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From Sarah Schulman's Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination:

Rereading Stan[ Leventhal]’s books [after his death] was a strange experience. This good man who was a loyal friend, who had impeccable taste in literature, who started a literacy program at the New York Lesbian and Gay Community Center to teach gay people how to read, who has a library named after him, who published some of the most interesting gay male work of our era, this guy could not really write. I feel guilty saying that because I know how much Stan wanted to be a great writer. But on the other hand, one of the paradigms we’ve created about AIDS is that of the dead genius. Of course, most of the people who died were not geniuses or great. They were just people who did their best or didn’t even try at all. Some of them were nasty and lousy, others mediocre. Some knew how to face and deal with problems, others ran away and blamed the people closest to them. Stan was unusual because he gave so much to other people, both personally and in his never-ending contributions to the community. These actions alone make him exceptional. But, as an artist he had—as one colleague put it—'an ear of lead.’ Yet, his death and loss is just as horrible, even though he never wrote a great book and possibly never would have.

This book combines a plethora of ideas, some in convincing ways and some less so. But one of the many notes I appreciate about it, is its attitude toward art as a community-based practice that ought to serve the people and communities participating in that practice—a process in which the things being made are just one byproduct of an ongoing process of connection, and of mutual challenge and idea-refinement, amongst the people making them—rather than art as an end-product created for eventual sale, created to serve the tastes of the consumer.

It’s a more naunced argument than many I’ve seen, which tend to devolve into a debate over what’s more important, the artist or the art. Art qua art IS important to Schulman, and some of the ways she talks about it are more… I keep wanting to say “traditionalist” than some, even though she’s advocating for a renaissance of the not-necessarily-marketable, of the niche and the experimental, of art that comes out of, and speaks to, marginalized experiences. That said, she does, for example, believe in objectively “great books,” and in her own ability to discern whether a given book is “great,” which is an idea I think a lot of Tumblr would find uncomfortable. And she finds value in great books, and great plays, and great playwrights and writers; she doesn’t exactly challenge Leventhal’s ambition to be one.

But she values all of this most of all within the context of art as an everyday practice: one among many that make up our lives. It’s the lives that are precious, regardless of how they’re lived; and it’s the lives that are mourned when they’re lost. The value of art is in its ability to bring those lived lives into communion with one another—whether via participation in communal acts of creation, or substantive engagement with the community and the end products of the art-making process—and in its ability to carry forward, into the future, memory of and empathy for those lived lives. That’s a tremendous, crucial body of work; one that, due to the mass AIDS deaths in the 1980s and 1990s, largely remained undone for a sizeable section of the population. At the same time, there are other ways of bringing lived lives into communion with one another, as well (cf: all the things Schulman cites in the passage above: load-bearing work that Leventhal did in the community)—which were lost, too, during the AIDS epidemic, and which, amongst survivors, continue to be crucial. Those things, the art-based communion and the art-tangential or non-art-based communion, aren’t in conflict with one another. And neither one is in conflict with the fact that all lived lives, even those which don’t strive toward that kind of communion, are precious. It’s an and/also rather than an either/or proposition.

I like that analysis.