On Art
(This is a repost of my article on nyxworldorder.wordpress.com)
I love art. And I think about it too much. And sometimes something within me makes me want to share them, like how startled sea cucumbers eviscerate. This is why I want to discuss what art means to me. It can also serve as a reference to other posts, something that better explains the way I talk about art. If you are looking at this page, it is likely that you don’t mind it as an overwrought topic or my lack of academic rigor, so I hope you can find it interesting.
Art is a type of play which constructs a parasocially shared reality. Artistic creation either results in a physical medium, such as making a sand castle or writing a novel, or it is absorbed during creation, such as playing with dolls or conducting a stage play. This is flexible, for example a sand castle maker may only focus on the moment of creation and not be interested in the fate of the sand castle. Conversely, a stage play can be recorded and be carried into a medium where it can be viewed and examined second by second. Art can be performed in many forms and any human activity can be art, though everything is not art. Creating a beautiful chair is not art if it is only viewed as a chair and nothing else. Books are typically art when they are read, discussed or imagined but not art when they are used as a coffee holder or as material for a question in an exam. Art is not inherently useful beyond a vague sense of fulfillment, this typically manifests as joy but even this is not necessary. As such, even the act of playing is not art by itself. For example acts of play like destroying a sand castle, throwing a snowball or participating in a chess game is often quite pragmatic and, unlike art, is done with universally agreed expectations and can be perfected for maximum returns.
Defining art in this way can receive several major objections. Throughout history, art has been a sphere of professional labor with bold political, religious and economic motivations. And also, again for most of history, art has been closely intertwined with crafting and understood as creating novel, enriching or if not beautiful things. First of all, this definition does not ignore any “serious”artistic endeavor, precisely because art is inherently trivial it can turn into any shape and mean anything for anyone. Second, while art is often a heavily intense labor, if it wasn’t an act of play, so many people would not go out of their way to choose to be and perish as animators, illustrators, figure actors and many, many other insecure, low wage positions. Third, this blog post does not aim to end hundreds years of art discussion but merely contribute it with a viewpoint of someone who isn’t neither academical, nor particularly skilled but just likes to think about these things a lot. And fourth, if art can mean anything to anyone then it is impossible to define it in a definitive way.
But this doesn’t mean that all definitions or art is equally respectable.
In particular, art is not necessarily “a craft”, craftsmanship is often a part of it, but the artist alone cannot craft a creation. For art, there must always be an audience: There must always be a person who witnesses every touch, every stroke, every attempt, every minute revision; not just as a critic or editor, but as a phantom twin who watches the performance of their sibling. Finishing a work is not necessarily when the creation stops, a work having multiple iterations is fairly common, but rather, it is when the artist quits being their own audience and leaves the seat open for others. This means that the audience does not merely observe, or dreadfully, consume but actively creates art. People create art because their imagination wants an audience and they want to be an audience to their imagination. Performance seeks audience and audience yearns for performance. One can imagine but only two can create. And so, art is a result of double-creation.
Art is important because it allows us to be frivolous. But if that was enough, daydreams would suffice. But we hunger for sharing, not just socially, from those who close to us, but parasocially, from people who will we never meet. The parasocially shared worlds are the true “product” of art.
When I look at a statue, at first I only see a landmark, a symbol of its surroundings. When I look at it a little longer I see a symbol of a history, a likeness of an historical figure or a memory of a bygone civilization. Then I realize how expertly it captures human anatomy. But if I look at a statue long enough the inherent oddities of trying to represent a human by stone becomes unavoidable. The statue impresses me by how much it pretends to be so. The sculptor and I constructed a reality where this stone human is real. Perhaps the sculptor didn’t quite intend this. Perhaps they just wanted a monument to glory or resilience. But that makes the parasocial reality stronger somehow, because I can only see a cold, quiet giant helplessly submitting to the pigeons. I am interested in defining what art is because I simply want to explain that art uniquely creates such feelings.
