There is a terrible song my father loved.

Harry Chapin wrote and performed it. He’s probably best known for a good bad song called “Taxi” that tells the story of a guy who couldn’t achieve his dreams. He ended up driving a cab in San Francisco. I used to dislike the song because it seemed like what we these days call “a humblebrag.” After all, the guy singing it hadn’t failed to achieve what he’d set out to achieve. He hadn’t compromised and given up on his talent. He didn’t end up doing something quotidian that almost anyone could do for a living. He’d ended up a successful folksinger-type with Top 40 hits like “Cat’s in the Cradle” to his credit.

Having grown up a little bit, I think I kind of like “Taxi” now. At least in theory. I like it when I’m not actively listening to it. I understand most of us have things in common with the guy driving the taxi. Even those of us who did learn to fly have some of our options foreclosed. Most of us have on occasion stuffed the a bill in our shirt.

But anyway, the song my father liked was not “Taxi,” but an album cut called “Mr. Tanner.”

“Mr. Tanner” is about a midwestern dry cleaner who sings in amateur productions. Friends encourage him to rent a hall in New York. They urge him to try to make a career as a professional singer. But when he gets to the stage, he’s simply not as good a singer as his friends believed. A critic succinctly destroys him in “only took four lines.” 

On the track, Chapin helpfully gives us the review in a spoken word interlude: “Mr. Martin Tanner, a baritone, of Dayton, Ohio, made his town hall debut last night. He came well prepared, but unfortunately his presentation was not up to contemporary professional standards. His voice lacks the range of tonal color necessary to make it consistently interesting. Full-time consideration of another endeavor might be in order.”

The Chapin sings the killer couplet: 

He came home to Dayton and was questioned by his friends

But he smiled and said nothing and he never sang again

My father thought it horrible what the critic did to Mr. Tanner.

Sometimes I think that if he were alive and not my father, he might not approve of what I do for a living. He was an athlete and a military man; an autodidact who only earned a college degree after he was fully adult, with a family. Thanks to the Air Force, he traveled the world. He became accustomed to living and working with people much unlike himself.

I believe he was very bright. His personal library was small and eclectic. He tended to re-read the books he loved, such as Tennyson’s poetry, Bulfinch’s Mythology, and Mickey Spillane’s paperbacks. He admired John Cheever, he thought Norman Mailer was a boorish clown. He liked cowboy movies. He especially enjoyed those with Dean Martin. However, he didn’t care for John Wayne. John Wayne reminded him of a swaggering football coach. He liked Jim Reeves and Marty Robbins. The Beatles initially confused him, but he liked their later stuff. 

He preferred Charles Bronson to Clint Eastwood, Redd Foxx’s Fred Sanford to Carrol O’Connor’s Archie Bunker. He watched ball games and sometimes Johnny Carson, late at night with a beer and a Pall Mall. This is only how I’d map his taste — he did not think about these things.

My father was not trying to project a brand image or advertise his erudition. There were three channels and, like a good Depression child, he was trained to consume what was put before him. He was more Huntley and Brinkley than Walter Cronkite, part of Nixon’s silent non-complaining majority. He grumbled about politics, but was not completely predictable. I was very surprised to learn this in the last weeks of his life. He had taken steps to keep me from going to Vietnam. The war, and the draft, ended before I turned 18.

In many ways, he is still mysterious to me.

He could not tell me with certainty who his father was. He also could not tell me what it was that I should do with my life. I am probably more like him than not. However, there were parts of each of us that the other could not know. Like many others whose father has died or is absent, I sometimes wonder about his opinion of me. He was somewhat sympathetic to artists. He was receptive to their work. However, his general attitude toward critics ranged from indifference to disdain.

His favorite president, after JFK, was Teddy Roosevelt. He could quote from TR’s speech at the Sorbonne in 1910: “It is not the critic who counts … the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly … and who at the worst … at least fails while daring greatly.”

