The Day of the Impresario

Abandon all hope, young artist… and that’s a good thing. For somebody.

Ok, I’ll stick my neck out and be the one to say it:

This whole DIY, auto-promotion, the artists are in control, who needs a publisher?, Internet horsehit-fest sounds like freedom.

And it is… if you’re an impresario.

Oooh! “Impresario!” Like “hate stares,” there’s a term we haven’t heard for a while—likely because the shoe is on the other foot.

Allow me to explain—first by defining the term: if you’re an impresario, you are an unusually skilful social animal despite your somewhat artistic side.

You are a salesman, but of sensations. One could even say your art form is making people feel what you want them to feel, using nothing but the baldest manipulation, and making them like it.

This is someone whose fate and talent it is to draw hype and money into the arts; they used to be highly valued managers and publicists, but times have changed.

Quality is passé; we prefer professionalism. Critics are more interested in your race than your writing, in your politics than your prowess, whether your parents are successes than whether your work puts me to sleep—and most important, all the art that said critics have declared “good” is in fact so bad that people buy it to say they bought it, not to read it.

In other words, with the right publicity, who needs talent?

More and more often, impresarios are able to cut the real flab, the true middleman—that dipshit who spent their stupid life learning to write, sing, act—You—Me— and use their skills to promote themselves as the artist, instead.

I mean, it was the logical step. I got to watch one of the first specimens—he failed, like everyone who is truly ahead of their time, but it was fascinating to see.

The requirements are simple but difficult: You need to know exactly how both the social spheres and the art world tick, and not really give a damn about either of them, except as pleasant sources of fame, attention, and income.

It’s good if you’re more talented than average; those reviewers who are gushing about you because you’re famous are going to need at least one pull quote that doesn’t sound like it was written by AI or a chimpanzee—but you can't be too talented. Not till you get big, anyway; not if you’re trying to climb the greasy new pole of social media.

Cause, get this:

People will share your stuff if it’s good. That makes them look good.

People won't share your stuff if it’s great.

Or even a bit too much better than theirs.

If you're thinking, "Oh, my god, that's so paranoid and negative! People aren't that bad! Love of art is greater than envy! And—they would envy me for what?!—I’m not even famous yet!”

(Oh, but they’re DYING for that genuine content, they gotta produce today, baby…)

“Come on, I know if I make a good enough song, my X moots will all re-tweet it!—they love Art!”

Yeah, if that’s your reaction then congratulations, you naïve bastard: You’re not an impresario, you've more like Kurt Cobain, so enjoy that series of suicide attempts, kid.

If you are dumb enough to be the dopey artist in this classic duo, this ain't really your century. Go back to bed.

You think I'm just trying to thin the competition, like all the woke? Is that’s why I’m sticking my neck out with this glorious truth?

I’m at max disgust, is why I’m speaking up, but I see your point: It is tempting, with these numbers, to try to get people out of the pool. Or it looks like that to people with no talent.

I’d rather it be fair, personally, which is why I’d like to invite the best disinfectant.

But if you know, deep down, that you have more ambition than talent? Yeah. Sure. Under these conditions—umpteen billion people on the planet; jobs in the arts are the only jobs that don't make you wanna kys after a week; there’s about ten of these jobs that pay a decent living, the repo babies get the first pick; and everybody is cheating—the "discourage, or, if that fails, forcibly eliminate everyone else from the competition” strategy for building a career in the arts is, if nothing else, rational:

Once you've cut out all the males, white people, conservatives, people old enough to know their ass from a hole in the ground, and people who use naughty words, including ass, from the competition—it's pretty much just you versus a kid who wandered into Book-Tok, looking for Jane Austen porn.

But if that kid turns out to be talented? Suddenly he’s the author of a mean Tweet he can’t remember writing.

Dommage, petit, and tant pis: « the more the merrier » quit being the motto round here a few decades of contracting audiences and booming numbers of barely-literate pretenders ago.

