Who Makes the Rules?
“You have to know the rules in order to break them.”
We all know this maxim. We’ve heard it our entire working lives, from training to profession. We parrot it. We don’t question it. Once we hit a certain level of achievement, we look at it as a badge of honor. “Well, I learned the rules. That’s why I get to break them.”
In his revelatory new book, Craft in the World, Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping (which I recommend for artists of all disciplines), Matthew Salesses says,
“The argument that one should know the rules before breaking them is really an argument about who gets to make the rules, whose rules get to be the norms and determine the exceptions … Writing that follows nondominant cultural standards is often treated as if it is ‘breaking the rules,’ but why one set of rules and not another? What is official always has to do with power.”
(Bold emphasis mine)
Craft is about cultural expectations. It’s defined what has been judged “good” by a certain group’s collective generalized expectations and needs, codified by a body of scholars and practitioners based upon a specific set of artworks — artworks accepted as “good” based on their culture and upon a series of self-reflective ideals.
Who Made Our Rules?
For a brief cast study, let’s look at the training of the American actor. Who made the rules? Stanislavski, Uta Hagen, Stella Adler, Michael Chekhov, Sanford Meisner, Jerzy Grotowsky, Anne Bogart, Tina Landau. It’s safe to say that American acting craft is built on a solid base of white European cultural ideas. Tadashi Suzuki is one of the very few foundational heavyweights of American acting craft who is not white. And his craft is markedly different from the others mentioned, with the exception Bogart and Landau who draw from his work.
American dance, concert music, fiction, poetry, photography, painting, sculpture, design … our disciplines are built on white Western ideas of what is good — ideas that go back to Greece. Non-classical music seems to be the only American art form free from classical European influence… but it wasn’t born free.
We live in the age of disclaimers, so… Please note that I’m not arguing that all of our art is only influenced by white Europeans. Nor am I arguing that many of our basic principles of craft aren’t perfectly valid and haven’t contributed to important work and our own individual successes.
But, we have a wildly diverse body of disciplines that are defined by some pretty narrow lenses. And a diverse body of artists who find themselves squeezed between multiple cultural expectations that are often accepted as gospel.
American and western artists who are not white, who do not come from the same cultural backgrounds as the creators of established rules, find themselves alienated and often overlooked because their parameters for what is good diverge from the academy.
Salesses uses the example of African literature seen through the Western lens. It has often been criticized as lacking in round characters. African authors in Toward the Decolonization of African Literature argue that a character’s roundness comes “not from the author’s words but from the audience’s reading.” For whom was it written?
Similar blurriness happens in Western views of Asian art and literature. What is seen as loose, meandering and incomprehensible to those bound by expectations of a certain storytelling style do not have the same experience as audiences from the culture in which the art is created.
Whose rules do we allow to decide what is good?
Robert Pinsky says in The Sounds of Poetry,
“There are no rules.
However, principles may be discerned in actual practice: for example, in the way people actually speak, or in the lines poets have written. If a good line contradicts a principle one has formulated, then the principle, by which I mean a kind of working idea, should be discarded or amended.”
Pinsky goes on to state that the best way to understand the fundamentals of a certain type of poetry is to read that type of poetry, rather than referring to texts about it.
What is good is ultimately decided by the artist and the audience. To get good at something you love, study that thing.
Create with a specific audience in mind.
“The reader,” “the viewer,” ”the theatergoer,” all the generic audience archetypes are built from the same ideas of the universal that our crafts’ rules are built from. What is generally accepted in the West as the “universal experience,” is really code for the white experience.
The Hero’s Journey, round and flat characters, psychological realism, balance, movement, structure — these are all inherited from white European and American culture. Interrogate your own practice.
What have I accepted as “right” that is really just “white?”
When we create, we must decide who we are creating for. And we must commit to that with doggedness. No work of art can be a failure if it moves its intended audience — critics and trolls be damned.
Craft and the Difference Between Rules and Skills
Art isn’t a free-for-all. Interrogating the rules we’ve been handed is not the same as being undisciplined. Every artist uses tools — words, color, light, sound — and they must know how those tools work to use them well. And they must practice.
