In praise of unprofitable art
Every day, I draw silly little comics and slip them into my daughter’s lunch box. They are trifles, but I get a lot of compliments on these one-panel drawings from parents and teachers. My nature makes me incapable of hearing most praise without looking for the hidden shiv, but these compliments usually make me feel a little glow of satisfaction inside… up until the exact moment the plea to capitalism inevitably comes:
“Hey, these comics are great! You should sell them!”
I really do appreciate the generous spirit of these comments. Even so, I think it’s interesting how viscerally I reject the suggestion of trying to sell my daughter’s lunch comics, or my cartooning more broadly. I also think it says a lot about our society that so few people know how to compliment creativity without implying that its true success hinges upon being successfully monetized.
Let’s leave aside the question on whether my comics are ‘good’ enough to bring in any real money, which is really the wrong question anyway: in art, something’s marketability often has very little to do with its quality. What this is really about isn’t money, it’s about value, and whether something can be valuable without being worth money to others.
When I draw my daughter a comic, she is the object of my work. Success hinges not upon satisfying enough of the whims of a faceless crowd to eke out a profit, but by making a child happy whom I know better than I know myself. If my comics make her smile or laugh, they’re a crowning achievement. And even if a comic doesn’t check off any of those boxes, it isn’t a failure, because the comic’s very existence communicates to her that I love her. When she is older, she will revisit these comics, and treasure them. She will know their true value lies in that I made them specially for her.
Within American society, it’s interesting how unexamined the idea is that the value of a piece of art rests on how well it can be monetized. It’s how we’re programmed, but it doesn’t even remotely pass the sniff of a reality test. After all, how many financially successful creatives does the average person know… especially compared to the number of lawyers, or doctors, or scientists, or bankers, or even plumbers?
When I started trying to get fiction published, I remember how depressing it was to learn that many of the authors I thought of as “successful” were either moonlighting their literary careers or simply living in poverty. The vast majority of writers cannot afford to pursue their art for a living, because writing’s monetary value is so incredibly debased. In the 1930s, Isaac Asimov sold his first short story for the equivalent of $1,200 today. It was the golden age of sci-fi publishing, and he considered that a bad rate. Today, he’d be lucky to get paid half that even in the magazine bearing his name.
Many artists looking for a culprit to blame point the finger at piracy, or AIs training off their work, or predatory studios and publishers, or some other bogeyman. And certainly, none of these things help. But the reality is art has never paid. Look to history, where artists ranging from DaVinci to Shakespeare needed their rich patrons to focus on their art. Even today this patronage continues. A billionaire keeps a newspaper or a magazine going as an unprofitable pet project, or a university gives tenure to a glorious weirdo whose only profitability lies in maybe one day being able to teach to other glorious weirdos. Art is called a labor of love, because it has almost never been a labor of cash, at least for the artist.
I used to find this incredibly disillusioning. These days, I find it liberating.
Once you accept that art almost never has monetary value, you are able to focus on its inherent value, which is self-realization and self-expression. If you know your art will never pay your rent, paying your rent ceases to be its object, and you allow its focus to become something else you care about more than money, whether that’s an idea or philosophy, a technique or effect, a person you love, or even your own creative ego. Of course, the irony of this is that once you forget about money, money tends to come looking for you. Pass the level of amateur, and if there’s anything original about you at all, you’re more likely to make money from your art if you focus on your own unique voice, rather than chasing monetization.
Most of the artists I respect for their weird creative texture have spent the better part of their career dancing this tightrope, I think: viewing money as a happy accident of doing deeply personal work, rather than allowing it to be the object of what they do. A guy like, say, David Lynch, only cares about monetizing his art so much as it allows him to have more of his deeply weird projects funded in the future. Success, of course, has paradoxically given him this luxury, but his deeply unmarketable weirdness has always been there, from Eraserhead to Twin Peaks: The Return. It is highly unlikely his art would has ever been financially successful if Lynch hadn’t had the conviction to value his vision and voice more than his ability to be monetized.
All of which brings me back to my daughter’s lunch comics. To even think about monetizing them would be to debase everything that I value about making them. Because just having fun drawing is what makes them worth doing, and not giving a shit if anyone but my daughter loves them is what makes them valuable.
Unfortunately, I’m not entirely in the same mental space when it comes to my fiction. I still care if it gets through slush piles. I still care if it sells. But good god, do I hope I eventually reach a place where I don’t.
A snozzberry that tastes like AI
About a decade ago, when I first made the transition from journalism to content marketing, I was told by my boss: “I mean, no offense, but I often tell people anyone can write.” I replied: “I agree, in the Ratatouille sense that even a rat can cook.” He was not happy with my response, but, crucially, could not articulate why.
In the era of Generative AI, I think about this exchange a lot. Every single day, I work with executives who think that ChatGPT will make writers and other creatives obsolete. And every single day, they are proven wrong. It’s because they are not writers that they think this. It’s because to be a writer is to know the difference between “anyone can cook” and “not everyone can cook well.” It’s because the only ideas they express as part of their jobs are ones they often repeat, as my boss did. And so they can’t fathom the writer’s instinct, which is to think things through from base principles, then craft and express new ideas… something that is Generative AI is fundamentally incapable of doing.