But as much as anybody hates a newbie nipping at their heels, I'm also sincere in trying to warn you: if you want to be an artist or a writer, unless you want to write hallmark cards, you're probably a bit suspicious of human behavior and nature. You figure that keeps you safe.

But I’m telling ya, in a prestige area like the arts, no amount of misanthropy will suffice against the snakes.

Here, everything is amplified, and if you are any good at all, you're doomed to learn that it's worse than you thought.

Oh, everything is zen, once you suffer enough—and if you really mean this shit, I’m afraid you will suffer indeed—so at bottom it’s all better than you thought. But in the arts world, governed as it is by this hallucinatory exaggeration of everything that is vile and grasping about human nature, it is so much worse than what you might imagine, I have to laugh.

But at least I finally appreciate a good, honest impresario. Now that they are done. Now that they have cut out the middleman.

Impresarios used to leech off artists by promoting them to the public, fast-talking them into dodgy contracts, and taking most of their money.

We thought that was very bad, back in the day.

But, too late, I have realized: this wasn't real leeching.

Now, we know real leeching.

What they did back then was, by comparison, an extraordinarily necessary service. In promoting artists, I’d even say they earned most of their pay.

Art takes all your soul, if you do it right. It’s not something you piss out on the side of your astrophysics career because you’re that big of a genius.

Nobody is that big of a genius. Not even you or me, Sweet Pea.

And the kind of honesty it takes to make art that is worth the space it takes on this very crowded stage—the dance between working toward perfection and being humble enough to know when you’re far from perfect—makes it impossible to fart out the kind of bragging that you need to get a first listen out of a potential audience member in an endless race to the bottom of the doom-scroll.

Even if an artist had time to be his own impresario, these are two “skill sets” (why do we so abuse this glorious language?) which cannot coexist.

Shooo-urrrr, I mean— if you truly sincerely are both, then marry me, but only if we find a really hot bisexual girl who's into both of us first.

Impresarios used to do the dirty work for the artist. They took their cut and were fat and happy as the middleman, but there was a price for them, too: they got a paunch, they couldn’t shoot up, and they resented the glamorous rockstar, the writer, the REAL talent; the talent got the glory, even if they died in vomit and/or poverty.

In other words, everyone took out, but everyone paid in.

Everyone had their complaints—or their horrible death—but great art kept getting made.

You think Bowie just sprang up out of the London sidewalk by magic? No; great impresarios made it look that way. They’e good at what they do. They’re maybe slick, but they were members of the tribe.

But then they started making it work only for themselves.

Sometime after 2010 or so—just in time for me to mature as an author, what luck I have—the impresarios realized they could take the artist out of the loop.

Music, literature… I’m not even going to mention the visual arts, they’re so absurd ; you’re born with a silver ballon animal in your mouth now, or you’re a graphic designer.

Everyone who’s famous now is actually an impresario, because the metric is clicks and units shifted—not whether that coffee table book even gets its spine cracked.

« I can make anybody seem legit… so why not make it me? Fuck art, fuck people who are lucky enough to get inspiration —I’ve worked for my social skills, and my dad worked his ass off so I could have a trust fund! Fuck that little scribbling/singing turd, sitting on her ass all day, putting together a sweeping, cinematic narrative—why should she get famous off the back of my pithy tweets? I’ll just slap together a narrative made from his best ideas—nobody’s ever read anything he’s written anyway, because nobody knows who he is—then tell people she’s a far right-winger, hehe, that should bury her good… »

I’m sure it’s not hard to justify, especially when you’ve got all the money for drugs.

As it turns out, the artist was the real middleman. If you are an attention whore, don’t let the haters get you down: That’s the only art skill the Internet will ever need.

But…

If you are very talented?

Ha, good luck with that.

You think you can rely on your fellow arteests? All you have to do is get someone to read your book, and if they like it they’ll tell everybody !

Ha ha, no… if they like it? They’ll HAAaaaaAaaaaAAATE YOU.

Even your own publisher. You know what my former publisher said to me about one of my books?

“The epilogue is perfect… Fuck you.”

And I thought I was bad at romance! Woo hoo—Another red flag my dumb ass didn’t see.

