Just a couple days ago, my friend Rob — who I haven’t seen in roughly a decade, around the time he made a noncommital attempt on my life in a crowded day-camp pool — made a very kind and generous comment on the most recent of my bloggish prattle. In it, he complimented what I had written in ways both inspiring and unwarranted, which he prefaced with a striking thesis:

Of the forms of expression… from music to painting to movies… writing strikes me as one of the hardest mediums to transform into something truly original and therefore worthwhile.

I looked him up on the old social networking cable device and began to write a sentence’s thought in response, which wound up becoming a paragraph I felt better suited to a reply on the original comment thread fabric, which wound up becoming the kind of bloggish prattle I like to spew loose on the World Wide Web every now and then. So here we are.

My first reaction to his comment was to disagree, if only because I’ve done a whole lot of writing in my life and very little music or filmmaking.¹ But the more I thought about it, I realized that Rob isn’t wrong: writing is, in terms of focused works that have been preserved and replicated across time, the oldest form of artistic expression we have. The Epic of Gilgamesh is aged around three millenniums now, and we still remember plenty of novels and written stories that were made long before the first real printing press began slowly to make the idea of writing a book far more accessible. That happened circa 1450 in Europe, and even earlier in the eastern world — which is a pretty huge head start when you compare that to when similar creative revolutions happened in the mediums of music and film. Considering writing and painting are the two oldest forms of expression that have been practiced by a considerable number of people and produced for a considerable amount of time, it makes sense that there would be more work on record in those two mediums than the others — which would, at least logically, make it harder to be original in those forms today. Because photography and film were art forms invented and made possible by relatively recent innovations in technology, they’re at a historical disadvantage — even before recording, classical composers at least had sheet music.

But it’s around this point in my line of thinking that I realize I might not be weighting these different mediums fairly. After all, it’s hard to quantify an art or even estimate the amount of time/love/effort a piece of art would take to make, but if we were to define the standard units of creativity in each of these art mediums, we could simplify it as…

Writing: the book
Music: the album
Handmade art: the exhibit
Photography: also an exhibit (or maybe photo album…Flickr set?)
Film: the movie

Most of these are generally roughly basically equivalent — it seems to take most artists an average of about two years to come up with a book, album, or art exhibit that is actually worth other folks’ time. And some truly inspired individuals can make astonishing creative works in far less time.² Though music is generally more collaborative than the novel or the art exhibit, great pieces of music can certainly be the work of just one artist. But no matter what, a filmmaker can seldom make a great film all by his lonesome, or any film at all — and if he chooses to, that severely limits his creative palette. When you consider that most films today (even independents) are often made possible by the hard work of hundreds and the wallets of at least one very rich man, the combined inputs and man hours to yield your standard unit of creativity is pretty astronomical. Even if we scale back our unit of creativity to, say, a (very) short film, far more people and far more effort is generally involved there than it takes to write a short story, pen a song, or take/make a picture. So it’s not really fair to dismiss the film as an easier route for originality on the premise of its youth as an art form, considering that even getting the chance to take a shot at originality is pretty damn hard.

Things get hairier still when we consider how one painting (or record, or writing) can be far more ambitious than another, usually extending the time it takes to be finished. I could wax on and wax off all night, but I’m more curious to hear what you have to say. If anybody’s still reading at this point: What is, to you, the hardest art to make worthwhile? And what is the art form you most appreciate and respect when it’s done as well as it can be? That’s a pretty heavy question and I think I’ve knotted myself up thinking about this stuff as it is, so I’m going to let that kick around my head a little longer. Maybe your thoughts will spur mine.

Back to Rob’s comment (nice and full circle-like), I’m more comfortable disagreeing with his claim that art has to be “truly original” in order to be worthwhile — plenty of art I’ve read and seen and heard has been far from original, at times even pointedly derivative, and I’ve scrutinized plenty of art that is wholly original but still absolute shit. But that’s some prattle for another day.

1. Sadly. Yet. [↩]
2. The Beatles pretty much clinch the Best Band Ever title in my mind when I consider that they churned those albums out at a pace of roughly one every six months. [↩]

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