Mediocrity is meaningless

The piece on artist Ray Johnson [“His Life Was His Art, His Death Its Coda,” by Steven Rosen, March 11], coupled with the one in the magazine, “The Golden Age of Mediocrity” [March 7], bring together for me a sad fact: Too often in today’s world eccentricity passes for originality in art. That, together with the arbitrary focus on grunge and the gross, because they exist in life, adds up to mediocrity.

Horror, pain, even eccentricity have been depicted by geniuses of Art (Goya, Picasso, Camus, Rilke, Beckett, to name a very few). But in every case the darkness has enlightened or moved the viewer or reader as only true Art can. The work transforms the horror into a powerful experience that adds to our humanness, our compassion. Mediocre work that gives us grunge, eccentricity or grossness for its own sake is as meaningless as art for its own sake.

Peggy Aylsworth Levine

Santa Monica