This is Calcutta. Bohemia is dead.

I love musicals. Love 'em, love 'em, love 'em. Love 'em when they're mainstream, candy-coated, toothache-inducingly sweet confections like Hairspray. Love 'em when they're dark, serious, literate bloodbaths like Sweeney Todd. Or, at the very least, I love fat girls dancing and over-the-top violence. So I thought I'd take a look back at the very first musical I was ever intimately familiar with: Rent.

Even though an image of the poster for Rent actually appears next to the Miriam-Collins dictionary entry for the adjective "dated," criticizing the play's myriad flaws is an ever-timely endeavour, thanks to the constant presence of poorly-received film adaptations and poorly-received revival tours, all of which surprisingly continue to feature the increasingly grizzled original cast, who I believe are now in their mid-to-late 60s (it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison because of the different sample sizes, but it's nonetheless interesting to note that the combined ages of the eight members of the original cast of Rent are now actually higher than those of the four CIA scientists who invented AIDS in the 1970s in the hopes of finally bringing down the Black Panthers).

But I digress. The point is that Rent is a musical that will leave a lasting impact on you the first time you see it, as long as you try really, really hard not to actually think about it. So it's fortunate for me that I first encountered the OBCR (Original Broadway Cast Recording, for those of you who lack my musical theatre pedigree) of Rent in the 11th grade, back when listening to Jimmy Eat World was a profound emotional experience and getting a hand job was a profound sexual experience. So even today, I can watch the Rent movie and actually feel a little bit touched now and then. It can put a smile on my face. And then it ends and all I can think about is how damn stupid it is.

Specifically, I'd like to set aside concerns like how the entire second act has no pacing or structure, or how a play so frequently noted for the ethnic and sexual diversity of its cast has two straight white guys as protagonists, and focus on how, for a play that at its heart is about about artists and their struggle to create, Rent has incredibly juvenile, poorly thought out views on art: views that I've encountered in the real world, and that I think are rather pernicious. And just to drive home the point that I'm a Serious Man With Serious Views On Art, I'll make some reference to Chekhov's The Seagull.

Rent tells the tale of Mark and Roger, two young Boho types living in New York in either the very late 80s or the very early 90s, their quirky minority friends, and their struggle to make it as artists while dealing with the ramifications of the AIDS epidemic. Mark, a filmmaker, and Roger, a musician, are both struggling with creative block. In fact, Roger has apparently never written a song. They spend the one night of the first act and the one year of the second act trying to make their respective grand artistic statements. A goal which they pursue primarily not by working hard on their craft, but by congratulating themselves for being poor and living in a rat-hole loft in a crumbling building.

Throughout Rent, emphasis is repeatedly placed on the notion that the main characters, mostly artists proudly living "La Vie Boheme," are inherently superior to their sellout friend Benny, who used to be just like them but now works for a CORPORATION. Owned by his soon to be father-in-law. A rich white man. Benny's black. Mark and Roger are white kids from the suburbs, whose parents leave messages on their answering machine in the first act promising money if they need it. They barely restrain themselves from spitting on Benny when they see him. They openly imply that he's an automaton doing the bidding of his soon-to-be-white-daddy. They deride him for trying to achieve financial security, when their own starving artist lifestyle is a phone call home away from ending if it ever gets too rough. It's more than a little bit tone deaf, though at least they refrain from actually calling him "Uncle Tom."

The conflict beautifully encapsulates the shortcomings of Jonathan Larson's conception of art (oh, right, did I forget to establish that the creator of Rent's name is Jonathan Larson?): simultaneously demonstrating an absurdly reverential view of the figure of the artist (being an artist makes you better than other people!) and the bizarre conception of what an artist is (basically, a poor person who doesn't play by society's rules).

The first act centers around the heroes (everyone but Benny) trying to stop Benny from evicting homeless people who are squatting in a building his company owns. Now, I'm a big ol' lefty, and I think the existence of homelessness is one of the great moral catastrophes of our society. But of the many crimes against the homeless that we're all somewhat implicated in, requiring a tent city to be moved to a different abandoned building than the one you own is just not even in the top ten.

Here's the kicker: Benny wants to use the building to build a community center for artists, a "state of the art, digital, virtual interactive studio" where artists can "do our work and get paid." Benny calls it a "cyber-center." If Benny's nice looking clothes weren't enough to tell you that this center is a sinister thing, the fact that it's "state of the art" and would allow artists to "get paid" should surely get the message across. Technophobia and willful poverty being essential traits of the artist.

Rent romanticizes the artist while presenting the view that being an artist isn't about creating works of art, it's about living in a shitty apartment and rejecting your parents values. Now, look: the walls, door frames, ceiling, window frames, and doors of my place are done up in a paint color I believe Color Your World calls "white-ish with lots of cracks and blemishes." My mother and father are decent, honest, hardworking people. So I can relate to the joys of living in a shitty apartment and rejecting your parents' values. But you won't hear me calling myself an artist until I've produced some works of art.

Rent's utter unconcern with the creation of art is beautifully underlined by the play's ending. Mark finishes his film and Roger finally writes his song. Mark's film happens to be a shaky, hand-held shot, soundless montage of two-second clips of his friends hanging out, edited together randomly (I've heard it derisively referred to as a home movie, but most home movies I've seen at least achieve coherence). Roger's song is literally the worst song in the play. It's odd. Larson poured himself into creating his works of art. But then, when he wrote a play about artists struggling to create, he gave no thought whatsoever to their creative processes or their results. He venerates the artist as an image rather than as an identity.

Not unlike Konstantin in Chekhov's The Seagull. (See? Name-dropping Russian plays= instant Intellectual cred.) Konstantin, the protagonist and would-be artist, spends that whole play obsessing over his own notably terrible, defiantly non-mainstream play and congratulating himself for his superiority to actual writer Trigorin. He feels this sense of superiority because, even though Trigorin notably produces actual works of art (that even Konstantin begrudgingly admits are good), he doesn't spend all his time acting like an artist (he likes to fish, for instance, instead of sitting around agonizing about how to change the world with his art). The play makes this point quite beautifully, and even Konstantin seems to realize that he'll never actually be an artist due to his inability to create art (sadly, he expresses this by burning his unfinished manuscripts and then blowing his own head off). And yet, when we discussed this in seminar, the average classmate's comment went like this: "Of course Konstantin kills himself! It must be maddening for a true artist who rejects the conventions of society and the tastes of the masses to have to see someone who isn't even an artist like Trigorin succeed while he labors in obscurity!" That's why I said Rent's views on art are pernicious. Because they resulted in me being annoyed during an honours seminar.

So, to sum up: artists create art. Whether they do that while congratulating themselves for "riding your bike midday past the three-piece suits" and drinking "hand-crafted beers" is immaterial. No matter how much you venerate the figure of artist, no matter how superior you show him (or her!) to be to middle Americans, if your primary criteria for identifying who's an artist is a particular aesthetic/attitude, you're not celebrating art, you're demeaning it.