In popular media discussions, a great deal is made about “interpretation”. Correct interpretation, wrong interpretation, “media literacy”, so on and so on… It is usually assumed that interpretation is a voluntary action imposed on a factual text, which is then compared and contrasted to the “authorial intent”, which is assumed to tangibly exist aside from what is already present in text. While the audience can intentionally assume a perspective and look at art from that viewpoint; most interpretation happens unconsciously. Art is a living being that feeds on interpretation, re-interpretation, analysis and even mere remembrance. It is only due to the interpretive nature of the double-creation that the art can be alive.
If art is a living thing, then there is a moment it comes to life. Often this is when a project is born, but sometimes the audience needs to see it in full flesh, sometimes time is necessary to see beyond what is written, said or shown. Advertisements seldom cast an artistic spark, not because the capitalist cynicism snuffs out “creative soul”, capitalism cynicism can be a great foundation actually, but because advertisements solely exist to represent what they are advertising. In the distant past, ads were structured as actual sale pitches, but it was discovered that using pseudo-artistic techniques to aggressively imprint the brand works much better. And for the most part advertisers are good at their jobs. Ads are expertly crafted to tunnel any image, object, person, joke, absurd scenario or social cause into the singularity of a brand, just as how the letters of an alphabet or national flags have universal, unmalleable meanings. But sometimes an ad gets too smart for its own good, it gets too caught up in the battle of brands that they forget to include the brand in the ad or the “message” simply gets eroded with time. When I see an advertisement and genuinely fail to see what it’s advertising, something magical happens: now I, the audience, am free to interpret, free to participate in the creation and thus a new work of art inhales for the first time. This is perhaps how humans created art out of nowhere, we always wanted the world to speak to us somehow, we always wanted to be the audience.
If art is a living thing, then it might die. It can be starved of interpretation, nibbled little by little into a final, irreducible, atomic meaning. Smarter people call this “reification”, for example with overuse and aggressive association a piece of music can only come to result in a singular, rock solid meaning. Just as advertisements can become art when they are bad at advertising, media we understand art can be reduced to a signpost, only representing something else rather than itself. This usually doesn’t happen in a single stroke, and not always from an entirely cynical mindset.
Sometimes artists become too possessive of the audience seat, getting wound up in “correcting” everyone else into their mirror image. A famous example of a work earning such a fate is Harry Potter (1997-2007) novels. The author leaves no stone unturned in teaching the reader what to think in every possible opportunity, at the meager expense of shrinking and bleaching the setting a little further. The most notable damage is done to the character of Albus Dumbledore. We have a figure who can be seen as someone who atoned for sacrificing his loved ones in his quest for power but only to do the same thing again for the greater good, manipulating an orphan kid for his entire life to his early grave. But with each detail added, this characterization is peeled away, we become so sure of his ultimate innocence that not only do we get to see him in the Christian heaven, his story also hijacks a cousin franchise ostensibly about a guy chasing silly magical monsters. This isn’t merely unfortunate because we end up with yet another story only cowardly alluding to a complex morality nor it results in a less interesting character for anyone who is not a chronically conservative Churchill worshiping Brit but I am being tut-tutted for engaging in a story so much, when I am stopped from re-creating a story I can only become a passive viewer, and passive viewers can’t witness art, they can be only preached or advertised to.
If the audience can breed art, then it can kill it too, and often are the ones that end its life. They always ask “What’s the message here?”, “What does this really say?” “Let’s break it down”. They hunger to reach to the core, to excavate the truth, to obtain the prize once and for all, and in doing so it no longer exists as a living breathing thing, but a dead thing, preserved in formaldehyde. Solved and put away... Sometimes the desire becomes so insatiable they curse their own eyes and abdicate from the audience seat and can only stand to see art from the mirror of someone else, someone with “better knowledge” who would explain and solve the art for them. Humans are hopelessly social, we cannot handle our emotions and thoughts on our own, it is only natural that witnessing art parasocially just doesn’t cut it beyond a certain point, as we create and seek meta-art, media talking about art, just like I am writing this very post right now. But our innocent zeal may burn the art we cherish to crisp, leaving nothing but smolders of themes, concepts, plot summaries and wiki entries.