Most accurately described, current generative AI models are bullshit-as-a-service. Ask ChatGPT to give you, say, a 12-page script for an off-brand Willy Wonka interactive experience for kids. If you then lazily skim it, it sure looks like an acceptable bit of writing that nails the flavor and parameters of the request. But to attempt to execute it is to instantly discover the bullshit. That’s when you discover you have a disaster on your hands, filled to the brim with masked, malevolent gimps hiding in walls and children-gobbling-up-grandpa’s-cum jokes. It’s a machine-generated fever dream turned PR nightmare.
When it comes to AI, companies are slowly finding themselves in the “find out” part of the fucking about cycle. Air Canada for example, was just forced by courts to honor a refund policy made up by an AI out of whole cloth. Google–after launching full-throatedly into the AI game, and pushing for generative AI results at the top of every search page–is now devaluing AI content in its SEO results. Expect these stories to only intensify as more poorly thought-out AI projects bounce off the bottom they were racing towards.
Any person who cares deeply about expression will tell you that the actual execution is only 20% of the work. The other 80% falls in the category of the ineffable: not just in the honing of a piece of creative expression (as opposed to its rote creation), but the thinking through of it all. That’s the part that can’t be bullshitted away. “Thinking something through”–whether it’s a piece of writing, a piece of art, a refund policy, or how to execute a knock-off Willy Wonka experience–is something generative AI can’t do. Because what generative AI does do isn’t really all that different than hooking up a statistical probability calculator to a tin of Magnetic Poetry.
This is why AI-written content appeals so much to a certain portion of the C-Suite, whom already are used to communicating almost exclusively in a memetic grammar of pieced together corporate jargon. But for people like me, whom have spent the better part of their professional careers laboriously coaching companies, brands, and especially their executives on the rudiments of how to sound authentically human and how to express new ideas, the notion that AI is going to steal my job is about as plausible as a rat winning the James Beard award.
A Tale of Two Marios
A few weeks ago, I took my five-year-old to see the Super Mario Bros. Movie. She loves Mario, having watched me play hours of Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Kart 8 on my Switch, but outside of the immediate thrill of being in a movie theater, she was pretty ambivalent towards it. So was I.
A movie about a thickly accented Italian dwarf being sucked down a toilet into a world of anthropomorphic mushrooms should feel like a candy-coated fever dream. Instead, Illumination’s version was just so obvious. Not only was every story beat on Mario’s hero quest something that could have been written by ChatGPT, they didn’t even try to adapt the movie’s video game logic. So when Mario picks up a mushroom in the movie, it works the same way it does in the game: it makes him bigger, and it’s called a “power up,” with no further elaboration. As a multi-million-dollar Let’s Play with a B-list Hollywood voice cast, it’s passable, I suppose. But as a creative exercise, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is bereft of any imagination whatsoever besides that which it inherited from the license.
A couple days later, the inamorata and I decided to watch 1993’s Super Mario Bros: The Movie starring Bob Hopkins as Mario, John Leguizamo as Luigi, and Dennis Hopper in full-on Blue Velvet mode as King Koopa. (It didn’t end up happening, but Tom Waits apparently came this close to landing the role of Toad as well). My wife and I had both heard a lot about how execrable this adaptation was, with Hoskins himself claiming it was the biggest mistake of his career.
But you know what? Super Mario Bros: The Movie is an infinitely more interesting movie than the Illumination version. It takes big creative swings in adapting the property for another medium. The directors created Max Headroom and so the entire film has this techno-dystopian patina, where Mario’s jumping powers come from bionic boots, Koopa is a malevolent half-dino corpo-fascist, and Princess Toadstool’s father has been genetically devolved into an all-encompassing rhizome of ever spreading mushrooms.
No, this isn’t the Mario we all know and love… but, of course, thirty years ago, Mario as a property was a lot less rigidly defined, which is why a director could take big swings. However, it does feel like what a Mario movie should be: the aforementioned hallucinogenic fever-dream. It’s unique, and has confidence in its weird creative texture. That’s a hell of a lot more interesting to me than a movie that has no intrinsic creative texture at all.
Porous Like Coral
“It has perfect confidence in its weird creative texture.”
I forget where I heard this for the first time. I think maybe it was in Tim Rogers’ epic review of Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding. Wherever I heard it, it has stuck in my mind ever since as the perfect encapsulation of a lot of my tastes in fiction across mediums:
Some examples off the top of my head:
- The video games of From Software like Dark Souls and Elden Ring: gothic, lore-drenched worlds in which the fabric of time has completely broken down.
- The fiction of Robert Aickman, William Hope Hodgson, Thomas Ligotti, Jon Padgett, Michael T. Cisco, Jean Ray, Gene Wolfe, the Strugatsky Brothers, H.P. Lovecraft, Alfred Kubin, Edgar Allan Poe, Mervyn Peake, Cormac McCarthy, etc.
- The comics of Junji Ito, Kentaro Miura, Hyōryū Kyōshitsu, Graham Ingels, Bernie Krigstein, Harvey Kurtzman, Kevin O’Neill, etc.
