This happens to be the NBA weekend when professional basketball takes a break from team play and individuals compete in separate skill sets. There are contests to determine the ‘best there is’ in ability to pass, to shoot, to handle the ball. The most highly anticipated and least relevant to the game itself is the ‘slam-dunk’ contest, a zen-like exercise in which contestants are asked to make a routine ability, in the NBA, hard to do. Each contestant has a ball and there’s the metal ring ten feet above the ground. The object is to get the ball to go through the ring in the most inventively difficult way possible, and they keep expecting more every year. The winner will be the one who does the it the hardest way yet.
That’s pretty basic. In essence the basket and the ball cancel out, since it’s the same for all of them, and all that’s left is ‘hard to do’. That’s what we admire, really. It’s pretty obvious the hardest thing to do in any competition, on any level and in any arena, is to be the best. Da Vinci isn’t remembered because he painted a Madonna, since it was long ago and what it represented has fallen away. What’s left is a level of painting, creating an image on a flat panel using ground minerals suspended in oil, that no one has ever really surpassed coming forward or going backward in time. Leonardo remains at a pinnacle of human achievement because he took simple means and made something so good it bordered on impossible. Now that’s hard to do, and, deep down, that's the part we admire, no matter in what endeavor we choose to find it.
Remember that when you look at art. Difficult doesn’t stand by itself and even though a scale model bridge made of matchsticks can be impressive, it may not rate as art. On the other hand, pouring, dripping, and slinging paint is sure easier than trying to make a picture of anything, and comfortably less vulnerable to outside criticism. Farm animals and children can do it, and the biggest experts around couldn’t tell the difference without the little tag. So what is the average person left with? Not much to look at in the repetitious trademark monograms of artist/celebrities they neither understand or respect.
Without resistance it’s hard to imagine where traction comes from. These days the digital camera has gotten so good, so easy, and the image so malleable that folks look for ways to make photography seem hard again, and the camera itself will have a couple of settings to degrade the photo as though work was involved, even if charmingly inept. Photography, once the test of truth, now has less credibility than a disgraced news anchor, and a photo of godzilla sitting at a lunch counter would surprise no one. All the art photography out there that anyone takes seriously seems to have been made on film, in a dark room, by the hand and eye of the artist.
This is not a moral distinction. The musical instruments most difficult to master are the ones most capable of the greatest expression, emotional depth, and mindful connection, and this is easily tested simply by listening. Is it possible to rival Beethoven on a synthesizer, well maybe, but where is it? Degree of difficulty turns out to be a tool, a means to an end, and the steepest climb reaches higher in the end. A work of art is a transformation from a state of universally available means to one of singular uniqueness, the product of one human in the universe, and moving back the starting line makes it easier to accomplish, strange as it seems.
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