Yeah… he published it. But he didn’t promote it. When I did the footwork to sell out the first edition and go into the second, how was I rewarded?

I think I begged him for MONTHS to mention this accomplishment—my own publisher!—but maybe because he never finished writing a book himself (I dunno, if I could read minds you’d be giving me a massage right now), he preferred to let me sink into despair.

He coldly, deadly, stupidly, flat-headedly refused to even mention my work, or stop burying it in the back of his catalog under all the books whose shiny covers my work had financed for him. (He paid the cover designer of my book as much as he paid me; I like the guy but come on; he didn’t even do the illustration.)

When I was hallucinating from a 105-degree typhus fever, several years of despair later, after diligently suffering in as non-diva of a silence as I could, I was CRUEL ENOUGH to mention all this in public—so he did the honorable thing, and cut me loose.

I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Because… good or bad, artists are broken, rotten people. (And yet “diva” is the favourite word of the mpresario, implying a particular artist should be screwed extra hard because she has some self respect left—well, it used to be. Notice you don’t hear THAT one anymore either, eh?) Unless we backstab our way into the big time, the more mediocre or never-launched we are, the more rotten and desperate we tend to be.

Because this is the deep, dark, evil secret of DIY:

The better an artist is, the less likely other artists are to help promote their work.

You know—because they’ll outshine you. It’s safe, on the other hand, to restack and cheer on and promote something that doesn’t threaten your position.

But one of these social mediocrities is NEVER going to share their connection in the business with you. And they CERTAINLY aren’t going to retweet your great work to their millions (or thousands, or even dozens) of followers.

No… if somebody has the capital, and you have the talent… they will suck every idea they can plagiarise out of you, often using a tragic amount of creativity in their passive-aggressive methods of suction—then spend the rest of their brains and energy packing out beaver dams of assiduously perfect plausible deniability.

I mean, at first glance, I would naively wonder, wouldn’t it would make more sense to develop actual talent of your own, to go along with your carefully cultivated social media empire?—but… aha, ha:

Where is the profit in that?

The artist off whom you feed is powerless to stop you, since they are not as well known; they foolishly wasted their time on art, and not artistic visibility. When you have the latter, all you must do is steal the former.

I’ve watched this happen in every art form, from my positions as artist, consoomer, and critic alike, and it only seems to be getting worse. Sorry, kid.

I saw the newspaper industry die this way in the early aughts when I was doing my journeyman work there, and I got to watch the traditional books publishers go down more slowly, but the same way: In a stupid death spiral, or rather a death cloud, of their own nepotism and cronyism and sheltered distaste for the actual process of getting anywhere sublime.

In their wake, self-publication has become the only way for oi polio to make a name… but the main result is that, with every underrated banger, you open yourself up to lurker plagiarism from your betters, who have run out of ideas. The fun of getting plagiarised is doing free creative work to further erect the credibility and apparent oeuvre of the parasite above ye.

I don’t know what to do about it; don’t shoot the messenger. And I hope hopelessly that I’m not advising anybody to be the Borgia in this case—Although that’s likely inevitable; hello, Pig. Thus armed with this fresh perspective you are, even now, filching from me as you lurk on my page to scamper off with a new treasure to turn into more of your fecal rage …

There are more lucrative places to be a pig, Dear, and ones that might annoy us even more than fouling our own havens.

Young earnest reader-writer, on the other hand—I don’t know what to tell you, except you ought to probably turn away—yes, because it’s too crowded in here, duh.

But I also know your great and generous talent can find a place that is richer than this pit of professional swine—and that, I guarantee.

But never fear…. There’s a part two coming, where I tell you how we can fix this… ‘We’ being the impresarios. Artists are fucked.

I don’t even look as good as this photo and its editing would imply, but that’s another pile-of-shit dance you have to wade through, thanks to your “fellows”: If you look too bad, it’s like, ew, being attached to that loser is never going to help me. But if you look too good, it’s like I ain’t reading all that, I hate that pretty bitch.