I know those words well. They are bumper sticker boilerplate for a lot of people. They are the title of a documentary series on Tom Brady. He is the greatest quarterback who ever drew breath. I keep a copy of the entire speech in my upper left desk drawer. Three or four times a year, someone balls them up and throws them at me in an email. They imply that it is not my words that count.

Some of them, I suspect, have never read the speech, they just know the quote. Others may have read it, but they haven’t read it critically. They’ve missed the point of T.R.’s speech. Maybe my father did too. 

The title of the speech Roosevelt gave in Paris to a crowd that could fairly be considered intellectually elite, was “Citizenship in a Republic.” It was not a tirade against “critics” who scrutinize and write about or comment on the endeavors of others. Instead, it was a somewhat reluctant admission that rugged individualism could not always carry the day.

Roosevelt’s speech was about how a democracy needed vigorous and involved citizenship to thrive. It was a call for collective responsibility. It acknowledged that individuals could wield tremendous power. However, individual efforts were insignificant compared to the power a group of like-minded people could muster.

“I am a strong individualist by personal habit,” he said, adding, “It is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the State, the community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to individual action.”

Now remember, this was the beginning of Roosevelt’s post-presidency — the beginning of his shaping of his “legacy.” Roosevelt had finished his term as president in 1909, and journeyed to Africa to shoot big game. Before returning home, he toured Europe. He lectured the Old World on the hazards of empire. He spoke about the state of international relations. But the speech he gave in Paris was a departure from the standard stump text.

He’d developed the idea for the speech while wandering the Left Bank. This area is home not only to many of Paris’s avant-garde artists and writers but to expatriate Americans as well. He thought about the commonalities between France and the United States. At that time, France was the only European nation without a monarch. He wandered anonymously. He thought about how democracy had benefited both his home country and France. It produced citizens with the means of self-determination. To Roosevelt, those avant-garde artists were a pure product of democracy.

But he also knew the dangers of modernity.  Roosevelt held that modern society “accentuates vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant, self-centered, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and blind to its own shortcomings.”

The upshot was that it was a system that required average citizens to be moral, vigilant and involved. In a democracy, the average citizen must discern empty promises. They need to recognize the cynical reckoning of would-be demagogues. They must avoid becoming the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs. They must not become “the man to whom good and evil are one.”

By which he meant they all had to be “in the arena.” Every good citizen had a duty. They had to ensure that others receive the same liberty that they claim for themselves. They all had to work to achieve social justice and to bring about equality.

“The best test of true love of liberty,” Roosevelt said, “is the way in which minorities are treated in the country.” Dirty Hippie Roosevelt even held our most important work was “non-remunerative in character

Sure, taken out of context, Roosevelt’s words provide a pithy comeback. They are handy for any athlete or artist facing criticism. This criticism might come from a pencil-necked geek who never put his or her hand in the dirt.

But that’s a fundamentally dishonest reading of the speech. Roosevelt wasn’t talking about people who write about the arts. His “critic” was the naysayer who was hostile to the spirit of the republic. At the Sorbonne, Roosevelt urged his audience to resist “temptation to pose… as a cynic.”

This sounds to me like a prescription for criticism. The best critics always hold themselves vulnerable to the magic of the art they consider. To be a critic is to delve into the world. It is to apprehend its beauty. Sometimes, it is to detect what is faithless and false.

We must resist reflexive cynicism. We should not hold ourselves apart from the fray of human argument. We should engage in an earnest and direct way with questions of how we ought to live now. Roosevelt tells his audience of academics, writers, philosophers, and artists to avoid locking themselves away in theoretical towers. He invites them to come down and engage actively with him and other robust people of action.

He’s giving them the same advice I give would-be critics. 

•••

As a critic, I won’t shame you for liking what you like. It’s also not my job to shame you for not liking what you ought to like. It’s not my job to tell you what to think, only to remind you that thinking is an option. It is my job to hold art up to the light. I look for the flaws — the cracks that let in the light, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen. However, I do not precisely weigh, measure and declare its worth. All I want to do is to say something interesting. On a good day, perhaps I can point something out you haven’t noticed.

