By Kevin Lee Associate Editor

Like a plush chair, a favorite food or the warmth beneath a layer of your grandmother’s quilts, “comfort” speaks to us all. For most, it’s a lifelong object of desire, a goal we go to the greatest lengths to meet.

However, comfort is a siren call to the artist, its allure hiding a death dashed on the rocks of mediocrity. As actor Stephen Toblowsky once said, “Comfort is the enemy of the artist. If you find that you are comfortable, then you are doing something wrong.”

Think not? Western civilization is littered with similar sentiments. Philosophers and artists as diverse as Goethe, Baudelaire and Burckhardt postulated that effective art inevitably upsets those who experience it, the artist foremost. To dig deep, to reveal, is no easy task and fundamentally plagued with disturbance.

Plato argued that art not only creates disorder, but fundamentally alters those who truly experience it in the manner most primal.

In Art and Anarchy, philosopher Edgar Wind wrote “A certain amount of turmoil and confusion is likely to call forth creative energies.”

Marcel Proust, too, felt the duress of the process could be its own reward, that tribulation brought sweeter fruit than the monotony of life at ease. This plays into the well-trod stereotype of the suffering artist, the wretched individual unable to produce unless in the throes of angst. How well that holds merit is still debatable.

Certainly emotional duress is a trigger for many. Others have been just as productive while physically secure, but they still knew how to metaphysically push themselves into further revelation through their artistic mediums.

It seems the comfort most dangerous is that which lulls the artist into repetition, toward leaning on that which delivers the same measured response regardless of what price is or isn’t being paid in its pursuit.

The results of inner comfort, of not delving into art as one should, of not seeing with fresh eyes or pushing one’s talents, is to trend toward the antiseptic. Some have argued that many people build a particular callous in response to repeated exposure to emotionally laden work, and that in turn influences the artist.

It’s hardly a new grievance. Immanuel Kant saw the art of his era as tending toward a purpose without actually realizing one. Leo Tolstoy shared a similar complaint, that art had become cheap and superficial, no longer capable of performing its principal function of profoundly altering the lives of people for the better.

We hear those same sentiments echoed in our own time, in our own areas of the world.

If an artist hopes to keep the wolf from the door or to feed their own ego, a great temptation lies in giving the public what they know will work. It’s easy to fall into the rut of reproducing what sells best or what pushes the right buttons and elicits famous praise.

But is that true to the muse? Is that what promotes growth in artist and observer? Is that the point of the endeavor, to merely line the physical and psychic nest in the finest fluffery possible?

What of keeping to the edge of your ability and vision? Where is the room for challenging everything involved in the process? How do you ask observers to see the world anew, to experience an aspect of life through fresh perspective if yours is hackneyed?

The same could be said for the other side of the process, for those doing the viewing or reading or listening. How are we upholding our end of the bargain by being satisfied with the usual routine? If we’re not open to being prodded in unimagined or new ways, are we really opening ourselves up to the possibilities of art?

In our little corner of the world, “comfort” is a credo. Life can be easy here and it’s facile to fall back on the cultural idiom of “going along to get along.” Regretfully, that can seep into life in a variety of ways and make stagnation almost inevitable. Things aren’t too bereft hereabouts with more cultural outlets and showcases than in a lot of the outlying rural areas however that doesn’t ease the pain of squandered potential.

One look at the natural world shows us the lack of fitness and vigor that results from an insular and soft existence. It’s the surest path to extinction and those lessons exist still in our cultural essence.

Where is the jostle, the jolt that makes us feel life to its fullest if we are performing by rote? Where is spark to wake us from the mediocre and moribund?

It exists only in our resolve, in a promise to ourselves to make this journey one of discovery and not mere comfort.

Kevin Lee is Lagniappe associate editor. Contact him at klee@lagniappemobile.com.

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