All One In the Same

The popular icons and works recognized in the recent Grammy and Academy Awards ceremonies are a sad and stark reminder of the esthetic fall of an empire.

I realize that these are pathetic representations of the truest talents to be found within America's borders (or, at least I hope so). But they are, nonetheless, zeitgeist engines that culminate phenomenal amounts of monetary investment in music and in film and generate the vastest of audiences... who not unlike caesars in coliseums of yore determine the fate of whatever they see with a thumbs up or thumbs down based purely on impulse rather than artistic value…

Which is forgivable because so little artistic value is present in the first place!

The fact that the title artist is bestowed on so many musicians and actors who are merely flesh and blood mannequins manipulated shamelessly by some producer and have no talent beyond being able to stand in front of a camera or shriek into a microphone is abominable.

To call Katy Perry an artist during the same event where Carol King is being honored for lifetime achievement is blasphemous, just as Bruno Mars sharing the stage with Sting to recognize a demi-god like Bob Marley. (It is like me saying I laud George Saunders as a fellow writer.)

As the camera sweeps through the audiences of these so-called artists it becomes clear that they are as much fashion models as they are anything.

No one is willing to get real or ugly for art anymore.

Adele is as close as we are going to get to a Patti Smith. Robert Downey, Jr. (who was once relatively gritty) is as close as we are going to get to a Jack Nicholson.

All these pretty boys and pretty girls who are essentially interchangeable become so much wallpaper after a while. And isn't it telling that there is little difference between an actor and musician now? You could practically move them back and forth amongst professions with similar indistinguishable results.

Both of these women are artists?

And it is no wonder. Shows like American Idol de-emphasize originality or raw talent, and instead reward emulating some performers who've already made it to the top.

The result is an elevation of mediocrity, conformity and repetition.

Devoted fans of the show, who watch it season after season, would be hard-pressed (despite their fervent fandom) to name all the insignificant people who've won.

Actors are no different. Promising upstarts like James Franco and Joseph Gordon Levitt have been all but hammered into lack-luster drones and will surely be replaced in a few years. Think of their earlier roles versus the ones they are attaining gargantuan fame for now.

Both of these men are actors?

It hasn't always been this way.

Oscars were once bestowed on the likes of Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor and Henry Fonda.

Grammies were awarded to Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac and Bruce Springsteen.

This shift in impetus, in taste and what is to be elevated is recent and endemic to a descent that can be observed throughout this country, top to bottom, from civil participation to education, journalism to politics, en masse behavior to intimate social interaction, even down to the bare root of language... all further indicating a culture in tailspin demise.

It is notable that in the past few years our pop culture icons have increasingly come to resemble our politicians, and vice versa: glamorized figureheads absorbing enormous amounts of wealth while producing mediocre-at-best results.

Talent and conviction have been superseded by fashion and good looks and a willingness to whore oneself to the highest bidder.

Our politicians fare as badly, few representing common will, moral integrity or reasonable intellect, but more concerned with strategic positioning and satisfying the partisan factories that support and eventually replace them with new-and-improved watered down versions of what a leader is supposed to be.

All one in the same.