“The only principle in art is balance,” this was my high school art teacher and she was great—but that was hack advice.

If you’re trying to realistically draw a chair (which we were always trying to do in high school) you can make the legs too long or make them too short and, yeah, you want to do neither, so you see where people get the idea that balance is good.

But think of it from the chair’s point of view: I am not a compromise between some taller chair and some shorter chair, I’m exactly this chair, born to handle the myriad butts of various humans—humans, a specific and unique species that overrun this earth and fills it with chairs and is available in an equally specific range of sizes I ably uphold.

The real chair, here, presents itself to you before it has imaginary mega- short or ultra-tall siblings to compare it to. What we want in honestly depicting this chair isn’t a moderate stance taken between a pair of equal, opposite, fanciful Otherchairs, what we want is precision: a total and in-all-ways-uncompromising devotion to an absolutely extreme position named Fidelity To The Chair. The chair doesn’t have the sexy extremism of being as tiny as a quark or big as a universe but it has a sexy extremism neither can claim: it is more this chair that you are drawing in Dr. Thompson’s class on May 28th in a breeze that slides through the propped-open windows and across the flat blonde varnished desks than any other object can ever hope to be.

Likewise, (outside still-lives and schoolroom realism) that, not balance, is what works in art. Fanatical devotion to the uniqueness of experiences: to what this never-to-be-repeated person born on this particular day in this place sees when they open their eyes—or close them.

The idea that life’s a balance ironically fuels a constant rhetoric of extremes. Be proud! (Also be humble!). Be fierce! (Also be kind!) Trust yourself! (Also be open to other points of view!). Show empathy always! (Also cut negative people out of your life!). This is fascism! (Also don’t compare people to Hitler!)

Contradictions don’t matter since statements aren’t there to be contemplated or analyzed, they’re just tools to nudge us this way or that, toward an intuited perfect place. To the philosophy of balance “Be proud” doesn’t mean always prioritize your pride it just means be more proud than you currently are, until it’s time (at some unspecified moment) to stop being proud and then be humble. In this model, no Facebook post or spiritual guru or revolutionary or president really wants any of the things they ask of you, they’re just provoking you—and maybe that’s the energy you need? Until…you don’t?…at some point?

The art equivalent of the statement that’s dumb-but-useful is the artwork that’s important-but-bad. The piece that, in some alleged context, moves some theoretical art-viewing public closer to where it reportedly needs to be. This is part of an increasing medicalization of art: each artist is a drug competing for space in the nervous system of the artgoing public. “This is the show We Need Right Now.” The art is no longer an example of the possibilities afforded by being human but a nutrient fed through a tube into a sense of shared public meaning lying on its deathbed.

If art is always medical then no discussion of art is ever just about a difference of taste: you either are being responsible by catering to the tastes of those Most In Need or you aren’t and we should argue over it like we do over how we spend our tax dollars. (Consider how rare it is to find an effective take-down of an artwork or artist that doesn’t do so by identifying the work with some axis of social oppression. We may not all agree what’s Socially Bad, but unlike Aesthetically Bad, at least we can all agree Socially Bad exists.)

And so what? If you go around yelling GO WEST! who cares if this is only useful to audience members drowning off the Delaware coast? Well, the ultimate problem with nudging artworks—as with statements meant to nudge us—is they’re only useful if you’re stupider than the person who made them. Maybe encouragement and protest sound more fun to you than information, but I’d submit that in 2019 the information is very exciting: teenagers are millionaires, the East is waging cyberwar, drugs are legal, everyone’s polyamorous or dead from drone strikes or has face tattoos, Nazis and anti-Nazis roam the streets, thousands of adults are squashing melons with their thighs on your phone right now. What we need is not constant competing shrieks of course correction but a fanatical devotion to mapping this terra incognita.