These are two short parts from Chunhyangga:

Sarangga (Love Song)

Nobungga (Farmer’s Song)

The music’s loud. Unbelievably loud. I didn’t know what to expect and now sitting in a tiny theater a foot away from the stage going partially deaf and yelling out my vocal chords really cemented the whole feeling of “what the nonsense is happening?” But I honestly think that having no idea what to expect made the entire experience that much more powerful. Everything was minimalist from the stage to the man himself, muMs, because, as we’d soon learn, there was no need for any ornamentation.

MuMs walks onstage to some scattered applause. Casually dressed, he begins almost immediately: “Fear is a warning and I’m scared.” Someone from the audience calls out “why?” but muMs ploughs on, reciting his poem, his story. He gives us the setting, introduces his beginning as a “sucker emcee.” We’re captured as an audience, the lights are changing behind muMs almost subtlety; the music matches him. And the hip-hop coming from DJ Rich Medina’s table isn’t the stuff we hear on the radio today, it’s classic stuff, old time hip-hop; the majority of which I was unfamiliar with. (I am proud to say I did recognize Rapper’s Delight immediately, though it was because I had seen it on the “Brian Williams Sings” segment of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.)

MuMs interweaves the genesis of hip-hop with his own childhood in the Bronx. From living through the blackout of 1977 as a kid to going to college at Norfolk State and getting into drugs and back to New York where he began working at a hospital, muMs takes on the rollercoaster that is his life. He reconnects with hop-hop at open mics, his desire to be a rapper taking priority over everything else. When he makes it as an actor, he thinks life is good, but when the show reaches its conclusion, he finds himself in a depression and trying to return to his rhymes.

MuMs doesn’t hold back and gives his all to the performance, sweating almost as soon as he’s onstage. His very personal and detailed accounts of his life are touching. Since he recounts his entire life up to the present, there’s something for everyone to relate to. I personally was most moved by his charge at the end of the performance, telling young people to stay true to themselves and their dreams. “Fear is a warning and I’m scared.” MuMs’ whole life has been overcoming fear, not being debilitated by fear, not allowing a disenfranchised beginning color the rest of his life; bouncing back and soldiering on. DJ Rich Medina said it best during the talk-back, the show was to inspire young men of color in this day and age when it seems the world is against them and showing them another future away from trouble.

The reason this show works is because of its “one-man” way. If there had been other actors playing the parts of muMs’ family, it would have detracted from the performance. If there had been intermission or scene changes, it would have disrupted the art and drawn us out of the world muMs’ created.

Though I had my doubts, A Sucker Emcee has moved and inspired me to keep holding on to my dreams and never let fear cripple me. “Fear is a warning and I’m scared.” Overcome the fear and keep moving.

In Taxi Driver, there were jarring red lights, honking horns, and cussing lowlife scum. In Wall Street, there were greedy stockbrokers and more cussing lowlife scum. In God of Carnage, there were misbehaving parents and pretentious artifacts of wealth being destroyed left and right. Now, we add In Arabia We’d All Be Kings, with an entire cast of lowlife scum, to the pile of artworks that portray a nasty, gritty New York. Their New York is reality, but we’d all like to reject that reality and substitute a prettier one, right?

Enter the iconic Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It takes place in Manhattan. There’s not a bum in sight. How could that be? Breakfast at Tiffany’s was released in 1961, right when the city was teetering on the brink of slipping into decay. Nothing in the film suggests that in ten years time (around the time of Taxi Driver) that this beautiful city would become a cesspool.

Holly Golightly is a socialite seeking a wealthy man to marry. At first her intentions seem very good, she wants to help her brother Fred with the money she’d gain from marrying up. But she keeps cooking up new plans to marry wealthy men much to chagrin of her neighbor Paul, who is less financially inclined but loves Holly genuinely.

Unlike Veronique from God of Carnage, who measures her wealth in her unique, expensive possessions, Holly thinks wearing diamonds at her age would be horrendously tacky and her apartment has bare-bones furnishings. Though she (sometimes desperately) desires money, Holly doesn’t resort to turning tricks like Iris of Taxi Driver or DeMaris of In Arabia We’d All Be Kings. She also easily disentangles herself from men, unlike Darien in Wall Street. Holly seems to be a self-made woman, a classy lady who believes she owns herself. In this way, she seems to embody the ideal New York, independent and somewhat aloof and gorging on all things “classy.”

