What is Art?

Got the chance last weekend to go to Minnesota and see my daughter in her college's production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. It was the first musical the school has done in at least a decade and I have to say that it was a lot of fun and the cast was really good. Emilee knocked it out of the park. I can't believe how much she has grown as a singer and an actress. She manages to capture the nuances of her character in ways that many at her age and with her experience are seriously lacking. She really understands, and gets how to convey, what is happening in Olive's mind. Unfortunately, that may be because she grew up with a little too much of Olive's experience.

The musical raised a question for me, however. Does a work of art (music, literature, visual, whatever) become more sophisticated if it is more profane? That seems to be the accepted truth among those "in the know." There were two different versions of the performance of this musical--one that was family friendlier and "G" rated, the other considered "R" rated. We were supposed to see both versions, but since there were no children in the audience on the opening night, they went with the raunchier version. The second night, advertised as "R" rated, had a much bigger audience and much more buzz in the theater before it started. It was generally a much younger audience. And if you were not present and just listening, you might think there were cue cards up front telling the audience when to respond with oohs and whistles. It was louder and more raucous. Which is fine, I guess.

Here is the issue, though. This story really looks into serious issues of childhood and family relationships. It explores how the pressures we put on our children affects the ways they view themselves and the way they view the way the world views them. One "boy" suffers with attention deficit issues and is convinced by his family that he is stupid. A girl senses the pressure from her dads to win, to succeed, and the devastation of coming in third causes her to believe that she has failed and that the world will hate her for it. Another is a social misfit who has great difficulty interacting with others. One girl is an overachiever who has to come to grips with how she wants to deal with expectations. Emilee played a girl whose parents are absent and at odds. She feels alone and abandoned and believes that somehow the dysfunction of her parents' relationship is her fault. These are HUGE issues that the musical handled really poignantly and with enough humor to make it bearable. Unfortunately, when they added the raunchiness, I don't think the audience was paying any attention to the real story of the play. Something was lost. Some innuendo and balanced humor make it quirky and unpredictable. Absolute profanity (especially unrealistic profanity--they were portraying twelve year olds, who swear to prove they are "big," but don't use the language in the ways demonstrated in this musical) seems to appeal to baser instincts in the audience and causes them to miss the learning moment such a treatment can create.

George Carlin was hailed as a genius for mocking society's conventions and showing how flawed we were by using the seven dirty words you can't say on television or radio. In the intervening years, society has become coarser in its language and behavior and it is no longer mocking convention to use hardcore profanity and to shock with songs about erections. Mocking convention would be doing a fantastic story like this in ways that appeal to the common decency of humans rather than the common coarseness. That's what I think, at least. I would love to hear how others respond. And if Emilee reads this, I think you were wonderful. I just don't want you to be sucked into the idea that in order to do quality work we must do work that is profane and base. I love you Olive.