Mediocrity, more than anything else, conjures in me a dull, numbing apathy that pounds at me like a brainless headache until I move on and realize the uncaring despair I was feeling while experiencing it. You might reasonably be asking what a brainless headache feels like, as it is typically the brain that feels affected by the headache, and your intuition is exactly right: it feels like nothing at all. A brainless headache is that non-existent ache one wishes to feel, and yet cannot because it is complacent and satisfied where it shouldn’t be.
To encounter mediocrity in art is to bear witness to a kind of death, for mediocre art—aside from being a kind of oxymoron—is little more than an effort by the dead to preserve what isn’t there. It is devoid of nutritious substance, empty, and boring. The point of art, no matter the medium, is to instill life through creative endeavor. That need not require a message or a meaning, but art nevertheless demands some life from the artist so that it can become more than colors swirled together, gestures or notes moving through the air, black lines on a page.
Much the same can be said of the workplace, can it not? The exceptional stand out, the terrible need attention, and no one pays any attention to the mediocre. Never mind what I may or may not find uninspiring. Mediocrity is uninspiring per se.
Besides all this, mediocrity allows the hipsters to feel they have a purpose in life. That is a crime which stands alone, by itself, but I digress.
With care,
~ Grigori