It’s amazing how many highly intelligent people I’ve encountered who themselves are a slave to some grand, sorry dogma. I understand the reasoning behind this basic tendency: a dogma comes prepackaged, with all the major questions already covered in some way when you find it – and if the belief system is any good at all, with relatively self-consistent answers. This fulfills a practical need, as it limits the mental workload of the dogmatic person: it tightens the field of view, and thereby makes it easier to consider only the issues the individual actually wants to think about. A dogma also provides an automatic “us and them,” and consequently a built-in community – and for those who might have had a hard time making friends anyway, this is especially attractive. However, while these are both admittedly crucial traits, I believe the most addictive quality of a dogmatic system for an artist is, fundamentally, that it provides a way to articulate how “I” am better than “you.” It is a simple solution for a deep insecurity. This is one reason why it’s often easy to find that some of the most senselessly dogmatic are among the most lost people you will ever meet: it’s a security blanket, and the more lost the artist is when they find the system, the more it will tend to entrench in their life and work, and the greater a mental crutch it will become. The dogma fills up the empty person like water between rocks – a secular, justifiable god. The cognoscenti are fond of remarking negatively on the “simpler person’s” need for archaic faiths. Ironically, I have so often witnessed these same people argue desperately for the most threadbare, hand-me-down artistic dogmas – people who would claim to be on the absolute cutting edge of artist creation, free and wandering the perimeter.
The core and perennial problem with stylistic dogmatism in art is that, by definition, the degree to which it reigns in a given art object is the degree to which that object is no longer a work of art – at least not to the same degree, not anywhere near the same caliber, and however you slice it, certainly not what thinking people mean when they talk about the avant-garde. One of the principal costs of a dogma is that in exchange for its safety and somewhat complete answers, the artist must sacrifice his own decision-making power. Given this, the degree to which an artist's decisions are guided by an external, prefabricated doctrine is the degree to which the artist chooses to submit to the notion that nothing new is possible in this art object. And so wherever dogma is the guiding force, real experimentation cannot permitted, and therefore nothing truly new can happen. And with so few resources available, how can we have a new music worth supporting that isn’t actually new? Only in the areas from which dogmatism has been exorcised can truly honest art be possible.
It’s not a fresh idea: without breaking rules, the groundbreaking stuff just doesn’t happen. Thomas Kinkade is not the same thing as a work of Christo and Jean-Claude, no matter how well crafted the justifications and explanations surrounding the former may be. The really unfortunate thing is the reality that ensues when the dogmatic reign without recognizing their own dogmatisms. The dogmatic have traditionally been able to find a comfortable home in the academy, as it provides little real artistic challenge beyond a general game of semantics. Unfortunately, the lockstep artist seems by my little experience to represent the vast majority of those actively working in what they would call new music. The reason is, again, that it’s an easy and often accepted way of being, and more so, that the alternative is much more difficult: to figure it all out for yourself from scratch, to find the answers yourself, to dig out all the questions one by one with your own tired, dirty little hands. Without a doubt, this is a much, much more difficult thing to do. Truthfully, it’s not even in the same category of being. But then, it is also the only way to actually become an artist.
“And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not…A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. So, dear Sir, I can't give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take the destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.” — Rilke
