Some artists carry the cultural burden of their genius and mounting legacy. Ahem—not I.
Having run through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ first four stages of grief as pertains to my career (denial, anger, bargaining, depression), I’ve finally come to acceptance: I’m clearly burdened by neither genius nor legacy. This revelation has freed me to embrace what I’ve come to call “sublime mediocrity”—that liminal space where one’s creative execution so consistently falls short of one’s vision that it becomes kind of “your thing.”
In my case, it’s chiefly the result of executing idiosyncratic visions without sufficient money or talent. The result seldom robs my audiences of their imagination of how it could’ve, would’ve or should’ve been better if it weren’t for the above. I like to think my limitations give the audience space to imagine the version they think I meant to make, or the one they would’ve done better (had they tried). And in that way, it’s almost collaborative.
In that gap between what I thought I was doing versus what I did, there becomes a haunted, shimmering negative space where the ghost of the “better” enjoys its meta half-life. This is the wellspring of sublime mediocrity. It’s the vertigo that occurs when we realize how far through the crack between our ambition and limitations we’ve fallen. And for some extra anxiety, do it in public.
We try; we fail. And yet, the sublime emerges not despite mediocrity but because of it.
As Voltaire advised, “Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good,” to which I’ll add, “…or the good enough,” or really, the “simply done.” Like my spiritual forebears in the art-schlock racket, having a body of work—an incarnation of one’s vision, no matter how flabby or shabby—is better than carrying a bardo of disembodied ideas that never manifest at all. And taste, being the mercurial hellion that it is, means one never knows when one’s work may accidentally trip face first into favor.
There is a quiet liberation that comes when alleviated from the expectation of brilliance. Once it’s gone, a kind of inspired Zen sets in. I once watched a juggler drop a ball on the stage—he regarded it, raised an eyebrow and wryly appraised his effort as “perfect.” In art, intention can be retroactive; it’s the quantum loophole that makes sublime mediocrity not a failure but an aesthetic. The mistake is the message.
And here, where we’re too underfunded to soar and too weird to make something “normal,” we’re surrounded by local culture built on beautiful near-misses—films that screened and vanished, bands that almost broke, publications that might’ve changed the world had they been read beyond the county line. These are the sacred relics of the possible, the sublimely mediocre because the miracle here isn’t in our perfection but in our persistence. The masterpiece is the mess we dared to make.
Daedalus Howell is at dhowell.com.
