The Necessity of Art Work

Why should anyone read my poetry, when there is so much excellent poetry out there already? Why should anyone buy my painting, when there are so many brilliant paintings in the world already? Why should anyone listen to my music, etc. etc.
That's the wrong way to look at it.
True, some people are professional artists, and they continue to produce art because that's their profession, and, in some cases, they even make a living that way.
But most people, if they are artists at all, are aspiring, apprentice, or amateur, and, if they are professional, don't make their living from their art.
The only reason to produce art, to be engaged in art work, is because it's of vital importance to us, whether or not anyone else likes it, or whether or not we like it ourselves.
Recently I decided to publish a novel that I began writing in the 1980s: "Site Report," an Israeli novel: http://www.amazon.com/Site-Report-Jeffrey-M-Green/dp/1502300621.
The manuscript I produced back then was huge and ungainly, and I saw I had no chance of getting it published, so I shelved it. Then a few years later, I reread it and cut about 1/3 of it, but I still didn't have the heart to send it out to agents and face disappointment after Today I am lessdisappointment. A few years after that, I put the whole thing onto my hard disk (I began writing it before I had a computer, and then, when I had a computer, it was an Osborne, one of the first home computers marketed, which ran on CP/M, so I couldn't copy the diskettes over to a PC).
Years went by, and I kept fiddling with the MS, cutting it, revising it, and then forgetting about it. When I heard of the possibility of publishing it for free and having it available on Amazon, I decided to reread it and see whether it was worth publishing.
By that time, I barely remembered writing it, and I was very surprised at how decent it was, so I did publish it. But I didn't have the sense of necessity about it, the drive that had enabled me to write it in the first place. I let too much time go by. And I have changed too much.
The novel is, as I see it now, about a person (an American Jewish woman) whose life is more or less stalled. She is divorced and can't meet any man worth marrying. She has a good job, but not exactly one she is committed to. So she decides to take a Sabbatical year in Israel and study biblical archaeology. In Israel she meets all kinds of people who are committed to their paths in life (though all the paths are different), and most of these people try to recruit her: stay in Israel and be what I am.
When I wrote it, but to a lesser degree now, I saw living in Israel as a kind of mission that transcended personal ambition and self-interest. It's hard for me to see life in Israel that way today. The novel conveys what attracted me to Israel thirty years ago. I could never write a novel in a similar spirit today.

Discarding Ambition?

This year, as most people in the world are unlikely to know, is a Sabbatical year in the Land of Israel. The Torah says that every seven years all agricultural labor must cease, and whatever grows in fields, orchards, and vineyards can be picked by the poor.
Some scholars say that this impossible arrangement was actually observed during Second Temple times. Today the rabbinate has made the colossal error of reinstating the rule, only to find a way of getting around it.
I contend it was an error, because I imagine the rabbis could have said they had no idea when the cycle started and, consequently, couldn't determine which year was a Sabbatical year. But they attached great value to the fulfillment of a commandment, even if it was more or less impossible to do it right. So, from their point of view, it was not an error.
But I digress.
I have been studying the subject of the Sabbatical year with a group of adults at an unusual Israeli institution called Elul, a House of Study open to secular and religious men and women. At Elul we try to focus on the meaning of traditional texts for us in our lives, not in the sense of dictating details of Jewish law, but in the sense of implying values that we may or may not identify with.
In our discussion of the Sabbatical year, for which the Hebrew word is "shmita," from the verb "lishmot," meaning to drop, to let go, we have been discussing the ethical and spiritual value of abandoning things in our lives, to which we cling, the way property owners, according to the biblical law, had to forgo their crops, an aspect of their ownership. (If this smacks of Buddhism, let it smack!)
At Elul, as I said, we have been thinking and talking a lot about discarding, and I have just reached the age of seventy, an age when further acquisition doesn't make much sense - unless it is for the sake of my children and grandchildren.
To illustrate my attitude: our good china shows a good deal of attrition, but when my wife and I start thinking about spending another few hundred dollars to replace the broken and chipped plates, we say to ourselves - why bother? How long will we be using it? We've had most of it since we were married in 1970, we replaced some of it about 20 years ago, but what's the point of doing it again now?
Another seemingly unconnected thought that has been on my mind for a while is the matter of ambition. At this time, I happen to be translating a book by a very ambitious young man. Indeed, most of the work I do is for ambitious people who think their thoughts and words are so precious that they must be made available to the English speaking world. I'm not complaining. If no one was ambitious, no one would hire me.
I was once ambitious, I think. When I was young and thought I was very smart, I thought I wanted to be widely respected and influential, famous. I say, "I thought," because, as I look back at the decisions I made in my life, I see that I didn't really want to be famous, since I never strove for fame. I didn't have that drive. Fame never came to me, and I never sought it out. But I grew up with the idea that a person had to be ambitious, so I thought of myself as someone who hadn't lived up to expectations - whose expectations? Don't ask.
Ambition doesn't make a lot of sense when your seventy years old, and I'm not sure how much sense it ever makes. Success, recognition, should be thought of as a tool: if, say, as an artist, I gain recognition, then I can continue to be an artist. If I want to improve the world, I need to attain a certain status so that people will listen to me and do what I propose. But the status is instrumental, not essential.
Have I discarded ambition? I think I did so long ago and never noticed.
Just today I learned that an essay I entered in a creative non-fiction contest didn't even make it to the honorable mentions. I guess I care. Otherwise I wouldn't have spent $25 to enter the piece in the contest. But, when you come down to it, my satisfaction came from writing the piece, and if it isn't interesting enough to be published, so be it.

Flies in the Ointment

Is there a method of critical analysis that can explain and demonstrate why a work of art is great, or one that enables someone to distinguish between great art, good art, and mediocre art?
From high school through graduate school I attended many classes on works of literature, and, in my experience, the teachers always chose to teach works that were acknowledged to be excellent, or at least historically important. We never, so far as I can remember, took a bad story and picked it apart to show why it was bad. Nor were we ever given a poem to read, for example, and asked to judge it.
Much later in life I took courses in musicology, including a rather advanced method of musical analysis, which essentially showed that Mozart's sonatas followed certain harmonic rules, but which didn't show why they remain interesting musically after more than 200 years, while so much of the music of Mozart's contemporaries is never played.
Sometimes I think there is a kind of circularity at work. Certain people are trained as arbiters of taste, and they train acolytes, and these experts assert that certain art is good. Having made that assertion, one can rather easily dissect the work and point out the things one likes in it. Indeed, most likely these experts are right, though they can be blind to the excellencies of certain kinds of art, and there are matters of taste. I can acknowledge that Verdi's operas are great music, but I'm not on opera fan, and I don't enjoy them.
At the moment, an album of Clark Terry's, "Serenade to a Bus Seat," is playing and totally distracting me from writing. In addition to Terry on Trumpet, the other musicians are outstanding: Johnny Griffin on tenor sax, Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums. You could hardly think of five greater jazz musicians. But I don't know how I could persuade someone who doesn't like jazz that this music is beyond superb. What could I say? Just listen!
Obviously there's a matter of skill. You can hear that these musicians are masters of their instruments and that they play together with precision - but skill is no guarantee of artistic excellence.
What about the other direction: can MFA programs teach people how to become excellent artists? Or at least to become the best artists they can be? I admit to ignorance. I suspect that the answer is no, but I'm not well enough informed.
Food for thought in any event.