- The films of David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, David Cronenberg, etc.
- Old BBC teleplays like Schalken the Painter, Whisper and I’ll Come To You, Robin Redbreast, Baby, The Woman in Black, etc.
This concept of weird creative texture is one I’ve been thinking about a lot in my own writing lately.
We often teach young writers that texture creates friction, and that friction gets in the way of ‘readability.’ By that, we mean an effortlessly lubricated flume like a Disney World water ride, where the alternative would be a keelhauling. But friction isn’t all barnacles. It can also be as weird and pleasurable as a cat’s tongue. From texture comes the unexpected, like the rumble of static that sizzles under flesh when you stroke a seemingly smooth piece of metal. We encourage too many writers to polish all the friction away, until what is left has no spark. Instead of teaching young artists to be confident in their creative texture (rough as it may still be), we ask them to buff it away until what’s left is just gloss.
James Baldwin once famously wrote: “You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.” It’s great advice. I believe in it. But we should all remember that even the cleanest bone has texture. Look close. It’s weird and porous like coral, with edges to cut yourself on, and crevices in which things can seep and grow.
The 39-ers
There’s a number I notice over and over again in polling land: 39%.
Sometimes it’s 40%. Sometimes it’s 38%. But within a percentage point margin of error, this 39% number pops up over and over again as the percentage of Americans who stand in the way of progress in our country.
I thought it would be interesting to start tracking these 39-ers over time. I’m starting from scratch. Here’s what I have logged so far (newest entries at bottom):
- 39% of Americans believe abortion should be illegal.
- 39% of election deniers believe violence is needed to save America.
- 38% of Americans oppose a ban on AR-15s.
- 39% of Americans were unwilling to wear a mask while flying home during the 2022 Holiday Season.
- 39% of Americans believe that being ‘woke’ is a bad thing.
- 38% and 39% (respectively) of Americans say patriotism and religious faith is “very important”.
- 38% of Americans are “extremely proud” to be American.
- 38% of Americans believe the 2020 Election wasn’t fair.
- 38% of Americans have never had a passport.
- 40% of Americans lied to avoid following COVID-19 safety measures.
- 39% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Donald Trump as of 03/27/2023.
- 39% of Americans do not find the crimes Alvin Bragg has brought against Donald Trump to be serious.
- 39% of Americans approved of Donald Trump’s job performance two weeks before the January 6th Insurrection.
- 39% of American men say they own a gun.
- 39% of Americans say Western and Islamic religious and social traditions are incompatible.
20 Years Later…
Maybe seven years ago, shortly after I left Fast Company, a local journalism student asked if we could grab coffee.
After being surprised I hadn’t gone to school for my trade she wanted to know how I got my start.
I told her: “Oh, I started blogging in 2006 for Nick Denton for $12 a post, and things sort of took off from there.”
Her response marks the first time in my life (but not the last) where I felt old.
“What’s a blog?” she asked.
I originally started blogging in 2005. At the time, I was living an ex-pat life in Ireland, working as a temp at a bank. I was 26, and despite the fact that I was “living the dream abroad,” more lonely and frustrated with my life than I wanted to admit. My first blog–the unfortunately christened Pimp Junta–was an outlet for those feelings… an attempt to reinvent myself digitally in the way I desperately wanted to be seen: as an Internet enfant terrible. I cringe when I look back at that era, because like many lonely men with something to prove, too much time on their hands and no healthy friendships to invest in, my sense of humor was mean-spirited and I often punched down. But my blog took off.
Suddenly, I had a professional writing career. A blog post I wrote (about an electric toothbrush, of all things) got noticed, and soon I was working full-time for the Gawker Network, contributing to various blogs like Gizmodo, Kotaku and Consumerist. From there, I went to Wired, then Boing Boing, then other places, until I ended up at Fast Company, at which point I had more or less ceased to be a blogger and accidentally become a journalist. And I’m not even a journalist anymore. For the last eight years, I have helped companies reach customers as an editorial strategist. Some of those projects have been incredibly meaningful to me: Folks, the site I created for PillPack, is perhaps the least cynical project I’ve ever done, treating its writers fairly and putting measurable amounts of good into the world. (No wonder Amazon killed it.) But none of them were for me.
It’s funny starting a personal blog again after nearly twenty years. The landscape has changed significantly. In 2005, before social media gave everyone’s opinions a platform, there was something counter-cultural about blogging. For the first time, a dude typing in his underwear could have the same media reach of influence as someone standing at the top of the traditional media ecosystem. It gave us early bloggers an outsized sense that our opinions were uniquely vital and important, which just seems so quaint and hubristic in an age where everyone from your MAGA uncle to your tweenage neighbor has a social megaphone at their disposal, and no one’s opinions seem particularly vital or unique at all anymore.
And I’ve changed too. I’m no longer trying to prove something to the world or to myself, which are really the same thing. I write because I’m a writer, not because I desire an audience. And so this blog is running on Blot.im, a no-frills web app that turns standard text files on your computer into blog posts. I don’t care about having a platform anymore, and the last thing I want to do is spend time fiddling with yet another CMS. I just want a place to write.