Here, it is easy to roast the plot puzzlers, the lore lurkers, the funko-pop fanatics, the cinema-sin seekers but let’s try to tumble a taller tree: It’s all too common to criticize works of art as meaningless, as having no reason to exist, as frivolous and saying nothing of importance, and the cream of the crop, as having “style over substance”. Such remarks are, of course, utterly correct but it’s weird to say them when discussing a specific artwork. All art is meaningless and frivolous. If you wanted to have something important to say, you wouldn’t want it to be interpreted, you wouldn’t risk it fading away in noise, you wouldn’t leave it to the whims of taste or comfort. An important message ought to be said through a megaphone not a trumpet. Art is undoubtedly style over substance. An oil painting is not a ballad, a short story is not a novel, a live action show is not an animated movie. Unfortunately we can’t teach people via telepathy, but the next best thing is to tell something as irreducible, as unmalleable, as incorruptible as possible.
But, surely I am being facetious here. A poem is more memorable than a dull paragraph. Assuming a movie that speaks to people is much better at propaganda than a tacky party poster, then a single picture can capture the human condition better than a huge, dusty tome of a history book. Why do I sound like those gooners who say “fiction doesn’t affect reality”? After all I am not smarter than every diligent follower of the Enlightenment, be it the nationalist, liberal, fascist or Marxist variety, that all agree that art is capable of transforming society and that good art educates the people with correct morals, it reflects and advances our values and that art shouldn’t be left to hedonistic, haughty, heroin-ridden hippies.
Self-evidently, art is profound and transformative, otherwise I wouldn’t write about this at all. I merely believe that the audience creates the performance they seek and that the artist is the first audience. Birth of A Nation (1915) did not create a racist audience, it was created by an audience that wanted to howl and hoot at the most racist imagery they could dream of. Jaws (1975) was made and seen by people who shared a fear of the vast, untameable ocean. People gravitate towards war stories because either they can at least abstractly understand the horrors of war, they want to feel triumphant or they have a fetish for conducting war (not mutually exclusive). Art is powerful at transmitting unfiltered and unorganized information. Many people casually believe that plate armor is much heavier than it actually is because they saw art made by people who had seen art made by people who only saw plate armor from museum replicas. The audience can be misled by casual trivia they have no reference of, children are particularly susceptible to this b works precisely because art is not reducible to a collection of facts. The wrong details are but a small facet of the constructed reality. Compared to this, art is truly terrible at ideological training. Art is created by audience participation, when they are able to connect to the artist, the audience will inevitably see themselves. People often don’t respond favorably when art tries to construct a world contrasting theirs, much less actually change their opinions with it. Art might be able to shake someone’s worldview, but only when that person already readied their mind to do so. It is quite possible to enjoy art despite great ideological disagreements, mind you, but there still has to be a thin thread of connection, otherwise there can be no art, there is only a message. Even children can recognize when they are being preached to, despite not quite understanding constructed realities. Right-wingers seeing artworks in a completely alien way then we do is not surprising nor is a matter of “media literacy”, For a group of people who are already primed to fix any observation to validate their unchanging truths and also who are hyper-conformists, an uneasy confrontation with a work is not possible, art is either heretical for having women kiss or, well actually, it is but a maidenly sign of friendship which is not really important in the face of “the real themes''. But even those of us who can embrace ideologically opposing art, we can only engage with art to the extent they recreate it. It’s not that artists shouldn’t try to send messages, it is as good as any reason to create art, but it is weird to pretend it’s a high-brow aspiration when it is such a mundane part of art, pretty much anything is about examining the human condition, it is only a smart piece of what tempts us to art.
However, I am not merely saying that art is more important than its message. Why does art have to be important in the first place? Let’s return to what I originally disagreed with: Art is about creating quality products and thus, art is important if it’s good. Well...
