Great Expectations, Approbations, Palpitations & Lamentations

In an essay on Jackson Pollock that Kurt Vonnegut wrote for Esquire’s 50th-anniversary issue in 1983 — which I packratted away like the hoarder I am — the novelist attributed the painter’s recklessness at the end of his life to the dilemma of the artist who finds himself at an impasse, overwhelmed by the expectations of his audience.

“(Pollock) was rendered unmanoeuvrable …” Vonnegut told an interviewer four years later, “by the response of the society, which was, ‘Hey, these things are extremely valuable. You’ve got to keep doing this.’ ”

“Vonnegut knew the feeling,” historian Gregory D. Sumner wrote in a 2011 book about the author called Unstuck in Time. “Everything changes when play is no longer a private affair, a child’s dialogue with the universe.”

Vonnegut himself neatly encapsulated the unholy play-child-universe trinity in his 1987 novel, Bluebeard: “Three’s a crowd.”

And so Paul Jackson Pollock, who remains a demigod of the abstract expressionist movement alternately celebrated and ridiculed for his “drip technique” of pouring or splashing liquid household paint over horizontal surfaces, got drunk as a skunk and killed both himself and a passenger while behind the wheel of his Oldsmobile convertible in 1956. He was 44.

So it goes.

The “27 club,” to quote the AI Overview that pops up when I Googled the name, “refers to a phenomenon of famous musicians, primarily rock stars, who died at age 27, often due to drug/alcohol abuse or tragic circumstances. Key members include Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse and Brian Jones. This group represents a, unfortunately, common trend of talent lost at a young age.”

Lost talent similarly overwhelmed by the expectations of their audience after recklessly playing with fire.

You’ve probably noticed that this trend has extended in recent years to encompass many so-called “social media influencers” and “content creators” who have taken a final turn at a young age into what Vonnegut referred to in his 1985 novel, Galápagos, as “the blue tunnel to the Afterlife.”

It seems you read about a new one every couple of months or so. C’est la mort, say the old folks like me, who’ve never heard of these folks followed by millions until their sad demise. It goes to show you never can tell.

For online fame is even more fraught than the 33⅓ RPM acoustic version of the 1960s, what with the potential for (c’est-à-dire, dead certainty of) cyberbullying and the relentless pressure to create fresh “content” daily for the ravenous black maw of public demand.

It’s all right, maw, (they’re only bleeding)

The insatiable appetite of modern idolatry, it should be noted, is not just bottomless but algorithmically self-cleaning, which is to say that anything you toss in is immediately digested, quantified, and — most crucially — rendered insufficient. The applause meter resets to zero before you’ve even wiped the metaphorical paint from your hands.

For my next trick …

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time

Which is where Vonnegut’s diagnosis of Jack the Dripper starts to feel less like a mid-century anecdote and more like a durable law of creative thermodynamics: Once a gesture becomes legible as valuable, it ceases to be a gesture and becomes a product line.

Pollock’s drip paintings — once a private, almost furtive wrestling match with gravity and viscosity — were suddenly a franchise. And franchises, as anyone who has ever been trapped on a long-haul flight with only sequels for company can attest, do not tolerate deviation.

They demand iteration with just enough variation to feel new but not enough to risk alienating the ticket-buying public ... or in Pollock’s case, the collectors who had begun to treat his canvases like volatile blue-chip stocks.

Turning and turning in the widening splat ...

Vonnegut’s phrase “rendered unmanoeuvrable” is doing a lot of quiet work here, like a stagehand in black moving props in the wings. Unmanoeuvrable how? Not physically — Pollock could still move, drive (tragically), pour, drink (excessively) — but existentially.

His agency for possible moves shrank as the price of each move increased.

Imagine a chessboard where every square you step on is instantly appraised, insured and placed behind glass. Such a glass bead game becomes less about play and more about risk management, and at some point the only truly free move left is to flip the board.

History suggests that no artist, under sufficient pressure, is above flipping the board while leaning over it.

You can watch the fraught and fracturing Fab Four flip the board (and the bird at each other) in Peter Jackson’s 2021 doc The Beatles: Get Back. The ultimate example of board flipping, I suppose, is the involuntary visual we all have of an unresponsive Elvis on a Graceland bathroom floor on Aug. 16, 1977.