I am responsible to myself, and to my small, dear family. I need to work and I like what I do. Even if sometimes, like almost everyone else, I feel I am constrained by convention. Additionally, there is too little time to say exactly what it is I mean. I sometimes feel that readers and editors are playing defense against me. I often feel inadequate to break through the shell of reductive cliché. It is difficult to overcome facile assumptions and tell the truth about what is, after all, a commercial venture.

I review movies, books, and music because that is what newspapers still do. They might do it out of a poverty of imagination perhaps. Also, it’s fun for me to think about things. Considering art is one of the great pleasures available to sentient beings. It is good to think about what things mean, and to play with meaning and perception. To switch off the light and see if the damn thing glows. To switch the light back on and watch the roaches scuttle.

But damn it, T.R., I feel like I am in the arena. Not as a referee either, but as a performer, in another, admittedly lesser ring of the circus. I may not be an aerialist or an acrobat or a lion tamer, but I am at least a clown. Mr. Tanner is not my prey. He’s my peer.

•••

Noel Murray is my friend and fellow critic. He likes to say that the stereotype of the critic as a failed artist is largely inaccurate. However, I am not convinced.

Some critics, I’m sure, are driven by curiosity and a desire to know how things work. However, I do it mostly because I am paid to. If I could, I’d play third base for the Boston Red Sox.

But being a critic is not all I that do. I also write stories, poems and songs. Sometimes I sing the songs I’ve written in dive bars. I’ve released my own albums. I paint. I take photographs. I don’t make movies. I’ve no real desire to be a filmmaker. I acted on stage when I was a kid. If the opportunity ever presented itself, I’d do it again. I dabble.

Not everyone believes this sort of “well-roundedness” is the mark of a serious person. The novelist Nicholas Sparks once told my wife Karen he believed he was a “great artist” (yes, he said this about himself) for a reason. He said it was because he “didn’t dabble.” He thought he was perfectly capable of directing the smash hit movies made from his bestsellers. However, he chose not to direct them. Doing so would distract him from his higher purpose.

OK. Maybe I am not Nicholas Sparks because I dissipate my energies. I engage in activities that are ancillary to my main work. I can live with that. Maybe I’d be a better writer if I didn’t draw or bang on a guitar. I sort of doubt it, but maybe it’s true, at least for Nicolas Sparks.

•••

I’ll tell you what I believe. I believe that to make art you need several ingredients. These include oxygen and a bit of discretionary time. Prime among these are what I’ll call “powder” and “spark.”

“Powder” is the preparation and the education. It involves the hard and difficult work of training your muscles to precisely drag a pencil across a page. It also trains your muscles to efficiently play a scale. Powder is technique and theory — the submerged intellectual acumen that connects the artist to the great human tradition. Powder is the part you think about all the time when you are starting out. It is all the failing you do to put yourself in position to fail better. 

“Spark” is the ineffable quality that explodes expectations. Some people might call it genius, but it’s really not that uncommon. Other people might call it talent, but I think of it as something rarer than that. Talent is cheap. Talent is everywhere. Spark is talent plus aspiration plus something else. Maybe guile. Maybe benign self-delusion. Maybe obsession. It’s just what it is — an accelerant.

To make the flashy noise we call art, you need both powder and spark. Maybe you’ve got a lot of powder, maybe you can burn for a long time. Perhaps your spark is big and dazzling. The long-running Neil Young tells us “it’s better to burn out than fade away.” Maybe the proportions determine how commanding or enduring the noise you make will be. 

You have some control over the powder you stockpile. I don’t know that you’re not just born with a certain quality of  spark. 

Spark is not something you decide.

