Community as Entertainment

By Marco Vernacatola
Creativity + Social Change
University of Connecticut

I feel that a fitting metaphor for community would be community as entertainment. When people are looking to unwind after a grueling day of work or school, the first thing that this person is likely to do is turn on the TV. The television, for many, is the easiest and most efficient place to go to for entertainment; if you want laughs, music, political talk, or sports, it’s all at your fingertips. The problem with this is that what’s going on in the television isn’t actually there.

This is why the community is an important alternate, and some would say more fulfilling, way to find your entertainment. Everyone in the community has some sort of talent to offer; this can be a good sense of humor and wit, skill with an instrument, or a heated passion for politics. This is all something that can be found on the television, but when this is on the television, it becomes distorted because of its impersonal nature. And the viewers who watch this can only ever be a viewer and never a participant.

As someone who plays an instrument moderately well, there is nothing more exciting than making noise with a group of equally inept musicians in my community, with no aspirations of recording anything or performing live. I’ve seen many bands live, big and small, and jamming with a few friends, making the most horrible noise one can imagine, is still more than exciting than seeing a giant live show or watching music videos and live performances on TV.

The greatest triumph of the community, however, is the fact that it is not an expensive proposition. To see Roger Water’s The Wall live in 2010, I paid $180 to see performers that resembled ants playing a band’s “greatest hits”. On the other hand, it didn’t cost me anything to get together with a few friends for an improvisational jam. The same can be said of art; why spend all your life enjoying only the artists deemed important by the mainstream when there are hundreds of artists in the community who can make meaningful and important pieces of art, regardless of the artist’s popularity?

The sad thing that happens to the community is that people are so focused on celebrities and nationally important figures, that the talents of those around them are ignored in order to continue the hero worship of some person they may never even meet. However, the people in the community are capable of becoming celebrities in their own little circle if the people of the community come together to share and embrace each other’s talents.

A friend of mine, a very talented art student, regularly needs to free up space in his art room, requiring him to get rid of his older paintings he feels are primitive at this point, which I quickly offer to take. As someone who is by no means an art expert, I am as moved by his paintings as I am a van Gogh. And good luck buying an original van Gogh.

In my mind, my friend is as important an artist as anyone in the art world, past or present, and he lives five minutes away from me. This is what makes the community important; it offers what everything else offers, except it is unique in the sense that you can easily become a participant in all the shenanigans.