They guard the entrance
to creativity, allowing the select few—those who pass muster—to enter. Not the
riff raff, the wanabees, those sad, misguided dilettantes who try to worm their
way through the slats because they think their work shows merit.
They’re the gatekeepers,
and they prevent the unskilled culture-defacers from assailing the public with
crap.
If it weren’t for that
cadre of connoisseurs assessing, ranking, and restocking the Aesthetic Empire,
the eating, viewing, and reading public wouldn’t know what to eat, view, or
read.
Take food. Without the
Big Food Houses, like Poach Board and Pot Watch, anyone and his second cousin
could open a restaurant. BFHs put aspiring restaurateurs through a series of
trial kitchens where chefs prepare innovative fare for taste testing, after
which the Palate Committee flavor-edits the dishes, taking, say, six to ten
months, eventually returning the recipes with recommended modifications that
the would-be culinarian must integrate into menu options before contracts are
finalized.
The Big Food House then
spends the next year and a half designing and building the restaurant, and,
once ready for business, collects all restaurant proceeds, forwarding to the
owner maybe eight percent of the profits in quarterly installments.
Gastronomic gatekeepers
save the world from being saturated with substandard eateries, i.e.,
self-established restaurants whose owners believe their food actually tastes
good.
Then there’s art. Painters,
sculptors, photographers. Those quirky right-brainers who think that producing
art is a way of life. Without Art Gatekeepers there’d be oils and watercolors
and photographs and sculptures on display all over the place—museums,
galleries, stores, street corners, gardens, offices.
The Big Art Houses, such
as Design Depository and Statue Statutorium, keep the art world under control.
They stash submissions for review in massive warehouses, where they remain
until the Talent Assessment Guild determines their attributes. The evaluation
process is simple. The Appraisal Committee, made up of the administrative
assistant and night janitor, stands in front of each work of art, and throws
Rock, Paper, Scissors. A coin toss determines who represents the artist.
Rock over Scissors means
the piece is rejected, or if small enough, displayed over the urinal in the
men’s room.
Paper-over-Rock means the
art is returned to the artist for revision—with a note:
“Jackson
– Uh, we think you sent us your floor tarp by mistake.”
Or
“Ansel,
a bit of color would be nice.”
Or
“Say Vincent - Don’t give up. With some
practice, you’ll master perspective.”
Or
“Yo!
Leonardo! My Man! – Everyone on the same side of a table? Hello.”
Now these artists, if
they want a second chance with TAG, must edit their pieces according to where
the dart lands on the revision wheel—Color Within the Lines, Smooth Out the
Dots, Quit with the Umbrellas, Straighten the Watch, Add Velvet—anything to
show they’ve at least parked at an art school.
Scissors-over-Paper means
the piece is a keeper, and contracts are signed. Once a piece of art is chosen
for public view, it’s put aside until there are upwards of twenty additional
Scissors-over-Paper wins by the same artist—enough for a full gallery open.
Could take two to five years, during which time the artist waits tables for a
Pot Watch Restaurant.
Art Gatekeepers save the
world from being saturated with substandard museums, galleries, and studios,
i.e., self-installed exhibitions whose artists believe their art actually looks
good.
Then there are writers.
Good writers. Bad writers. Mediocre writers. Doesn’t matter. They all want to
be published. Somewhere. But especially by the Big Book Houses, like Reticent
Review and Predictable Press. Ask any writer, and he or she will say that
publication is a primary goal. It’s imperative to have reading gatekeepers.
Otherwise, just anybody could write and publish a book. And if just anybody
could write and publish a book, there’d be books everywhere. We all know that the
reading public lacks wordsmith sophistication. They read books
indiscriminately, ignoring taste, creativity, style, and quotation marks on the
wrong side of the period.
It’s essential that
gatekeepers guard the reading public from piles of word hash plopped beside
gourmet prose at any reader’s table. How dare a writer expect to publish a book
without it first being prepared, plated, and presented to judges who can attest
to the quality and doneness of a piece of writing?
The BBHs judge a book by
its cover. Therefore, it helps if an aspiring writer has a close working
relationship with a Scissors over Paper art winner. Once the cover passes
muster, the interior text is evaluated—there must be a plethora of words with
more than six syllables, properly embedded fonts, and an appropriate dedication
to one’s mother.
The publishing world has
evolved to the extent that anyone—Grandma Jones, Aunt Agnes, Cousin Earl—can
publish a book. But self-publishers have no gatekeepers. Self-published books
aren’t legitimate. They’re written by amateurs. Ask the gatekeepers.
Self-published authors use bad grammar, change tenses, and incorporate too many
adjectives and adverbs. Self-published books are puerile, shallow, and
undeveloped. They’re not properly edited, they’re boring, they’re tedious— a
scourge on the market.
It doesn’t matter that
someone’s father, a gentleman in his early 90s, wants to publish a series of
stories and see them in print before he dies. Or that a Mid-west bride wants to
write her story of how she met a retired NYC police officer while playing on-line
Scrabble, fell in love, and got married. Or that a mystery writer—an esteemed
mystery writer—an award-winning mystery writer—chooses to go indie instead of
kowtowing to the King of Kopy. It doesn’t matter that some, perhaps many,
writers have dreams of seeing their words, their stories, their manuscripts,
stand on a shelf between Shakespeare and Steinbeck. It doesn’t matter that,
like restaurateurs and artists, they want to see their hard work come to
fruition and become a product they can sell to the public, or share with their
friends, or give to their children, or hold in their hands.
What’s that you say? Not
all self-published books are full of crap? There are well-written,
self-published books by excellent authors? That it's not the self-publishing in
and of itself that qualifies a book for the back porch, not good enough for the
grown-up table, not worthy of the good china?
And that just as
establishing one’s own restaurant doesn't mean bad food or installing one’s own
gallery doesn't mean bad art, self-publishing one's own book doesn't mean a bad
read? How radical.
If that's the case, then here's to all writers who dream of seeing their books on the shelf or on the coffee table or shining through the small screen of an e-reader. Go for it. Don’t be intimidated by the elitism of gatekeepers.
If that's the case, then here's to all writers who dream of seeing their books on the shelf or on the coffee table or shining through the small screen of an e-reader. Go for it. Don’t be intimidated by the elitism of gatekeepers.
http://www.publishista.com/Ellie_Searl.html