All this aggravation ain’t satisfactionin’ me

This is where the parallel lives of other prematurely extinguished talents start to look less like a macabre trivia category and more like case studies in constraint.

Hendrix discovering that every guitar he touches must now sound like that guitar; Joplin finding that the rawness that made her voice feel like a wound also had to be reproducible on command, night after night; Cobain trapped in the funhouse mirror of authenticity, where the more you insist you don’t care, the more people demand proof that you don’t care in precisely the ways they’ve come to recognize as marketable not-caring. Here we are now, entertain us I feel stupid and contagious Here we are now, entertain us

The irony, thick enough to spread on toast, is that success — the thing that is supposed to liberate the artist from constraint — often functions as a kind of boutique cage, hand-forged by admiration and lined with velvet. The future that was once wide open is now closing in on all sides.

Their A&R man said: “I don’t hear a single”

And then there is Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton or Virginia Woolf or Jerzy Kosiński or John Kennedy Toole or Yukio Mishima or Richard Brautigan or Sara Teasdale or Ned Vizzini or Hunter S. Thompson or Ernest Hemingway ... or I could go on. But let’s stop the spinning writer’s suicide dial at the great David Foster Wallace himself, whose sentences could spool out like extension cords in a power outage, lighting up corners of the psyche you didn’t know were there.

Let alone furnished.

Wallace was, among other things, exquisitely attuned to the feedback loop between performer and audience, the way attention can metastasize into expectation, expectation into obligation and obligation into a kind of spiritual claustrophobia.

If Pollock’s problem was that the world wanted more drips, Wallace’s was that the world wanted more Wallace — more ironic footnotes, more recursive sincerity, more calibrated candour about the impossibility of candour. At some point the self becomes both the instrument and the brand, and any attempt to change registers risks being heard as either betrayal or decline. He was 46 when he hanged himself on his back porch.

The pale king’s infinite jest.

Vonnegut’s “Three’s a crowd” begins to read less like a quip and more like a warning label: the third party is the audience-as-market, the invisible but omnipresent partner in what used to be a two-way conversation between artist and whatever it is artists converse with when they’re alone (the muse, the unconscious, the void, electroconvulsive therapy … take your pick).

Once that third party starts keeping score, the conversation changes. You start to hear not just what you’re trying to say, but how it will be received, clipped, shared, monetized, misunderstood. The studio, the notebook, the stage — they all acquire a faint echo, like speaking in a room where someone else is always half a second behind you, repeating your words with a slightly different emphasis.

Pollock’s undoing, in this light, is not simply that he drank too much or drove too fast, though he did both with fatal consequences. It’s that the conditions under which his work had a meaning were quietly replaced by conditions under which his work had a price.

The drip became a signature, the signature a commodity, and the commodity a demand for more commodities that looked like the last successful commodity. The move set narrowed. The board hardened. The only remaining variable was the artist’s tolerance for living inside that narrowing.

Which brings us back to the present, where the “bottomless black maw” is not a metaphor but a business model, and where the interval between creation and evaluation has collapsed to something like real time. If Pollock had to contend with critics and collectors, today’s creators contend with metrics that update by the second, little numerical verdicts that flicker like slot machines.

The impasse arrives faster now, and with better graphics.

The lesson, if there is one (and essays like this always feel a bit like they’re trying to sneak a moral past the reader in a trench coat), is not that artists should shun success or that audiences should stop loving what they love.

It’s that the ecology of creation is more fragile than we tend to admit.

Play, as Vonnegut suggested after his own botched suicide attempt of 1984, depends on a certain privacy, a margin of error in which failure is not immediately converted into data. Without that margin, every move starts to look like a referendum, and referendums are notoriously bad for improvisation.

Pollock, unmanoeuvrable, chose a catastrophic exit that reads in retrospect like both accident and allegory.

The rest of us — artists, audiences, occasional Googlers of tragic lists — are left to negotiate our own positions on the board, trying to remember that the point of the game, before it was ever televised or priced or ranked, was to play … even in the rain.

But there is no water, no residual wellspring of creativity to tap, when the pump don’t work ’cause the vandals broke the handle.

What remains after the torchlight and the sweaty faces? Only a distant, receding echo.

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop