Commonplace Book: The Artist and the Audience

Since I have been so hard on Pauline Kael lately, it is only fair to share one of her very best passages.

Perhaps no work of art is possible without belief in the audience -- the kind of belief that has nothing to do with facts and figures about what people actually buy or enjoy but comes out of the individual artist's absolute conviction that only the best he can do is fit to be offered to others. It's what makes a director insist on a retake even when he knows he's going to be penalized for it; it's what makes young dancers drop from exhaustion; it's what made Caruso burst his throat. You have to believe in the audience, and believe that your peak effort just barely makes you worthy of it. That's implicit when an artist says he does it "because he has to," and even when he says he did it "just for himself."

An artist's sense of honor is founded on the honor due others. Honor in the arts -- and in show business, too -- is giving of one's utmost, even if the audience does not appear to know the difference, even if the audience shows every sign of preferring something easy, cheap, and synthetic. The audience one must believe in is the great audience, the audience one was part of as a child, when one first began to respond to great work -- the audience one is still a part of. As soon as an artist ceases to see himself as part of the audience -- when he begins to believe that what matters is to satisfy the jerk audience out there -- he stops being an artist.

Pauline Kael