How Art Can Be Challenging

I just read an inter­view with Jeff Tweedy where he says:

Peo­ple really think nar­rowly when it comes to those types of chal­lenges, and the idea that some­thing has to be aggres­sive or avant grade, or atonal, even, to be a chal­lenge. I’ve found it to be the exact oppo­site. We lit­er­ally put 15 min­utes of noise on a record that did not raise an eye­brow, but if you make a pop song with Feist on it, peo­ple are going to cry like the sky’s falling.

This is in response to a fan who wrote online some­where, “It’s very hard to see how what­ever [Wilco is] could be threat­en­ing in any fash­ion” to which Tweedy jokes, “The goal of all art is to be threat­en­ing in some fashion.”

This is a tough les­son to learn for a cou­ple reasons:

1. I have never under­stood aging rock star music. Exhibit A: Paul McCarntey’s post-​​Beatles stuff (I also didn’t think Wilco’s most recent album was even close to their best). I’ve never found that kind of music chal­leng­ing (which is in the same fam­ily as ‘threat­en­ing’, but cer­tainly isn’t the same thing. 
2. With that in mind, but on the other side of the coin, I think David Fos­ter Wal­lace was right when he pointed out that we’ve come to think of art nec­es­sar­ily as being against some­thing rather than being FOR some­thing. We’re accus­tomed to rock music to rage against the machine, for visual arts to be dis­con­cert­ing, etc etc. But art’s rel­e­ga­tion to the neg­a­tive is a rel­a­tively recent development–it doesn’t have to be that way. 
3. Bal­anc­ing these two ideas: remain­ing chal­leng­ing while refus­ing to be against some­thing is a dif­fi­cult line for artists to walk but also for those of us who are enjoy­ing their art. It’s hard to know just what to com­pare an artist who refuses to fight the Man–we’re trained to see that as selling out. 

It may or may not be sell­ing out. But I want to make that judge­ment based on what’s really true, not on the last 50 years of sor­did art history.