Everything about Breakfast at Tiffany’s breathes “high class,” from Holly’s tasseled earplugs, to the costumes, to the cinematography. Everything in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is aesthetically pleasing to the eye and ear. None of the camera shots have overly saturated, bright colors; everything is soft and nice to look at. Unlike Taxi Driver with its harsh lights and red filters, Breakfast at Tiffany’s is soft and pretty; its cinematography is almost feminine like Holly herself.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s epitomizes wealthy New York, even though Holly herself is not particularly wealthy. She aspires to wealth through marriage and she is very much an independent being. She drinks milk out of wine glasses and Tiffany’s is her safe haven. Through the delicate light of the camera, there’s not an inkling of thought that New York was about to take a dive off the deep end. The ending is hopeful instead of happy, like New Yorkers themselves.

Classism in art? Horror! Oh the humanity! It cannot be! Well, yes, of course it can be. It’s a reality, a harsh one, but a reality nonetheless. To believe that art is unaffected by class divisions is to willingly cover your eyes and try to navigate a maze. You’ll run into something almost immediately.

Let’s start with film. Who watches films? Films, in contrast to theater, are economical forms of entertainment. So that means films are widely accessible to everyone. Matinees for films sometimes have discounted prices. Smuggle in some snacks and treat yourself to a new release. Films are available to almost everyone. So filmmakers must take into account who is going to consume their product. Films like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street are made with this “all classes will see this” mindset. Bud Fox’s father and the airline workers are honest blue-collar people who watch each other’s backs and want the best for everyone. Meanwhile, Gordon Gekko, the rich and powerful, lacks a moral compass and manipulates every person who falls into his clutches. This black and white view of the classes, this Robin Hood attitude, is what I think made Wall Street a success. If the everyman had seen a morally upright Gekko and crooked union workers, the movie would have been slammed. How dare you say that these poor laborers are crooked? And how can a man with that much money be “good”? You’re out of your mind!

Contrast that with Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. The moral ambiguity is strong in this one! Here, only the lower classes are really depicted. In fact, the destitute are painstakingly documented and their squalid lives are panned over in the slowest motion possible. However, there’s a lack of Robin Hood-ing happening here. There are no rich scapegoats here. The seventies were a dark time for New York City; a lot of people were down on their luck. Travis sees this and becomes angrier and angrier. He wants his city cleaned up. Times are so hard that young runaways like Iris resort to turning tricks to scrape by. Travis is angry, so angry that he takes a stand by killing three people he deems “scum” and becomes a hero. No one is safe in Scorsese’s New York. In his New York, everyone does what he or she must, even when its illegal or immoral or just plain wrong, to survive in the urban jungle. Who is good? Who is bad? It’s all relative.

Artists play with class structure to their benefit. Stone used a stereotypical view of class divisions a la Robin Hood to curry favor with the broad audience flocking to see his film. Scorsese broke down this idea of a stereotype by showing us a vast array of dark, morally turned around characters who are just trying to survive. That way, it’s not so easy to pass judgment about the classes or if one class is morally superior to another class. Remove Robin Hood from the equation and you’re left with the everyday human, a dramatized version perhaps. Every person, economics aside, has moral obstacles to overcome.

If you asked me a few months ago what art was, I’d probably tell you “the stuff that collects dust in museums, duh.” But now, truly faced with that question, I find it infinitely hard to give an answer. Of course, temptation drags me back to museums, but the stuff that collects dust in museums isn’t the only art out there. Anyway, who says the stuff in museums is the best art out there? What makes paintings made in the sixteenth century any more valuable than a chalk painting made by a child on a sidewalk? Who puts value on art?

Museums and their curators have a large influence on what we consider art. Aspiring artists dream of having their work hanging in a gallery because to them, being in a museum means they’ve made it. However, this kind of institutionalized snobbery prevents us ordinary folk from appreciating the art all around us. When I visited Paris, outside the Church of the Sacred Heart, a tourist started having an impromptu piano concert on a purple piano out on the summit. Was that not art?

So, can’t art be anything? But art isn’t everything. And depending on who you ask, art isn’t always art! If you took me to a modern art museum, I’d argue twelve ways from Sunday that four dots and a line on a white canvas isn’t art. Why? Because any child with a crayon can do that. But now wait, art isn’t defined by skill, is it? Well, I guess not. So does that make modern art “real” art? And if someone said that graffiti is art, I’d say that it was vandalism. Does art have to be legal? Well, I guess not, some artists painted things that were banned from museums or were otherwise met with controversy. Even old statues of naked people were censored by future curators and then uncensored again.

So now we’re in a pickle. What’s art? Art is subjective. Art is anything, but it can’t be everything. Someone is always going to be there saying pieces can’t be hung in museums because it’s not “real art.” But if a grown man can glue a pen cap to a plastic cup and call it art, then why can’t I draw a scribble and call that art? Shouldn’t art have a meaning behind it?

What is art? Here’s my serious answer: art is something with an aesthetic value to someone, it typically has some meaning behind it, and it was made to please the artist and its commissioner if there was one. Whether or not it hangs in a gallery or is out on display isn’t important. You’ll know art when you see it.