•••

In the 2000s, Birdman was one of the movies that made a little bit of noise. It is a black comedy co-written, produced, and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. It stars the former Batman, Michael Keaton. He plays a slightly meta-role as Riggan Thompson. Riggan is an aging actor. He once played a popular superhero in a series of successful Hollywood movies. Now, 20 or more years removed from his greatest popular success, Riggan is trying to re-invigorate his flagging spirit. He wants to recover his credibility. He hopes to become relevant in a digitally blinkered world. He stages his own adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story. The play is “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”. He performs it on Broadway.

In this instance, maybe my verdict on the movie itself isn’t all that important. I was impressed by Birdman but didn’t love it. This is a little unusual because I’m a pretty big Iñárritu fan. I think a lot of the criticism of his films as “pretentious” and gimmicky is specious.

I understand why people think that about his films. I think they’re wrong. At least, I believe that what bothers others about Iñárritu’s work doesn’t really matter to me. I perceive a big-hearted ambition married to a tremendous technical gift. 

Iñárritu may not be viewed as a particularly subtle director, and I think maybe that’s true. However, he is not cynical. I almost always experience his work emotionally. I love his naivete. It seems genuine and brave. I also appreciate his color palette and his willingness to engage “big” themes.

I understand why some people might see him as more spark than powder. They may think he is more style than substance. However, I generally think they are wrong. 

People who watch Birdman will likely remember the fierceness of the acting by Keaton and Edward Norton. They convincingly shift from playing actors to portraying characters in the play. This change happens within the movie (the satire wrapped within the satire). The virtuosic camerawork creates the illusion the film was executed in a single take. This brilliant move grabs the audience by the ear. It pulls them through the backstage drama. It directs them to look at this — and this — and this.

Now I could tell you why I think Birdman isn’t a completely successful movie. However, I’m more interested in saying what I think it’s trying to tell us.

Birdman is about a hack who wants to be an artist. About the anxiousness when you discover there’s a gap between your taste and your art. When you’re spark isn’t up to snuff. 

It’s about that feeling of inauthenticity. Some of us feel this when we realize our work isn’t what we hoped it would be. So maybe I should have managed a more satisfying connection with the movie. Because I am Riggan Thompson.

Now if you’ve seen Birdman, maybe you think that’s not really right. Maybe you think, “Well, sure, he identifies with Riggan. That’s because Riggan is the protagonist. He is the vehicle designed to transport the viewer through the movie. But who he really is is Tabitha Dickinson, the gatekeeping New York Times theater critic played by Lindsay Duncan.”

But I’m not Tabitha, and by now I think you know that. I think you are just thinking that to hurt my feelings.

•••

Tabitha, you see, is one of the bad people in Birdman. She threatens to pan Riggan’s play before she sees it. She resents Riggan because he uses his residual Hollywood clout to crash the theater world. She sees this world as a purer, higher art than Riggan’s blockbusters.

Tabitha is a caricature and a weak character. She is probably the weakest character in the script. However, she is not a completely incredible creation. By that, I mean I understand there are people who might behave as she does. Every kind of crime — journalistic and otherwise — that can be imagined has been committed somewhere by someone. It’s fair to imagine a critic who behaves like Tabitha. Similarly, it’s fair to imagine a crooked cop. You can also imagine a deceitful husband.

I suspect I’ve read reviews by people who didn’t actually sit through the play or movie. They likely didn’t read the book they’re allegedly reporting on. I’ve certainly known critics, or “reviewers,” who made up their minds about works of art too quickly. They did this before giving the work of art a chance to work on them. People may not be wrong to think a critic has an ulterior motive. This can apply when they pan or praise a work of art. I’m sure it happens all the time.

I’ve even talked to writers who have told me they don’t have to see a given movie to know it’s bad art. (And they’re probably right — just as the best Academy Award forecasters pay more attention to the metrics of the movies they evaluate than the content, you probably can safely judge a film by the promotion campaign the studio wages on its behalf and its Metacritic number. Not all the time, but mostly.)

