? I mean, don’t go out and get your face tattooed and act all surprised people are staring at you, some in horror, some in disgust or amusement. You brought it on yourself. No sympathy.

In a society of co-opted subcultures part of tribal affiliation is rejection by those unaffiliated with the tribe.  The lengths we have to go to provoke the rejection we need to validate our affiliations obviously increase as society greets greater and greater provocations with a big fat so-the-fuck-what? 

Whenever I argue with artists about art, they always assume an insidious conservatism that allows them to dismiss criticism.  And if humanism is an outdated mode of thinking and seeing that I am clinging to then maybe they're right.  But life is always shutting us down.  Art should open us up.  It does this by acknowledging and honoring the mystery of the otherness that binds us one to another. 

When art ceases to respect the otherness of its audience, when it ceases to invite them to partake in the alienation we all feel, it ceases to be art and becomes everyday life.