Louis Roney: Mediocrity

Outside Florence, Italy, Michelangelo Buonarroti stood motionless, gazing down into a marble quarry.

He spotted a large section of uncut of marble, which fired his imagination.

If you would like to see what sculptor Michelangelo saw in that piece of marble, walk through the Piazza della Signoria in Florence and gaze upon the statue of David, which dominates the busy square. Sculptor Michelangelo saw things in a “big” way – a monumental way.

He was also one of history’s superb painters, seemingly more at home when lying on his back on a scaffold high in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel than when painting a canvas on an easel.

Legend says that someone asked Michelangelo how he conceived the idea of the statue of David, and then proceeded to turn that giant piece of raw marble into one of the world’s great artistic masterpieces.

He answered, “I saw David in the stone. I chipped away everything except David, who was there all the time!”

Such is the simple truth of genius.

Small minds are contentedly imprisoned at the center of small protective horizons, and seek no Michelangelo to release them from their warm, safe cocoons. “Excellence” is usually the first cut on the budget of mediocre arts administrators. Wherever mediocre people labor jealously to promote a mediocre status quo over reachable excellence, public non-support and eventual financial insolvency are usually not far off. The story of such thinking is too often written in red ink.

A sad case in point is the late mediocre San Diego Symphony Orchestra, which closed down after deciding not to throw any more good money after bad in attempting to win enough knowing fans. Lack of public interest from cognoscenti, as evidenced in disappointing ticket sales, wrote the story for all to read.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic plays to enthralled audiences from all over. But that’s another story, another demography, and another orchestra – an excellent orchestra. An old show-biz adage goes, ”The public will tell you if you’re doing well, or not.” Woe to him who doesn’t listen when the box-office speaks!

An inescapable fact is that people in Yeehaw Junction can now enjoy the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Museum of Art via TV, VCRs, phones, etc. Live Broadway “clone” productions are available with fine casts in halls all over the U.S.

It follows that indigenous arts organizations must use world-class “excellence” as a yardstick, and public response, i.e. ticket-sales, as validation if they are to accomplish what they are capable of accomplishing.

Mediocrity cannot survive over the long haul without enjoying an “edge,” i.e. backing provided by dilettantism, sentimentality, and an unreasoning pride in preserving an inert and futile status quo. The mediocre thinker is always the last to “get the word,” i.e. to live in the “now.” Any imaginative new concept scares the mediocre to death.

Erosive lowering of standards and misdirection of financial support have put our formerly great educational system behind those of a host of once less-educated nations. Our present funding methods for the arts and for education often seem to reward mediocrity for illogical reasons that don’t stand the tests of time or reality.

The talented recognize genius at first glance. Englishman Isaac D’Israeli wrote in 1823, “It is a wretched taste to be satisfied with mediocrity when excellence lies before us.”

Joseph Heller said, in “Catch-22,” “Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.” (Can you think of people who belong in all three categories?) Mediocrity is a stupid thing for us to endow, for it usually costs as much as excellence, and leads – literally – to nowhere.

Shakespeare survives, flourishes, amuses, enthralls – and sells lots of tickets. How about Shakespeare’s mediocre contemporary playwrights?

We used to have two separate holidays – Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday — to honor two great American Presidents. In the bank one morning the lady teller who was depositing a check for me reminded me that the bank would be closed on Presidents’ Day.

I asked her how she would compare the legendary truthfulness – the excellence – of men like Washington and Lincoln to the non-stop dishonest wordplay of Barack Obama. The lady laughed. “The country’s doin’ fine!”

I said nothing.

“If the president wants to lie to us,” she went on, “that’s OK.”

I didn’t bother to say to her, “OK with whom? Do you hold Obama up as a model to your kids, the way Washington and Lincoln were held up to us? The fact that stocks are doing well or badly isn’t tied to presidential renunciation of decency, truth, or discretion.”

Today’s levels of taste are strongly influenced by TV with kinky interview shows and “soaps” parading illicit sex as normal daily American fare. In this ubiquitous medium, a hero is too often depicted as a guy who “gets away” with moral mediocrity (or worse) in a lifestyle where game-playing, deceptive phrasing, and artful lying are admired as “cool!”

Isn’t Obama a heroic monument to millions of mediocre people who identify with him, and look to him as an excuse?

Such a prevaricator in our White House cheapens us all, and makes us appear in the eyes of the world as a mediocre society.

If we decide that lying by our highest elected official is “OK,” our collective voice speaks to the world with, as Noel Coward put it, “The potency of cheap music.”