Buried Genius, Whining Elites

"Geez, the art world that I stunted is stunted!"

We got a problem.

Every time I set foot in normie media, I see two things:

1. Cultural objects that suck, and

2. Pundits and consumers complaining about how artists suck these days, and there’s no good stuff to read/watch/etc. They never ask any systemic questions about the art world; they always jump to “spoiled Millennials, lame Boomers, is there something in the water?”

3. Because everything the Emmys and the Oscars and the Grammys feed you is sub-par—you decide it must be the fault of the artists and writers.

4. Then you try to tell me you ain’t no nepo baby, wigger please.

Thing is, it takes two clicks from the very space where they’re complaining—often from well-paid platforms like the Atlantic or the New Yorker—to weird, trampled-upon spaces like DeviantArt that are full of unsung brilliance, like the humble comic posted below.

Inhuman Relations, home of characters like that libertarian guy who I swear lived next door to David Cole.

And where has this delightful project been relegated? To DeviantArt, which is basically a porn site. Don’t ask. I need money, OK? https://www.deviantart.com/mossmill/art/Inhuman-Relations-157-427027251

If there’s anyone to whom we all owe a good throat-punch, it’s these cultural mavens complaining about the quality of every bloated no-talent they’ve compliantly pushed ahead, ignoring the existence of the thousands of superior artists to whom they refuse so much as a slush-pile read.

I’d rather look at any random street artist than another one of those giant multimillion dollar balloon animals by a guy named “Jeff.”

I get it; complaining and being a poisoned pen makes you feel smart. But the mountain of deserving artists you dismiss as “losers” without letting them play the game—they’re more visible by the day, and they’re making you look dumb.

Bitch, you have reach AND eyeballs. You could find the same great writers and artists I find, and put them on the map.

But you decide to lick boots and complain instead.

How do we bring these worlds together?

I don’t want the aliens thinking Spiderman 14 is the best we can do.

Drawn by real hands

Not that Oscar bait is any less boring than superhero movies… nobody is going to call the Inhuman Relations comics guy a genius, because he isn’t trying to be one. But he succeeds at being DELIGHTFUL. A nice word that doesn’t seem to even be a compliment these days.

Yeah, there’s social media… and Internet fame… but if anything, those are worse, for reasons I will save to discuss another day. But they’re very similar to the reasons why our gatekept media doesn’t work; mass hamsters pressing buttons and a majority-takes all setup is a mechanism that, from orbit, looks remarkably similar to corrupt gatekeeping—but without even the dignity of professionalism or quality control.

Trapped between bad gatekeeping and the idiocy of the hamster-press lowest common denominator, I guess Substack could represent a better way.

However, the amount of spam I get from hucksters and the type of accounts that are going up at random make my Knee of Nihilism jerky and twitchy.

Gott in himmel—prove me wrong! I’ve lived long enough that I would much rather be happy than be right—I’d trumpet my wrongness with relish.

But to make Substack work for the arts—not just for those who have already struck it lucky (or for those who are mere empty shells, screaming for attention for nothing; Twitter/X is thattaway)—we’re going to need to do some thinking.

Yeah, Substack has a reputation for being more intellectual than other social media sites, but it’s still a social media site. And art, real art, is a solitary labor.

Sure, we’re used to salons full of parasites, backslapping and bullshit. That seems to be what most artists do with most of their time.

But we used to call that “procrastination.”

Once upon a time, in the days when impresarios didn’t fancy themselves artistes, there was a division of labor, and artists spent a much greater percentage of their time on… art-ing.

Yeah, that might be causing some quality issues, come to think of it, even amongst the “deserving” underground.

So we need to rethink a few things. Just to get the arts back to where they were in the 20th century, much less progress.

Andy Warhol famously blew out the wall between impresario and artist, for example—but that was more than a my-life ago. Memes go stale after a week, and you’re telling me Duchamp’s century-old urinal is still a radical statement?

Bullshit and taking the piss are not radical anymore. Sorry.

We’ve come to take for granted that the publicity is part of the artwork. There are even shit-ass writers with large followings who’ve had the nerve to claim that readership is all that matters; gee, I wonder why.

We’ve come to take for granted the blurring of the line between innate talent—how much raw élan, smarts, and skill you tend to have—and actualized talent: one’s skill and mastery in a specific art. People tend to trade on the former while directing attention frantically away from the latter; but more on this later, it merits its own bit.

We’ve even come to take for granted the idea that a person’s demographic data is more important than their art. An idea that’s always been around; for example, when I was a young writer, the ethos was that I wouldn’t be taken seriously till I was about 50.

Well, I could work, and wait; it seemed acceptable, and so that’s what I did. Then when I turned 30, they flipped and bloated the demographic requirements; I was told “we don’t need middle-aged women, especially white ones.”

But that’s merely one of my personal tragedies. Point being, age used to be an annoying, but borderline acceptable demographic elimination point—but it was a thin wedge, and now we’ve accepted a whole litany of reasons to ignore great work that have nothing to do with the work’s merit.

Granted, I understand why you would want to eliminate the competition, especially if you have no realized talent; there are so many damn competitors, people will try ANYTHING to get ahead…

Except for actual excellence.

And that is a worldwide tragedy.