Quality is populist. “Good art” is often understood to be art that’s popular in a given group, regardless of how “elite” the group may be assumed to be. While this doesn’t always correlate with dividends for the artist, good art often eventually earns a certain level of respect. In contrast, “bad art” is often understood to be unpopular in its own target audience. People who profess to care about art think that more art, more artists being heard and more art made by freer artists is usually good, meaning that unpopular art also has to matter. But the fatal error here is to assume that masses, whom refined people like me and you are not a part of, simply cannot appreciate good art. This is just a very comforting fairytale.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe (2008-????) is a good study case. The movies on the whole don’t inspire any particular strong feelings in me, which is the worst outcome I can have with art, but it doesn’t take an academic of movies to understand that first couple of Marvel movies undoubtedly are well-crafted in ways that latter examples aren’t, it is simply enough to look at the dip in popularity. MCU’s and similar franchise movies’ successes rightfully worry those who want more independent voices in cinema. The independent voices are unpopular because they aim to be less universal experiences which demand more from the audience, they want to create art with more friction. But friction is often bad-craft, creating art that breaks the mold sometimes does require the work to look shoddy from certain angles. The mold exists as it is likely because it has been already perfected. Sometimes art can only go forward when it gets “worse”.
Indeed, perfection is the true enemy of art. By simply wanting to get the best out of their knowledge, artists can doom themselves to chase perfection forever, for they do not realize that, when they first touched their tools, when their mind met the physical world the first time, they had already left perfection behind. Perfect art doesn’t need to be created, anyone can instantly imagine it. But please do not see this as just ideas having to conform to reality, even when we want to perform or be performed perfectly, all we still want in the end is actually, a new, different kind of imperfection. All the people in the world can reach to one and the same perfection but a single person can achieve imperfection infinite times. An object can have infinite corners but nothing cannot be rounder than a sphere. Zero is perfection and perfection is nothingness. Video games provide a great opportunity to observe this. In a short amount of time, so many tools and techniques have been and are being invented, perfected and discarded in the endless greed to achieve, to become bigger, bolder and crafting entertainment software. And every time, people discover something special in what was left behind, outdated, redundant, has existed as a mistake or just plain bad. We find out, again and again, every imperfection is a different expression, a different way to satiate our base desire to share what’s in our mind.
If that’s the case, is it even worth judging art as “good” or “bad”? Perhaps, it’s not a question of worth, is it? Stripping all trappings of objectivity, “good art” touches us somehow and “bad art” doesn’t, and this is not something we get to decide consciously, not so different from not being able to see eye to eye with certain people. But I am aware that I have a nerd-brain, so if a work gets me to think about it enough, even because of what it doesn’t get it right, that’s quite enough for me to consider being touched by art. Of course some art captivates me far more easily just like it does anyone else, but as you understand by now, I can’t “start from a perfect score and subtract the mistakes”, as so many reviews seem to do. Disappointment, anger and even boredom can qualify to show that there is something worthwhile to see. I think Valkryia Chronicles (2008) has one of the worst narratives ever, but at the same time, it is fascinating as an example of how much a story spirals out of control when a writer insists that they are telling a different story from the one they are actually telling. If someone was able to reject the warm embrace of perfection to bring something, anything into this cold world and I was able to drag myself into participating (please believe me that both of those things can be very hard), it is probably just good enough. In contrast, when it is bad, I really can’t find much to say about it. I have heard it often that talking about bad art is easier than good ones, and even though I also quite appreciate people discussing bad things as a performance, this is not true for me. When I truly don’t like a work, trying to find individual mistakes feels insincere because in truth, I simply fail to connect with what I have found in a more fundamental way. There is a great risk of being dishonest, because when I cannot feel any chemistry towards something, it is very easy to find faults in every insignificant thing, even when there is none.
When other people talk about “bad art”, they often refer to three kinds of art, terminally bad, technically bad, and morally bad.
