Shadowland Poland - death by cheap comparison

Watching any kind of review of Polish music, television or film here in Poland is often a sad affair because no one has ever achieved anything original, everything and everyone is 'in the style of'. This is a pity on two fronts, because there are many original people and productions, and people really would like to feel good about what is original. What is more, it must be quite annoying for the artists themselves, to be forever compared with other people, imagine what it must feel like to be called 'the Polish James Dean' simply because it is the 1950s and you are a risk taker, where is the space for your original work if you are forever compared to someone else. Do not bother to ask his real name, it is not important, for he was the Polish James Dean, that is all you need to know.

Alright, I admit that if you bind some printed paper together and put it in a cover, it is convenient to call it a 'book'. our experience of books is quite wide and we understand that a book can be many things and are written by many different authors, and as a consequence we know that you cannot open one randomly and be able to predict its content or qualities. Is it a children's book, 19th century literature or an advanced guide to some aspect of physics? However, there are not many James Dean, actor, around, it is pretty much defined in our heads what he is, and if you compare someone else to him your expectancies from the comparison are a lot more limited than saying he is 'like some book you have read'. The very act of naming to some degree excludes that object or person from being other things - once you call something a 'fire engine' you have pretty much excluded soft, fluffy bunnies from your mind, which is the purpose of naming anyway - distinguishing one type of thing from the rest of the universe. It is an extremely powerful tool, and like any such tool, they work best when you need all that power and work least well when the power is not required. The Polish James Dean is like a little nut - fine until someone hit him with a damn great sledgehammer. Now he is squashed on the floor for us to examine, and can never grow into anything else. One squashed nut looks pretty much like any other, they give no indication of the potential they once held, and this is a responsibility we all have when we describe other people and things.

When a field of human endeavour, in this case the assessment of artists and their work, is peppered with comparisons to other work, it is time that the kind of people making the assessments are reviewed, for they are demonstrating a strong lack of ability to assess quality on quality's terms. Comparisons, like counting, is the refuge of the unable or the underconfident, neither group being high on my list of 'hmm, yes, they are the kind of people I would trust for an opinion'. I can easily train my computer to count things, and with a lot more effort get it to compare things, much in the way of speech recognition software. With such an assessment tool anyone could compare any one thing or person in a particular field with another - we could use it to hunt down all the James Deans! Using such a tool we could create a database of all the typical forms of art, classify them, and hence classify all artists and their work in one huge database, and then forever more we could always find something we like, and we would even know how much it was worth.

The only fly in this ointment is that while I am similar to my brother David, and often think and do things in the same way as he does, sometimes we are not the same, we are often very different people. None of us are identical, and none of us even remain the same from moment to moment, year to year, and what we are depends on who is viewing us - how I see myself is not how you see me as me-me and you-me are two different people. If we take this idea a little further, if I am ever changing and ever different in this way, the work i produce will also be different. I spent ten years taking photographs of thousands objects and people in Lublin, and then this year I took 75 pictures of myself, 75 pictures that barely resembled any of the thousands of preceding ones, 75 pictures that changed my view of myself forever. In terms of photography, I had jumped ship.

Once categorised as a 'photographic recorder in the style of X', what chance would my 75 new images have? Even if they were accepted as being different, would I become 'Trevor Butcher, artist' or would I remain 'Trevor Butcher, photographic recorder in the style of X, oh, and he also made some art'? What would have happened if I had made the 75 images before publishing any of the thousands of other images?

If your description process involves direct comparison with limited interest concepts, you reduce the impression you give down to a shadow - and if enough people do this to a nation then it becomes a nation of shadows. Nothing is real, everything is copy. Quality description requires you not only to consider how you judge the object of person, but how the greater society will do the same. If you know that I am an engineer, husband, recorder and artist, make sure you know which one you are describing and assess how the description will be received.

Although it might be harder to find more basic ways of description, by doing so we give ourselves greater opportunity to say more. Once you have defined an actor as the Polish James Dean, there is little else to say about him, the reader would be better served reading about James Dean than anything else you have to say about the Polish actor in question. There is a risk that more basic description can be more difficult to understand, but that only begs the question 'what level of flawed understanding do you wish to propagate, the easy James Dean shadow or some harder level that is closer to the reality?'

Society's views are shaped by all of us, and change must start somewhere. I hope that this is one place where society in Poland will start to take a more responsible attitude to how people and their works are viewed, that people look for better ways to evaluate. Poland, a nation where people like bank managers still believe that possessing a driving license is permission to drive in any desired manner, deserves to learn that believing in the shadows of James Dean is like illuminating one's library by burning the books it contains.