Mysticism Wow
When I was a teenager listening to rock music (okay, so I’m a midlifer who still listens to rock, but that’s another story), among my friends the worst thing you could say about a musician or a band was that they had “gone commercial.” The idea was that pop and rock existed on a continuum, with “pure musicianship” at one end and “money-grubbing sell-outs” at the other. As teenagers, we really couldn’t grasp the subtlety that in a free market society, all art is commercial to some extent — we just had a sheep and goats mentality, where bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Emerson Lake & Palmer and Yes were seen as true artists, while the Bee Gees, Styx, Boston and Foreigner were derided as the sellouts. Of course, after the punk rock explosion a new line of demarcation emerged: you had the new wave and the dinosaurs — but I’m talking about the mid-70s, when it was still cool for rockers to have long hair and even longer guitar solos. In those halcyon post-hippie days, artistic integrity was bound up with being unconcerned about something as base and dirty as album sales.
Okay, thirty years later I can chalk all that up to youthful naiveté, but while I eschew the black and white thinking of my youth, as an author I continue to ponder the question of artistic integrity in a market economy. If a book (or song, or whatever), can’t sell, it doesn’t get published. If you have the resources to publish it yourself, great, but maybe then the word is it shouldn’t get published, as it’s a waste of your resources which could have been saved for a more worthy project. But of course, this is a dicey business. It’s legendary how creative juggernauts like Dr. Seuss or the Beatles had to endure rejections from editors or producers who were convinced that their work lacked commercial potential. The original British publisher of The Lord of the Rings calculated that he’d lose £1000 (no small sum of money in the 1950s) by publishing it, but did so anyway because he thought it was a work of genius (now there’s a case where intuition trumping business sense paid off handsomely). But of course, this works the other way around, where much-hyped and ballyhooed creative properties are released to thuddening commercial failure. Take, for example, Wikipedia’s list of Box Office Bombs: movies that grossed less money than they cost to produce. Some of these movies are critical failures (The Golden Compass) while others are regarded as artistic triumphs (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen). You never can tell, can you?
So, where am I going with this? Well, the issue for me is the question of the marketability of mysticism.
