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Artistic Integrity
Integrity is another word for the self. Integrity is what the self does when we aren’t looking.
The simple title of Lionel Trilling’s book Sincerity and Authenticity set out in the 1970s the simple definition of what the self needs to be taken
seriously, and to take itself seriously.
Ethics happens when a civilization develops an instinctive form of decency. No one has to think about how to act.
But integrity isn’t conformity to a national standard of conduct; it’s conforming to what your own heart suggests.
Integrity doesn’t come naturally, though. It has to be taught. It has to be learned.
During my formative years, art for art’s sake was the cry. Art must never be commercial, although it might earn money by accident. Much of the most accessible self is unintentional. Frost wrote the poem "The Road Not Taken” as a gentle gibe to his friend the poet Edward Thomas, who always insisted while out walking that it would have been better if they had taken the other fork. The poem became universal, but it was meant to be personal.
Integrity is the ultimate form of being personal.
My teacher, the pianist Russell Sherman, always insisted that every note must be life or death; nothing less was valid. I think of the pianists Natalia Karp and Władysław Szpilman, both of whom played Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 for German officers, both of whom
were spared because of it. Those are the stakes that musicians play for.
We make art to save our own lives, and to save other people’s lives. A culture without art can’t call itself a culture. As William Carlos Williams wrote in his poem “Asphodel”:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
I always think of the advice Polonius gave to his son in Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Integrity (or the lack of it) is what you do when no one is looking. Left alone at a computer, a poet will write poetry, rather than sign on to online gambling. Because we know there isn’t a second to lose. If you are desperate to do something to the exclusion of all else, that is your integrity.
Every day we fail at getting it right. What is important is that we try again tomorrow. All young people play at being artists. A real artist is someone who is still an artist after 40.
Integrity is trying to get beneath the surface of things, to get at the meaning of a musical note or a word of poetry. As someone said of the pianist
Artur Schnabel, music was just the start of it.
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