The difference between experiencing art that succeeds as communication and art that doesn’t is rather like the difference between being sexually intimate with a person and watching that person masturbate.
This is one of those analogies that I am never going to forget. It’s from David Foster Wallace’s “David Lynch Keeps His Head.”
David Lynch’s Blue Velvet had a huge influence on him, and here he explains why:
Blue Velvet captured something crucial about the way the U.S. present acted upon our nerve endings, something crucial that couldn’t be analyzed or reduced to a system of codes or aesthetic principles or workshop techniques.
The movie helped me realize that first-rate experimentalism is a way not to “transcend” or “rebel against” the truth but actually to honor it. It brought home that the very most important artistic communications take place at a level that not only isn’t intellectual but isn’t even fully conscious, that the unconscious’s true medium isn’t verbal but imagistic, and that whether the images are Realistic or Postmodern or Expressionistic or Surreal or what-the-hell-ever is less important than whether they feel true, whether they ring psychic cherries in the communicatee.
And art, DFW says, is only interesting to the extent it can do that.
