2025 retrospective: I was so fucking wrong about art
I fell for it. You probably fell for it.
Fell for what?
Okay, this will be pretty disorganized, but I just want to say this: seeing yourself as, or wanting to be seen by others as, a reader or as a "smart" or well-read person, comes with some super value-laden frameworks for viewing the world which are based on insecurity.
I was talking to my best friend about fanfiction. He hates intellectual property laws and a bunch of our conversations seem to converge on that point from unrelated starting points.
I used to argue with people online about fiction. A lot of people who are "readers" have a category of writing that they look down on as meaningless slop. BookTok. Romance. YA fiction. Fanfiction. Everybody needs to feel like they're better than other people and that the world of literature is going downhill like a snowball headed for hell.
So I interacted with some people who claimed things, like, fanfiction is inherently an extension of consumerism and just using stock tropes to fulfill shallow entertainment. And I argued with them, I acknowledged that fanfiction was mostly frivolous and not addressing themes and ideas with the same depth as works in the established canon of literature, but it could still have merit as art.
But I was embarrassingly wrong. I now believe that fanfiction is literally just a subcategory of literature and it can be just as good and have equal artistic merit to any other category.
Why did I assume fanfiction was lesser when I had never really read any back then? That's the embarrassing part. I cared about how I was perceived by judgmental and insecure people. I wanted to hang onto my identity as someone who was smart and read books, REAL books, classic books with deep themes and ideas in them. I didn't want to be one of THOSE people that everybody mocked.
Throughout 2025, I have been exploring new kinds of art and realizing, one by one, that artforms that are considered less worthy or intellectual, or even not considered art forms at all, are actually some of the most powerful.
I watched letsplays of video games.
I looked at Backrooms videos and galleries of "dreamcore" edits on Pinterest.
I learned about pro wrestling.
I read books that were merely "entertaining."
I read a LOT of Bucky Barnes fanfiction.
You cringed at some of the things I just listed, didn't you? Or maybe you didn't. I don't know anything about you. But that's how we're taught to think: that some art forms are worthy and intellectual, and some art forms could NEVER be deep or meaningful or "real art" on the same level.
But it's not true. I'm not going to pretend it's true. And I'm not going to mention classic literature or "literary" writing I happen to like to make sure you still think I'm smart and intellectual, because I have nothing to prove to anyone.
I had a very ugly realization about how much of reading is driven by the identity we want to have rather than what we actually like. I burned out really hard on reading because I was reading books i didn't even like. I realized that there were many categories of books I hadn't been open to reading, because...why? Because they didn't seem like real books. So I got over myself and read some psychological thrillers and some other books with the purpose of fun and entertainment. And loved them. And I kept going. I went on an adventure of experiencing art.
The chains that had been weighing me down drifted away like dust: I am not better than other people. I am not better than BookTok girlies or werewolf smut readers or cringe fandoms. Art is everywhere and abundant, and no institution or endorsement by educated experts or industry standard is necessary to categorize the good art away from the bad art or to tell us which art is good or to prevent the bad art from being made or to prevent people from liking it. Why did I ever think that?
One other thing. I have a lot of posts on here from a few years ago talking about my severe despair and burnout over literary poetry. It seemed like the respected, intellectual contemporary poetry was rhythmless, rambling crap. Also, the world of literary poetry writ large was obsessed with the trauma of people from minority groups, to the point that people besides straight white men could barely get anything published that wasn't about some horrible trauma.
I felt kind of anti-intellectual for saying it, but genuinely good contemporary poetry seemed exceedingly, vanishingly rare, and i hated the stuff the more I read of it. But surely good poetry had to be somewhere?
Ive been puzzling over "where did the good poetry go" for a few years and just within the last month probably i figured it out: it went into rap music.
I finally started actually getting into rap as a genre in the past couple of months. (not because of the superbowl thing--it actually started because of my youtube recommendations after i was listening to sir mix a lot's "baby got back" while absolutely delirious with covid. Don't ask cause I don't know.) And yeah yeah a lot of it talks about "deep" topics but I'm not actually talking about the subject material itself, I'm talking about how technically complex it is.
Like poetry classes did teach me to identify a lot of poetic techniques and forms of wordplay and rappers use basically every poetic technique and wordplay in the English language extravagantly, including many that "actual" poets hardly use anymore. I think I would argue that rappers are the people that are carrying poetry as an artform forward at this point in history.
But there is still this very negative connotation that rap music is just a bunch of meaningless crap about sex and drugs.
I actually feel like less recognition as "highbrow" art might create an environment for BETTER art to grow. In other words, the less a medium or form of art is considered be "real art," the more likely it is to actually be GOOD art.
I've also started to appreciate graffiti a lot more. Underneath a bridge I saw someone had drawn a laughing ghost. I love the laughing ghost. It compels me.
