Amateurs Like Us

This can be a liberating notion. Some of the art created by so-called “outsider” musicians and artists, and championed by small record labels and fringe galleries, arguably qualifies as amateur work and is certainly worth bringing to the fore. Much of it has a sincerity and urgency that challenges the contrived, anemic efforts of an array of art-schooled social climbers. There is no question that many more voices are demanding, and getting, our attention.

The mainstreaming of amateur culture also has the undeniable virtue of being a respite from a mass culture that has otherwise demanded only our silent acquiescence. It’s no coincidence that the rise of the professional amateur entertainer has been accompanied by a shift in the role of the spectator. Consider the rapid growth in interactive entertainments such as the digi-satellite version of Hockey Night In Canada, for instance, where you work from a menu that invites you to choose your own camera angle, follow the statistics of particular players, get instant updates about the games you care about, and so on. For a price, you can be camera operator, television producer, and audience, essentially creating your own broadcast. As a result, you feel ever more invested in — and a part of — your own entertainment. So, what could be wrong with that?

The trouble is, the amateur professional, on or off the screen, does not have to be good at anything. In fact, one is more likely to succeed in this realm by being inexpert, a naïf. So where does that leave those who have worked hard to cultivate and explore a real talent? As Vinay Menon, the television critic for the Toronto Star wrote, about the Guinness World Records book on the occasion of that institution’s fiftieth anniversary this past summer, “In a sense, [it] has helped create a culture in which oddball feats are now validated, catalogued, and glorified as worthy accomplishments.” Amateur activities are put on par with truly great feats of strength, will, or the mind, most of which take years, if not lifetimes, to achieve.

The professional amateur equalizes accomplishment and, in so doing, diminishes true achievement. As Menon reported in his piece, when two American teens from Grand Rapids, Michigan, went for a world record by watching television for fifty-two hours straight (the magic number, apparently, when it comes to world records) inside an International House of Pancakes, their feat was greeted within their community with acclamation, rather than with the kind of disdain that adults used to reserve for kids who watch too much TV. As one of the proud fathers put it, “He has to be good at something; this is just as well. He set a goal and reached it.”

The real tragedy is that amateurism itself — doing something for the love of it — is fast becoming passé, and along with it a sense of play for its own sake. The more amateur activities turn professional, the less likely they are to actually be creative and fun. In Ontario,for instance, for the past two-and-a-half years, a program sponsored by the provincial government has been teaching children how to play. The kids are taught the rules of old games like hop-scotch and four-square. It seems that, somehow, young people, occupied by Nintendo and online interactive entertainment and reality TV, don’t know how to play. Like many adults, they are forgetting the amateur pursuits that came naturally in a world in which Scrabble was just a game, not a touring circuit with trophies and thousands of dollars at stake. ( In contrast, how many kids need instruction in the correct stance for crooning a pop song or delivering a press conference? This information seems to come to them so easily.)

Our obsession with the professional amateur likewise threatens to diminish the spirit of invention. Many of our most famous early innovators — people whom we now revere as experts — were dabblers. Leonardo da Vinci toyed with flight in between painting masterpieces. His thoughts on the subject would later influence the Wright brothers. Marconi was a twenty-one-year-old amateur when he invented the world’s first system for wireless telegraphy. The American statesman Benjamin Franklin is remembered for his work with the lightning rod, but he had a staggering array of other inventions, including the Franklin stove, the odometer, a flexible urinary catheter, and bifocals. (Franklin had very poor vision and decided to address the problem himself.) In fact, until recently, many of our great artists and creators lacked the accreditation of a Ph.D.; they were empowered not by a panel of experts but by their sense of exploration and fun: they pretty much made up their best work as they went along.

The explosion of amateur professionals erodes the amateur ideal of doing stuff just for the fun of it, out of interest, as an obsession, or just to see what happens. We’ve replaced that with a hunger to be noticed on a grand scale. Sonya Thomas, a thirty-seven-year-old from South Korea who is a high-ranking contestant on America’s “competitive eating circuit” (she has consumed an impressive 167 chicken wings in thirty-two minutes, among other things), once noted, “People always seem to recognize me wherever I go. They treat me like a star. It makes me feel special.” On the Web site iwannabefamous.com, people tell the world why they should be celebrated and recognized. Sixteen-year-old Rachel writes, “I want to give people the joy of seeing me in movies like my movie heroes did with me!!! I am sick of looking for a ‘regular’ job, I know that nothing but acting interests me, I feel life slipping by, and that ‘something is missing’ feeling begins to dominate me all day and night.”

With every hobby and activity a potential site of future celebrity, the Rachels of the world grow impatient: “something is missing,” and it’s the fame they believe they deserve, no matter what they have to give up in order to attain it.

Ultimately, a proliferation of amateur experts may prove no worse for our society than a proliferation of professional experts who aren’t, truth be told, always all that good at what they do either. (Is there much of a difference, when it comes to musicianship, between Canadian Idol’s Theresa Sokyrka and the singer Nelly Furtado? And Ken Hechtman was no less enlightening than some of his supposedly expert counterparts — remember Geraldo scratching maps in Iraqi sand as war raged all around him?) But the real question is, in an age of flat-lined entertainment in which all role models are the could-be-you guy or gal next door, what happens to hard work, commitment, real talent? Alas, they don’t quite fit into this scheme. Neither do geniuses, visionaries, or even just highly trained professionals interested in exploring an art form such as, say, experimental contemporary classical music.

Which brings us back to John Conte, whose record-breaking performance began as a last-ditch effort for some recognition. In fact, Conte and his friend Jim Riffel collaborated on the world record because they thought it might jump-start Conte’s career and promote a couple of films they had worked on together. “We were just trying to find a way to get some attention,” Conte explained. “It was the director’s idea.”