Do What I Like, Not What You Like

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I'm not exactly sure why this news story should break me out of my writing doldrums, but a few days ago Steve Martin was hosted by the 92nd Street Y, where he was interviewed by art critic, historian, and etc. Deborah Solomon. The place was sold out, 900 people paying $50 a pop, plus this conversation was streamed on the internet. The topic was art, and art history, both of which have been a, let's say, major league hobby of Martin's for decades now, and are also the subject of his new novel An Object of Beauty, which had been released just days prior to the 92nd Street Y gig. So that's what they talked about. You can read about the ensuing controversy more completely here, but basically what happened is the paying audience, or anyway a portion of that audience (probably an important point, actually), both in person and on-line, did not much like the fact that Steve Martin was talking about art -- not to mention his fucking novel -- and not about what it was like making The Lonely Guy, or what he thought the Festrunk brothers might be like now, in this modern world of 2010, or whatever it is they wanted for their fifty bucks. They so disliked this that they registered their unhappiness right then, as the conversation progressed, via e-mails to the 92nd Street Y, and, I'm assuming, through hissed whispers to that venue's staff.
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More alarmingly, the higher-ups in that staff agreed that this art talk must not be allowed to continue and went so far as to pass a note -- again, all while Martin and Solomon were conducting the talk they were being paid for -- to Solomon asking that she steer the conversation towards the earlier, funnier portions of Martin's career. The upshot of all this is, the evening has been written off as a debacle, to the extent that the 92nd Street Y has offered refunds to all 900 paying customers, and Solomon and Martin are left to defend themselves against charges of boringness, and of not meeting the 92nd Street Y's "standard of excellence."
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There are a lot of different ways I could begin talking about this, many of them less long-winded than the path I'm about to go down, but I find it very curious that so many people would be willing to lay down fifty dollars, not only to hear Steve Martin talk about the earliest phases of his career yet again -- he sort of wrote a whole memoir about that called Born Standing Up, which I recommend, and plus there's thirty-some years of archival interview footage that's probably just a click away -- but to pay that money even though they're evidently unaware that Steve Martin long ago changed from this person:
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...to this person:
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Now, granted, Martin himself has confused the issue by his film work, which at some point changed from the more personal stuff like Roxanne, A Simple Twist of Fate and L. A. Story, films that, whatever you might think of them, gave a pretty strong indication of where his own creative drive was taking him, to what would appear to be straight paycheck gigs like Bringing Down the House, The Pink Panther movies, and so on. But Steve Martin is not a hermit, and you don't need to be a superfan to know that his personal sense of humor has leaned, over the past several years, to the very dry (and I do not believe, by the way, that Martin, during this 92nd Street Y gig, completely stomped down on this humor in favor of some dull, professorial demeanor, but maybe I'm wrong). Not only that, but his interest in art is very well documented, and references to it stretch way back to his absurdist days (see the Winslow Homer piece in his first book Cruel Shoes). The point of all of this being that the 92nd Street Y -- who this month will be hosting an evening with the Eddie Palmieri Latin Jazz Octet, and later another one with Ian Frazier and John McPhee (who will be talking about families and rocks, I'm guessing), and even later still will evidently be the site of live broadcasts of The Rachel Maddow Show (I recommend audience members for those nights demand their refunds in advance, as a time-saving strategy), but nothing, so far as I know, on a night of comedy with Carrot Top, or any kind of evening that requires a warning that members of the audience will get wet -- hired Deborah Solomon, a woman who wrote a biography of Jackson Pollock, thinking, apparently, that she was going to ask Steve Martin if it was a lot of fun making My Blue Heaven, and then got all pissed off when she didn't.
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Oh, there are more specific things that the complainers have pointed out, such as the fact that a large chunk of the discussion was about Martin's brand new book, which nobody in the audience would have had a chance to read yet, but I guess the folks making that complaint are entirely unaware of the tradition of authors promoting their brand new books by giving live readings. There's also the question of how the evening with Solomon and Martin was marketed. Well, here's the page for it on the Y's website, and I'll admit it's a bit vague, though I feel the biography of Solomon offered at the bottom of the page offers some interesting clues.
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Regardless of all that, the real problem is this appalling desire that an artist be only what we perceive them to be, and to do what we both perceive and prefer that they do. Steve Martin talked about art; I wanted him to sing "King Tut" again. Give me my goddamn money back. Now listen, I completely understand the impulse to want an artist you've liked in the past to keep doing those things you've liked, especially if the more visible work they're currently doing doesn't seem to be as good (for the record, I haven't been interested in a Steve Martin movie since Bowfinger, and haven't really liked one since he appeared in David Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner, but I find this personal, sideline work -- his novels, his banjo music -- really interesting and appealing, though I've experience not too much of it thus far). And you, and I, and everyone, has every right to wish an artist would do whatever the hell we might wish them to do. What nobody has the right to do is demand that they do it, even if we're putting our money down in the misguided hope that they'll read our minds.
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The analogy isn't perfect, but what this reminds me of (apart from that episode of The Simpsons when Homer goes to see Bachman Turner Overdrive and demands that they play "Takin' Care of Business" even though they'd just finished playing it, and then once they start it again tells them to "skip to the 'workin' overtime' part") is all the pissing and moaning from people who think that Robert De Niro has sold out. By turning up in two sequels to Meet the Parents and one sequel to Analyze This (which was no great shakes to begin with), as well as Hide and Seek and all that other stuff, I suppose, technically, he has sold out, but the attitude from some people is that De Niro has sold us out, as if by thinking he was so amazing in Taxi Driver we were somehow doing him a favor, one he's now refusing to make good on.
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Often, the line on this is that De Niro is "tarnishing his legacy." To those who say such things, let me first say "Fuck you, and until you've built up a legacy of your own, don't think you have any right to tell someone like Robert De Niro how they should go about handling theirs." After that rant, I would say that De Niro made films like Taxi Driver because he was a brilliant actor, and he wanted to make those kinds of films. Evidently, he no longer wants to do that. I don't want to get all slobbery and stupid and say that those dozen or so (or whatever, I'm not going to count them) astonishing performances De Niro gave in the first half of his career were his "gifts" to us, but I am grateful to him, as a fan, for doing that work. But I'm also not so delusional as to think he, or any other artist I like, owes me anything more, or even owed me what I've already gotten. Taxi Driver might have sucked, you know -- you buys your ticket and you takes your chances. The fact that it didn't can really be chalked up to our good luck.
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Artists don't belong to us. We have no rights in these matters. Be happy you can watch The King of Comedy whenever you want, or The Man With Two Brains or Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. Skip over what doesn't interest you, but maybe give An Object of Beauty a look, because who knows, maybe it's pretty good. Either way, don't buy a ticket for something you don't understand and then bitch about the fact that you don't understand it.