Tabitha is not interested in whether Riggan’s play succeeds as a work of art. She doesn’t care if it makes her think interesting thoughts about love. She is not concerned if it lights up unexpected parts of her brain. She’s interested in protecting her turf. She serves notice that if one wants to fret and strut upon her boards, then there is a tariff to be paid. She is the troll beneath the bridge. She demands a tribute, which is too dear for a Philistine like Riggan to pay by her lights.

She doesn’t think he has the powder to do justice to his ambition. By her lights, Riggan is not an artist. No matter how serious his intent may be, he can never convince her that he’s good enough. She believes he’s not sensitive enough to create something authentic.

One of the problems with Birdman is that Tabitha is not a terribly interesting character. She’s a cliché. We don’t know anything about her other than she’s powerful and wicked. She represents the forces that conspire against the interloper. Her actions defend the faith. She regards Riggan as a kind of artistic infidel.

On the other hand, she is granted more integrity than critics who appear in movies and plays are usually allowed.

Most of the time, a movie portrays a critic because the director wants to oppose the notion of criticism. Because they want to avenge Mr. Tanner. 

Consider the portrayal of the food critic in the 2007 film Ratatouille. He is depicted as a snobbish egoist. This character seems more interested in self-aggrandizing careerism than in honest assessment. In 2014’s Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh portrays the art critic John Ruskin as a supercilious salon rat. Ruskin was actually the inarticulate Turner’s greatest champion, by the way, despite being depicted as prudish. In Ingmar Bergman’s 1964 film All These Women, the music critic Cornelius (Jarl Kull) is a disappointed and mediocre composer. He attempts to blackmail a famous cellist into performing one of his pieces.

In Tim Burton’s Big Eyes (2014), conservative New York Times art critic John Canaday (Terence Stamp) fares only a little better. The real man deeply respects the discipline and work of art-making. However, his rage at the audacious emptiness of commercial Keane-eyed urchins obscures this respect.

Then there’s the case of M. Night Shyamalan’s 2006 film The Lady In the Water. Where Bob Balaban plays critic named Harry Farber (after Manny Farber, who’ll we’ll get back to in a little bit). Harry priggishly rails against movies that indulge clichés and embed exposition in dialogue in an apparent attempt to inoculate the ham-fisted affair he’s in from precisely that sort of criticism.

Farber is a closed and rigid adult Superego figure. He represses fun and is inclined to pull the wings off the butterfly of art. Of course he’s eventually torn to shreds by one of Shyamalan’s dark mythical beasts. But not before he’s lectured by another character (played by Jefferey Wright): “What kind of person would be so arrogant as to presume the intention of another human being?”

Critics know this is what artists think of them — and it stings. Poet and critic Rene Ricard is widely credited with “discovering” both Julien Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat. (Michael Wincott portrayed him in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film “Basquiat.”) Ricard denied his critic-hood in a 1981 piece in Artforum.

“… I’m not an art critic,” he writes. “I’m an enthusiast. I like to drum up interest in artists who have somehow inspired me to be able to say something about their work. It’s simple as that. I don’t write for the sadistic pleasure of contemplating how some slug of an artist will shrivel up as I sprinkle the salt of scorn upon them. The bare idea of such cookery gives me the horrors.”

We understand why artists get their feelings hurt. But on balance, while there are plenty of hacks and point-missers out there most critics become critics because, like Ricard, they love their subject. A critic disdainful of the art they consider is a fraud. 

The moment you start dreading seeing another movie, you should stop. If you start feeling the same about reading another book or listening to another album, let someone else take over. It’s boring for everyone to keep harping on how much better things were when we were twelve years old. 

Maybe that’s easy for me to say. I pick my spots. I’ve not written much about Taylor Swift because I dislike her music. I haven’t written much about her because there’s nothing about her that compels me to write. She’s a fine artist of her type, a regular pretty American girl doing her best to authentically, as E.M. Forster admonished, “connect, only connect” to a wide audience. If I paid it more attention I might find it a lot of interesting themes.