Terminally bad art is what I would consider as actual bad art. Unfortunately, even with a good faith look, you can’t find any inspiration in what you are recreating. I have given Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind (2002) more than 20 hours, and it was one of the few times I have truly regretted doing so. I have visited wikis, watched videos, downloaded mods, tried this and that and patiently waited for something to happen but besides the brief amusement of taunting random NPCs to their demise, there was no joy, no tension, no anger, no disappointment. I can list many small grievances like: the snail-like walking speed, the stilted look of the people blending in an aggressively muted world, its penchant to hide it’s allegedly good narrative and atmosphere behind its generic wall-of-texts, the fact that it obscures a rather simple game under busywork and superficially complex systems or the fact that it’s a chronically western action-RPG where the action part merely exist as a concept but you have to abuse the left mouse button regardless. And while I won’t deny the fun of roasting it, I really wish I liked it instead. Some say it’s a sign of a refined taste not to be easily pleased, but I don’t like not liking art. When I encounter bad art it’s like I am looking at a party that I haven’t been invited to only to receive a call about how everyone was so sad that I wasn’t there. It’s like I am missing something but I don’t even know what to look for. The reverse is equally true too. There is much to complain about Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim (2011) in theory but I liked patrolling woods and caves with an exploding sword, a bow or an eternally angry demon-knight. I liked collecting books to make a library at my own house, I liked to pretend to make breakfast and dinner for my adopted daughter, I liked the “place found” and “quest completed” jingles. Today, most core concepts of an “open-world game”, much less another Skyrim, feels repelling, but the person who I was many years ago had great fun for a few hundred hours. In the end, art is not a machine that yields better output with the right input, It’s not something analogous to a craft like food, where “taste” can be predicted with good confidence. When it comes to art, it’s often not the artist, but the audience that will create something they end up hating, despite themselves.
Technically bad art is art that can be said to fail as a craft. Because they are easy to make fun of and allow many opportunities to dodge subjectivity with smart-sounding words, their presence is greatly exaggerated in popular art discussions. In reality, badly crafted art will rarely see the mainstream, there are many checks to prevent this from happening, the greatest of them all is that artists who are not comfortable with their own craft. Such works usually won’t be on a bestseller list, on Netflix or on an art gallery but on blog sites, on the depths of Youtube or on Deviantart. In few cases where the checks aren’t present or bulldozed by either nepotism or sheer luck and blind confidence, or arrives too late to catch an honest attempt going wrong they quickly become infamous flops, most people do not have a taste for bad craft, simple as that. But unfortunately this is not the end of the story, because people are likely to behave as customers rather than art enthusiasts. When they don’t like art, they will always pinpoint to easily identifiable flaws in craft, they will even invent it when it isn’t present, and demand to know the criminal who is responsible, the allegedly talentless artist. Despite how hard it is to find truly amateur work without intentionally searching for it, the artist (usually just one artist even in a production of dozens of people) will be subjected to to a series of increasingly inexcusable insults and even persistent bullying, The artist will be lazy or lacking in “passion”, (the darling word of reviewers of the world) despite accepting to work in miserly conditions just to get the of honor finishing a project, or enjoy sabotaging a beloved franchise as a part of vague five dimensional conspiracy, or a hack who poisoned the creative space with their miasma.
In all honesty, sometimes art can create great disappointment. And it often makes sense to get angry at the producers and those who profit from art for shoddy presentation of media, for unfinished games, for badly preserved movies, for inexplicably censored books, for unprofessional subtitle work, for diminishing ruining an initial reception with bad advertising. But harassing artists does not happen merely out of misplaced ire or being carried by immature emotions, it happens because of a fundamentally cursed motivation. They are complaining because the market isn’t meritocratic enough, if it was, they would get better products for their money. Dreadfully, there are few things truly anti-art like meritocracy is. I will admit that I am quite averse to competition in general but in art, competitiveness feels especially perverse even if I can see the potential benefits of award shows or fairs and the like. But in even its most innocent form, competition is a double-edged sword held tightly to the chest. and when it cuts, it cuts really deep.
