Banter 64 - Is Leisure Time Required to Produce Art?

Time: May 27, 2021 07:00 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada)

Questions to ponder for your research for submissions and to bring to the conversation:

Does creating art hinge on leisure time, or can the arts be produced by those not fortunate enough to have access to periods of 'peace and quiet'? 

Under what conditions is art most often produced?  What are the exceptions?

When is art more difficult to produce and, historically, have there been periods where large parts of society have not had access to the conditions to produce art? 

If art requires the 'free time and relative peace' does it over-represent those privileged with those conditions and under-represent the more socio-economically or politically oppressed? If 'History is written by the victors' is (most) art created by the leisure class?

Consider all forms of art (music, folk art, visual art, literature, theater, dance, etc.).  Are some forms of art more the realm of privilege than others?

We can likely find examples to support varying positions we might take on the topic - please do bring those particular examples from all corners of the arts, because generalizing will be less interesting. 

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An overview from Sabine. 

Thanks, Sabine, for these intro materials to get the creative juices flowing!

It may be helpful to read some excerpts from Virginia Woolf, who focused on this problem more in depth than I’m aware of in any other piece of writing or lecture in her (1928) A Room of One’s Own (link). Here are some key excepts: 

 Ch. 6, excerpt: 

 “’What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne—we may stop there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men, and of these three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well to do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well to do, and I challenge you that, if he had not been well to do, he would no more have attained to write SAUL or THE RING AND THE BOOK than Ruskin would have attained to writing MODERN PAINTERS if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a madhouse, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is—however dishonouring to us as a nation—certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's chance. Believe me—and I have spent a great part of ten years in watching some three hundred and twenty elementary schools, we may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.' Nobody could put the point more plainly. 'The poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's chance… a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.' That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom.” 

 Ch. 3 excerpts: 

 “And one gathers from this enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer's mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world's notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and confession. "Mighty poets in their misery dead"--that is the burden of their song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.” 

 “…returning again to my original enquiry into what state of mind is most propitious for creative work, because the mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare's mind, I conjectured, looking at the book which lay open at Antony and Cleopatra. There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed. For though we say that we know nothing about Shakespeare's state of mind, even as we say that, we are saying something about Shakespeare's state of mind. The reason perhaps why we know so little of Shakespeare--compared with Donne or Ben Jonson or Milton--is that his grudges and spites and antipathies are hidden from us. We are not held up by some "revelation" which reminds us of the writer. All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded. If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought, turning again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare's mind.” 

Here is a contemporary rebuttal-of-sorts to Woolf’s claim that writers need money and a room of their own, ie mental space: https://electricliterature.com/what-if-you-cant-afford-a-room-of-ones-own/ 

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FROM ANNETTE:

Hello!  I'd like to use the example of Irina Ratushinskya as an example that leisure is not required.  She was imprisoned for her works and wrote all throughout her time in prison. (Quite the opposite of luxury.)  Here is a quick reference (from Wikipedia):

"On 17 September 1982 Ratushinskaya was arrested and accused of anti-Soviet agitation for writing and circulating her collections of verse.

Between 1 and 3 March 1983, she was tried in Kiev and convicted of "agitation carried on for the purpose of subverting or weakening the Soviet regime" (Article 62). Ratushinskaya received the maximum sentence of seven years in a strict-regime labor camp, followed by five years of internal exile. After being imprisoned three and a half years, including one year in solitary confinement in an unheated cell

while temperatures fell to minus 40C in the winter, she was released on 9 October 1986, on the eve of the summit in Reykjavík, Iceland between President Ronald Reagan andMikhail Gorbachev.

While imprisoned Ratushinskaya continued to write poetry. Her previous works usually centered on love, Christian theology, and artistic creation, not on politics or policies as her accusers stated. Her new works that were written in prison, which were written with a matchstick on soap until memorized and then washed away, number some 250. They expressed an appreciation for human rights; liberty, freedom, and the beauty of life. Her memoir, Grey is the Colour of Hope, chronicles her prison experience. Her later poems recount her struggles to endure the hardships and horrors of prison life. Ratushinskaya was a member of International PEN, who monitored her situation during her incarceration.^"