We must know the fundamentals of the things we work with, and we must know them inside and out. How they work, how to use them, how they can be tools and how they can be weapons. This is skill.
In our recent conversation, theatre artist Miranda Haymon brought up chef Grant Achatz as an example of mastering skill.
“He says, ‘if I can learn the function of a spoon, that means I can do whatever I want with a spoon. If I learn the function of a plate, that means I can do whatever I want with a plate. If I learned the function of taste, that means I can do whatever I want with taste.’ So for me as an artist, I'm asking myself, how do I find myself in a position to be able to know the spoons and forks and the knives and the box offices and the revivals of every single kind of making space so that way I can define it for me?”
In The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp writes,
“Skill gives you the wherewithal to execute whatever occurs to you. Without it, you are just a font of unfulfilled ideas. Skill is how you close the gap between what you can see in your mind’s eye and what you can produce; the more skill you have, the more sophisticated and accomplished your ideas can be … You’re only kidding yourself if you put creativity before craft. Craft is where our best efforts begin.”
There is a crucial distinction here — there’s an enormous gap between craft and rules.
Craft, in this context, is entirely about mastery of skill. Is skill culturally informed? Of course. But, the fundamentals within it are the rudiments of good work — understanding of the body and form, of intonation and timbre, of how people sound and how they negotiate, of how colors interact with one another. How people sound and what they think is melodious or pretty changes from culture to culture, and artists are creatures that rise from their culture.
A South Korean Pansori performer’s work will be judged poorly by a critic or audience steeped in ideas of beauty based in opera and Western classical music, while a Tuvan throat singer’s audience might find Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” aria to be saccharine and too busy.
But the Pansori performer, the Tuvan singer and the Mozart soloist are all masters of the skills required to make what they make. These skills are both fundamental and culturally informed.
In our 2020 conversation, composer Fahad Siadat said,
“Music is not a universal language that only white men from 150 years ago in Europe understood. Anyone who thinks that music is a universal language, all they need to do is listen to Beijing opera, and they'll realize that it doesn't speak to them at all. It’s a ridiculous notion. It’s vitally culturally informed. That doesn't take away its potency to speak to us. There are all these different ways that it can, if we are willing to let go of our values around what is ‘right’ and what is ‘good’ music … By looking and asking, ‘why am I having this experience’ we can start to really understand who we are and what we're listening to and a whole different way and we get to actually our power.”
Craft Today and Tomorrow
The people I’ve quoted today are products of the academy and traditional training. They speak from experience and deep knowledge of the history of theory, criticism and practice.
The academy is in a state of flux, and change has been at work for decades. It’s a slow process, but we’re seeing results. And the past year of deepening racial and cultural conversations have spurred that on more.
But today’s reality is that the academy holds less and less sway. Art is democratized. It is more egalitarian now than it has perhaps ever been in our history.
For better and worse, social media and technology have made creation and distribution easier, providing immediate global platforms for anyone.
At the same time, college enrollments are dropping and fewer young people can justify the expense of years of education.
This is a double-edged sword.
On one hand, it means that there is a new generation of artists who have access to great art online and who will create outside the strictures of the academy and Western ideas of “good.” They are exposed to an increasingly homogenized idea of what art is, but innovative new work appears every day.
It also means that the academy increasingly becomes the playground of the privileged, creating a pipeline of financially secure young practitioners who can afford to work for less and live in increasingly expensive cities while they gain access to elite arts institutions with the connections they made in the academy.
It falls on us as working artists from all backgrounds and cultures to steer our craft into an equitable, inclusive, inspiring future. How can we mentor young artists? How can we interrupt and disrupt destructive traditions within our craft and create space for something new? How can we preserve what is best about our traditions while also welcoming the best of others?
As Salesses writes,
“Craft, like the self, is made by culture and reflects culture, and can develop to resist and reshape culture if it is sufficiently examined and enough work is done to unmake the expectations and replace them with new ones. (As Aristotle did by writing the first craft book).”
We can all break the rules. And a good place to start is with what defines “good” art, and who gets to make it.