Just recently, anyone lurking on the artist scene in social media could witness a sizable clique of artists whipping themselves into a frenzy over image generation. Some of this came out of sensible concern over generators’ potential uses by companies to discipline workers, some of it is a correct but perhaps over-cooked association with “tech bros”, some of it is detestable but unsurprising rentiers conning naive artists into kowtowing to a even greater regime of intellectual property. But the saddest one is the anxiety of being outcompeted by the machines, the anguish over the possibility that the good and just meritocracy is being eroded by lazy cheaters. Those honest craftspeople hear the silly claim that “AI is democratizing art” and respond to it in complete sincerity even though most statements from AI people are platitudes to hype their own existence. Obviously the opposite must be true then, they say with full confidence, they say there are no barriers to art, none, even those crippled and the mentally feeble can do it. You just need to work hard. Working hard is good, good art comes from hard work, the honest craftspeople work hard, that’s why they are respectable. We need to embrace our meritocracy like a student zealously embraces the exam paper to shield it from lazy, vagabond, good-for-nothing cheaters. Indeed, if we agree with the logic that art is about creating quality, then this concern is perfectly reasonable. A machine can always be perfected more than a human can. Perhaps a machine output can never be this or that adjective, but it is faster and more consistent. And for a craft this might be the most important aspect of quality, after all every craftsperson wants to be comfortable to such an extent that they can craft without any friction, that they can be a little like a machine. It is only natural then when an artist, who has for their entire life validated for their merit in creating quality products, becomes so alienated from the joy of mounding a snowman, frolicly pressing the buttons of a piano or drawing a smiling sun with pastels, has been imprisoned in meritocracy so long that they can only despair even at most obvious snake-oil-salesman suggestion that the prison might break down. If you look at mass media and say that there is so much slop because commercialism is too merciful to the artist, that the tyranny of quality is not omnipresent enough, know that you only wish that every artist should be subjected to this psychological torture. Of course, some netizens on social media would gladly agree. But bad art, much less badly crafted art, is not a sin, it shouldn’t be. Bad art can touch someone’s life, inspire people to good art, please the artist, or even simply help someone to keep their paycheck. That’s why most bad art is a net positive for the world. Never listen to people who say art is doomed because the quality in [the current year] is too low. As long as we are away from the world of quality, the world of images, animations, sculptures and stories of perfectly anatomic people who live perfectly, art will be fine. But it would truly thrive in a world where every artist is equipped with the confidence of elderly people who send poems to newspapers. Some say, socialism enables great art but if the artists were truly free, many of them would dig corners for niches that serve smaller and smaller audiences, it would be truly the time for the terrible, the laughable, the rejected, the forgotten; a world where even the most unremarkable is treasured by someone. Would you be surprised now if I said that I find lost media search rather uplifting even if the fans get weird about it sometimes?
But then, there is morally bad art. Do you think that art can be evil? This can prove to be rather confusing because what we often think of ethically dubious art is just art that has collapsed into an unshakeable brand. When this branding is born with association, we hear the classic “separating art from the artist” meme. What is often missed in these debates is that people don’t really willingly alienate themselves from art, especially one they cherished a lot before. If they could separate the art from the artist, they already would. But equally often, the now demoted work is put to trial for having the obvious signs of the artists’ cursed mind, where the accuser is given free reins to stretch and exaggerate as they wish, under the guise of “looking more critically” and the jury is often quite welcome to participate by remarks like “Well I never liked their work anyway”, “Lucky me, I only like morally good thing”. “Me is a good consumer, me me me.” But sometimes it's just enough to say “well I liked this but the creator did this terrible thing, so it’s soured now”, sometimes the all-consuming specter of liking or disliking art can greatly derail much more important conversations.
It even derails the discussion of the artwork themselves. It can be quite difficult to assess how messed-up a work is without veering into another review. It is natural for the audience to recreate art in their value system but it is another thing to say failing that always stains the artwork, or worse, the judgment about art is also a part of the value system. But even “you can like the work while acknowledging the faults' ' can be too much customer-like, as if we are buying tasty food that invites diabetes. The more critical acknowledgment is that a certain kind of art requires a deranged mind. Fictional violence is great but certain types of violence, especially horror violence can’t really exist without it lighting up a certain bulb in the artists’ head. And that’s great, art can be a great way to unpack or even excise the dark side of our minds. Sometimes it’s not quite clear whether the artist endorses or criticizes something, and the beauty of the work is often a reflection of a confused and conflicted human mind.
