[1] Someone worked really, really painstakingly hard to create this, out of an irrational-almost-to-the-post-of-insanity love of something.
[2] This was a stroke of unconscious genius wherein somebody under the influence of intense emotion or psychoactive drugs or probably both had this work flow like a torrential waterfall out of their fingertips.
If I believe either of these things to be true about some work – a painting, a song, a writing, a freaking map – I am, without any exceptions that I can think of, in love with it, or at least intensely admiring of it.
I just impulsively bought a $40 map because of this paragraph, with the key words that probably got me emphasized:
David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus-a 35-year veteran of cartography who's designed every kind of map for every kind of client-did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. Imus spent eons tweaking label positions. Slaving over font types, kerning, letter thicknesses. Scrutinizing levels of blackness. It's the kind of personal cartographic touch you might only find these days on the hand-illustrated ski-trail maps available at posh mountain resorts.
I’m going to re-write the paragraph with how my brain might have interpreted it:
He created it personally and painstakingly. He created it really painstakingly. Absurdly painstakingly. By the way, he’s an expert. He created it personally. He created it painstakingly. He slaved. He scrutinized. The result is unusually personal—a sincere act of love.
Just convince me that something you created was like this and you can have my $40, too.
I don’t necessarily feel duped out of $40 because I feel it’s legitimately true that this was a near-obsessive act of love, and so the map, besides being interesting just by virtue of its mapness, contains a metaphor so powerful that it almost feels like a steal that I can put this on my wall for $40.
But at the same time the map is not really that poignant because I don’t imagine there was much emotion behind it. I imagine it was probably some guy doing a fun hobby because he likes maps. Not that meaningful.
For maybe a better example, Stanley Kubrick movies give me a clear impression that this guy was obsessive. But my appreciation of his stuff went to much higher heights when I learned the simple fact that the set of The Shining is intentionally impossible. When I ask myself why he was so obsessive with detail, I don’t imagine it was just a fun hobby for him to create movies but that he was probably personally “tortured” (there’s that word) by something, even if only an existential pull to create an amazing movie.
Then the other way to get me to cough up $$ is by convincing me of the second and polar opposite point, that this was created swiftly and remarkably unpainstakingly in a moment of unconscious inspiration. This is trickier to convince me of because (1) if it’s something complicated like a map or movie or kitchen appliance, I know that’s not possibly true, and (2) if the result of your transcendental experience is something lame like a fingerpainting, sorry, but I’m not impressed. In other words, to convince me that this was a special transcendental moment, you must have some pre-existing expertness in whatever you created so that unconsciously creating something interesting is even possible.
There can be some overlap in the categories: A work could be created in a moment of unconscious inspiration and then meticulously edited and perfected. That’s cool with me.
What’s interesting to me is that there’s no middle ground. If something was created the normal way, by thinking about it and working reasonably hard on it, I might think it’s nice and amusing and good-looking and whatever, but I can’t think of a single case when I had that perception and felt anything beyond those calmer feelings.
Another thing that interests me is that all of the artists that I really like seem to fit pretty neatly into one or the other mental bin. Most fall in the obsessive category (DFW, Kubrick, Zach Galifianakis [yes, I’m serious]), and there are a couple in the unconscious category (Richard Brautigan, Rihanna [joke]). Some seem to use obsessiveness and uconsciousness at different parts of the process (Bob Dylan, Ray LaMontagne). There are exactly two I can think of that seem to sometimes create stuff unconsciously and sometimes obsessively: Werner Herzog, Van Morrison. But I cannot think of a single example of an artist I love who I perceive to operate in the middle ground.
Is this just me, or are others in this boat?