I’m trying to read a couple of books a week. I also keep up with the current cinema. Additionally, I use (and make) music as a kind of self-care. Like Ted Williams, I let many good pitches pass. I wait for the one I want to hit. Unlike most critics who write for daily newspapers, I’m fortunate to be in a position where I can be choosy. I get to decide what I want to write about. Consequently, I hardly ever have to write “bad” reviews. I tend to avoid unpromising movies, to put down dull books after a few pages. There’s always something to champion, something I want to put in front of readers and have them see or hear. 

Not that bad reviews matter anyway — they don’t really put anyone off. Whenever there is a significant gap between a work’s “critical reception” and “popular reception,” the audience will prefer the popular reception. Bad reviews quickly become anachronistic, even if they are “right.” The audience always decides. A critic’s opinion cannot compete with the marketing might of Hollywood and Big Publishing. 

All I hope to do is say something interesting. It should be true and connect with the people who take the time to read me.

I completely understand that, by Hollywood’s standards, the best movie is the one that provides the best return for its investors. There’s always a tension between art and commerce. However, most people enter the business of producing art because they see its world-changing possibilities. Art motivates them. But everybody likes to eat. Most of us like nice things too. Therefore, most of us are willing to compromise our theories for a bigger market share.

•••

I want to say for the record that I was among the few people. Whether film critics or others, I saw much to like in the critic-baiting The Lady in the Water. It was an ambitious failure. It was probably as good a movie as Shyamalan could have made at the time. I appreciate the obvious effort. He was building up his powder. He may have become a better artist after making this movie. I’m sure he considers it criminally misapprehended.

There is nothing wrong in failing, it’s what most of us do most of the time.

•••

Anyway, when Riggan’s play finally opens, Tabitha (spoiler alert) ends up praising Riggan’s production.

Like the food critic in Ratatouille, she’s apparently overwhelmed by the beauty of it all. The audience sees only a few lines of the review. Even in these few lines, it’s clear that Tabitha has misunderstood what she experienced.

In her review, she writes about Riggan digging deep down and uncovering something she calls “hyper-realism” or some such twaddle. He has actually attempted suicide right on stage. He may be deluded or perhaps he sees it all too clearly.

This is another flaw in Birdman. This is not a terrifically original idea. 

It was anticipated in the the Rolling Stones’ anti-critic screed “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll” from 1974. “If I could stick my pen in my heart, And spill it all over the stage. Would it satisfy ya, would it slide on by ya, Would you think the boy is strange?” — and, as indiewire.com’s Jeff Beck has pointed out, in the 1957 Looney Tunes cartoon Show Biz Bugs. It culminates with Daffy Duck, in an effort to upstage the kwazy wabbit. Daffy dons a red devil’s costume to perform. He calls it “an act that no other performer has dared to execute.”

 Daffy then drinks gasoline and nitroglycerin, ingests uranium-238 and gunpowder — a bit on the nose for my metaphor — shakes his body to mix and warns, “Girls, you better hold onto your boyfriends” he gathers his  

Daffy in a red devil’s costume performs a deadly stunt (which he refers as “an act that no other performer has dared to execute!”), by drinking a portion of gasoline, some nitroglycerin, a good amount of gunpowder, and some uranium-238, “shake well”, and swallowing a lit match (“Girls, you better hold onto your boyfriends!”), causing him to explode. The audience applauds the act. An impressed Bugs says they want more. Daffy, now a transparent ghost, replies that he “can only do it once”.

The movie provides us with a superfluous though understandable final scene. Birdman ends a lot like Taxi Driver. The dangerous crazy guy winds up as a hero of sorts. And not because he meant to.

This lack of intention is underlined by the headline that runs above Tabitha’s review: “The unexpected virtue of ignorance.” This tortured phrase is apparently important to our understanding of the film. The full title of the movie is Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.

It’s a phrase that has caused some problems for some people. It also caused problems for me, at least until the moment it actually turned up in the film. At least one filmmaker and writer whose work I deeply respect saw it as meaningless. He described it as an opaque koan suggesting a depth that just isn’t there. He said he didn’t believe any of the people who wrote the movie could explain what it means.