What if art is created by evil means? I strongly believe that bad craft is always preferable to avoidable suffering but it can get really awful when we are deceived to think that an artist’s clear ego trip is so critical to the experience. It’s one thing where artists have to method act or work long hours but they still want the work to be appreciated, it’s another when they just shoot real animals or wherever, that’s where “good art” or “bad art” kind of just fade away. The fact that perfection is often presented as a justification should be enough proof that it is truly poisonous to art.
What if art is created by evil ends? Despite the go-to example of something as extreme as Nazi propaganda, when people find a connection to art, this is the easiest one they can be comfortable with. Some video games are created with the explicit purpose of exploiting players. Some developers are just cynical about this but the others put in serious work to create stories and gameplay loops to ease players into obsessive spending because that’s why many companies demand to develop games in the first place. Perhaps it would be better to risk becoming indie rather than contributing to evil, but it gets a little murkier when you risk not only your career but also having your work being niche and overshadowed by the very thing you want to escape from. In this situation, it is undeniable that the audience is a kingmaker and it is possible to elevate more games, without hostile monetization and without worker abuse.
Finally, If there is one thing more reviled than “bad art”, it has to be “mediocre art”. It seems that the more the audience gets competitive over enjoying art, as if artists being forced into competition wasn’t enough, the more “mediocrity” seems to be reviled. When this reaches to its zenith, art can be either a “masterpiece”, “classic”, “thumbs up”, “100” or “mid”, “slop”, “terrible”, “worst thing ever”, “70”, “1 star”, “thumbs down”. Now, this is not a call for being “even-handed” or “unbiased”, not at all. Sometimes we just cannot connect with a work, and expressing this clearly is a much better critique than praising some aspect that is ultimately irrelevant to our experience. And as long as perfection is not held as the upper ceiling, review scales can be useful, because we all like certain art clearly much more than others, and certain art clearly wants to be compared and contrasted with another. But surely, you don’t have to share my brain worms to agree that there is much more to being the audience of art than to say “yes” or to say “no”, to defend or to attack, to buy or to boycott. If something I really like is truly mediocre, that only implies there are new peaks that I haven’t seen yet. Only in the perverted logic of the market and in the never-ending charade of “liking art” that the peak I am currently on is somehow worthless, that art has to be a zero-sum game for everyone involved. Life mostly exists by maintaining delicate standards, art can be amazing because it is a rare thing that can get better forever and ever.
Art means something to me for not only what it can achieve, but because it doesn’t have to achieve anything. Long before we walked on it, the Earth already achieved mesmerizing melodies, captivating colors and stellar shapes. Yet we still want to make and share even if it is less than what came before, because it is just a little different. This is why I find it very unfortunate that aspiring artists are often encouraged to accept what they make first will suck and that they should practice patiently until they get “good”, because the often unintended implication is, not that what they do still matter but they should hinder their own confidence that’s necessary to release art and somehow gain it back at a yet unknown threshold. We should instead say that it’s fine if they don’t like what they create at first, because with more practice they will get more comfortable, but if the process is fulfilling they have already created something worthwhile, they are not stealing attention from someone who is more deserving and they cannot destroy culture with unleashing abominations. Abominations too are ought to be loved by someone.
In the end, there are worse things than bad art, even in the realm of art critique. As artists and the audience, we share myriad realities again and again, we are desperate to share, because we don’t need to. Art is not a title that elevates spectacular media, as art is spectacular because it is mundane. It is the most serious endeavor and also it’s not serious at all. Art is where failure becomes success, dullness becomes recreation and self-destruction becomes fulfillment. Art matters because it doesn’t have to.
This article is written thanks to my dearest Patrons, namely: Effy, Kelsey Fyfe, Laura, Makkovar, Morgan, Olympia, Otakundead, Rita, Sasha. Also thanks to Alex(@punishedgenetic on Twitter) for his perfect editing work.
