(2023-10-13) Gioia My12 Favorite Problems

Ted Gioia: My 12 Favorite Problems. I’ve benefited in my own life by asking the same questions over and over—for a period of decades.

I have better answers to each of them now than I did 20 or 30 years ago. The progress I’ve made on my favorite problems has enhanced my life in many ways, and not just as a writer.

I will start with problems that I constantly ask myself as a scholar in music and the arts. But the scope will widen as we go down the list, and vocational concerns will overlap with personal matters.

(1) How can music change people’s lives?

This question came to the forefront of my thinking around 1990, almost exactly the midpoint of my life to date. I was 33 years old, and that’a a good age for defining your mature work. From that moment on, songs weren’t just songs for me. They were change agents in human life and a source of enchantment.

(2) How do I deal with situations when great art is created by flawed artists?

Grappling with this has made me a better critic, a better judge of artistic works. But it’s also had a larger effect of making me think more about forgiveness and redemption.

makes me more aware of my own responsibilities and shortcomings.

To some degree, this helps me nurture my own capacities in everyday life for kindness and compassion

(3) How can creativity, intellectual vitality, and learning be maintained in the face of inescapable obstacles—such as earning a living, or aging, or financial hardship, or residing far from major cultural centers?

Here, again, it’s been useful to formulate the problem in clear terms. That’s because a lot of the battle here is fought on constantly shifting terrain. The demands in your life are always changing—sometimes it’s the job, at other times family responsibilities, or illness, or something else that’s in the forefront of your life.

By facing up to the trade-offs, I’ve learned to find degrees of freedom in situations that otherwise might seem intractable.

(4) How can we avoid cultural stagnation—especially given the obsession with remakes, reboots, spinoffs, and brand extensions of old works by the dominant corporations that control most of the creative economy?

As a writer and culture critic, I operate at the intersection between these corporations and the mass audience. My influence is limited, but if I don’t play a part in trying to revitalize and refresh our artistic idioms, I will have wasted much of the potential of my vocation.

(5) How do I avoid becoming a narrow specialist or a superficial generalist? Is there a third way? If so, how do I get there?

I’ve tried to find a third way. I do immersive deep dives into new subjects—reading 40 or 50 books in a particular area. Then I move on to a different field of inquiry, and do the same thing all over again.

Over time, I have become a specialist in a few areas (jazz and blues, for example), but I have refused to let these turn into all-encompassing pursuits, or push me into debates over minutiae. This has forced me to fight against editors and organizations who decided many years ago that I should only write about one subject.

There’s a lesson there for everybody. The economic engines of society want to make each of us a very narrow person. The ruling institutions will almost always resist our efforts to develop into whole human beings.

(6) How can I protect or nurture local styles and perspectives in an increasingly globalized and homogenized culture

(7) How can I operate honestly as a critic without absorbing all the negative psychic energy involved in criticism? How do I reconcile this vocation with my desire to act kindly and compassionately at all times?

This has forced me to develop a number of tools and rules for my writing. For example, I only review albums I genuinely love nowadays. Life is too short to do hit pieces—although those are often very popular with editors and readers. Also, I try to focus my most intense criticisms on organizations, institutions, policies, and attitudes, and avoid direct attacks on individuals.

(8) How can we find balance and cohesion in a culture where the supply of creative work (100,000 new songs are uploaded every day) outstrips audience demand, which is at best static and perhaps shrinking.

(9) Is criticism objective or subjective?

(10) How do I handle the divide between highbrow and lowbrow pop culture?

(11) How can I thrive while operating contrary to dominant social and cultural trends?

What if you feel that many of the prevailing trends are banal, or actually dysfunctional?

This has always been a huge issue for me, because I am a contrary thinker by nature

(12) How can I have a positive impact?

I’ve learned that if I think about this problem on a daily basis—what positive impact can I have here and now on this day?—I start making better decisions.