Well, I’m not sure I can defend the subhead. It is a little precious and Bernie Taupin-esque. However, I do think I understand it. In the real world, Tabitha wouldn’t have written the headline. She might not have even seen it until it was published. I think we can assume that it’s reflective of the content of her review. It’s a clumsy newspaper critic’s way of summing it up. It’s a joke within a joke. It’s purposefully awkward and dense. What she’s talking about is Riggan achieving an artistic accomplishment despite his lack of talent and sensitivity.

What’s she’s saying is that he’s all spark and no powder. 

This is a backhanded compliment, somewhat akin to calling a black athlete “a natural.” It discounts Riggan’s intention, what he would call his “motivation” to make art. She does this despite Riggan showing her evidence of his sincerity. He presented a cocktail napkin on which Raymond Carver once scribbled a note of encouragement to the young Riggan Thompson. Riggan has multiple reasons for adapting a production of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” These reasons are complicated and varied. Among them was a genuine desire to make something impactful. He wanted to cause people to think and feel things they wouldn’t otherwise. His aim was to be a catalyst for human connection.

What Tabitha is saying is Riggan has made what the critic Manny Farber called “termite art.”

Here’s the part where I refer you to Farber’s famous essay, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art”, which originally appeared in 1962 in Film Culture. In that essay, Farber was a very good painter and an artist with a lot of power. He wrote film criticism on the side. Farber makes the case for B movies and what came to be known as “underground” cinema. This is opposed to the monumentality of big Oscar-seeking movies. If you don’t know the essay you should read it. I take from it that Farber is saying some of the best art happens in the margins. This occurs when the artist isn’t aiming to be an artist. They are not making a statement. Instead, they are just trying to make something entertaining.

Or is just following his own eccentric obsessions. 

And I believe termite art exists, and that its wonderful. Just look at the early work of Howard Finster, or the anonymous Philadelphia artist they call “the wireman.” Consider a lot of rock ’n’ roll. Enthusiastic children with a dubious grasp of their chosen instruments can achieve great things. “The unexpected virtue of ignorance” is a quality that termite artists share. They don’t think about art. They are art.

•••

I’m not sure I buy the idea that the best art is only created by oblivious genius. I don’t think that’s what Manny Farber believed, or what Iñárritu believes, either. Some really good art is created by people with a lot of spark and little powder. If you have an obsession, and you ignore the gaze of others, you might create something. It could touch off vibrations in other hearts. Termite art happens. We ought to prize all accidental miracles.

But I more believe in work. Hard work. Powder  that, alas, means nothing without spark You can feel as deeply as anyone, that makes you human. But not an artist. Not a genius. Tabitha and John Canaday and Harry Farber are right — there are standards, and there is a price to pay.

Birdman is not termite art. Iñárritu is not a termite artist. Birdman is the kind of movie Farber would have called White Elephant Art. It has aspirations for Oscar glory. It includes high-minded talk about the nature of art and artists. It is a wobbly movie, really, it’s not as slick and smooth as some insist it is. I do not presume to tell you what Iñárritu is trying to say with it. Only that he’s trying to say something. Like Riggan Thompson, he’s trying to be an artist.

And that there’s something noble in that.

And that’s the thing — being an artist is like being an intellectual. You don’t get to decide that that’s what you are. You just do your work. Let people look at it and say what they will. They will determine whether it is good or bad. Some of it is good. Some of it is bad. They will decide whether you are authentic or a fraud. You open yourself to the critics.

To people like me.

Who, in their spare time, are maybe trying to scrape together some powder. Who, in their waking hours, grieve for their puny spark. 

I’m not fooling anyone. It’s all the same to me: poems, songs, stories, columns. I’m trying to connect with something inside myself. I aim to write well enough that if anyone reads it, it might make sense to them. It could also connect with something inside them too.

Which is exactly the thing we talk about when we talk about art.