this page was last updated
July 12, 2003
More Talk Back:
’lowering the bar’
to peace and enlightenment
by Penelope Pitt
In response to Miriam
Stucky’s wonderful,
but poorly articulated, critique of the local art scene, i would
just like to say Bravo! And that you have it all wrong.
Bravo for contributing to the mediocrity of Peterborough’s just
barely creative community with another lousy article and ‘zine.
And what could you possibly be thinking?
Bad art is what defines us as the nobodies we actually are. We
don’t even try because we totally don’t care. We just continue to
produce and attend moderately neurotic and barely rehearsed ’productions’;
performing for undiscerning audiences of friends and well wishers.
You, on the other hand, wish to engage this hapless little place
in a conversation about standards of artistic rigor and quality;
as if to say that you might have a sense of what this is, clearly
not. And not because your article/zine is poor in thought and quality
itself, but because the standard simply does not exist outside of
ourselves. The myth of artistic merit and quality will inevitably
lead to dashed dreams and unrealized expectations, what the Buddhists
rightly call the noble truth of suffering.
And so why ask such a collective of creative misfits, with such
little concern for discipline, style and fame to adhere to such
a misguided notion? Clearly what is needed is a further lowering
of the bar.
We need to accept our moments of ignominy and simply be...bad...and
then to let go a little further and to perhaps be worse, if that
is at all possible. And when we are able to be beside the ego’s
latent desires for mistaken notions of quality and celebrity and
when we truly accept our art as being really really stinky, when
the bar is on the floor and when we begin looking around for a shovel,...only
then will Peterborough’s art have done its job and peace will emanate
from this shameful place.
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