I watch a lot of crime drama. Not always the good kind, although I like that too. I mean that I mostly watch the soft end ( Midsomer Murders, Miss Marple, Beyond Paradise, the kind of thing that asks very little and delivers exactly that ). I don’t mind the lack of ambition. In fact, I actively prefer it. What I need from these programmes is the reliable promise of a murder, an investigation, a resolution, and somewhere along the way a decent enough reason not to think about anything else for ninety minutes.
But I feel guilty about this. Not because of the time spent, but because of what it implies about the audience for art.
Because the people watching Midsomer Murders on a Tuesday evening are, in all probability, the same people who will stand in front of a painting at the weekend and ask: does it have nice colours? Do I like the shapes? Is the subject interesting? Yes? Good. Now what’s for dinner?
This is not a criticism. It’s just life. And once you accept it, a great deal of anxiety about making art either dissolves or gets worse, depending on your temperament.
The anxiety that gets worse is the one about ambition. If the audience is fundamentally undemanding (if what they want from art is more or less what they want from Midsomer Murders, which is to say a brief, pleasant interruption to the business of living ) then what exactly is the point of difficulty? Of work that resists easy reading, that withholds resolution, that asks the viewer to bring something they may not have brought? You are, in effect, making a programme that nobody asked for and presenting it to an audience that came for something else entirely.
The anxiety that dissolves is the one about failure. Because if the audience is undemanding, then the stakes are lower than you thought. Nobody is coming to be transformed. They are coming, at best, to be interested. At worst, to pass some time pleasantly. You cannot disappoint them in the way you feared, because they never had the expectations you were afraid of failing to meet.
What remains, once both anxieties have been properly accounted for, is a simpler and more uncomfortable question: who are you making it for?
The honest answer, for most artists who have thought about it at all, is that you are making it for yourself. Not in the narcissistic sense ( not as self-expression or therapy or ego ) but in the sense that the work is a way of thinking that no other medium makes available. Making something stops the noise. It confers gravity on thoughts that would otherwise dissolve back into the general cacophony of a life lived online, in the news, in other people’s urgencies.
The only problem is that this answer sounds like a retreat. Like giving up on the audience entirely. Which is not quite right either.
What I think is actually true is that the work made for yourself ( genuinely and without calculation ) is the only work that has any chance of interesting anyone else. Not because authenticity is a value in itself, which is the Romantic trap, but because the alternative is second-guessing an audience that doesn’t know what it wants until it sees it. You cannot make Midsomer Murders for people who don’t know they want Midsomer Murders. You can only make the thing you need to make and find out afterwards whether anyone wanted it.
Canaletto (amongst many old masters or artists living ‘before the romantic rupture’) knew what the market wanted because the market told him ( commissions, patrons, the specific desires of aristocrats on Grand Tours who wanted a souvenir of Venice that was pretty ). He could work within that frame without anxiety because the frame was clear and the skill required to meet it was, itself, genuine and demanding.
We don’t have that clarity. The frame has dissolved. What remains is the work, the audience’s mild curiosity, and the guilty pleasure of a Tuesday evening murder that asks nothing and delivers everything it promised.