Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about “bad” art.
I wrote a post the other day about being “cringe” and how I’ve spent a lot of my life being teased for liking art that is publicly deemed “bad.” Even though I’m an intelligent person with lots of experience and expertise in art and media, people don’t always value my opinion because I like art that doesn’t live up to other people’s standards or expectations. I grew up loving “bad” art and I think I’ll go to my grave loving “bad” art.
But because art is subjective and beauty is in the eye of the beholder or whatever, I could argue there is no “bad” art, only art that harms people, art that is made by inexperienced artists, and art that is unsuccessful in achieving its initial goal.
The problem is, when a lot of people are critiquing art (read: sharing their issues with a project), it’s easy for them to jump off the deep end and decry art that isn’t actually all that bad. The internet has lost a lot of nuance, if it ever had it, and the general public has such a flimsy opinion of what’s good and what’s bad. Sometimes even after shouting about how certain art is good, the general public will turn around and claim that they never liked it to begin with. We are fickle beings who love burning witches, and I think it’s become popular to claim superiority by putting down art. You can prove that you are good or smart or nice or cool if you criticize this other person’s art, and if you are better than everyone else, then your own art becomes valuable. Not only are we stuck in a circle of capitalist hell, but we are also losing our humanity.
Artists don’t owe you good art, no matter how much you want it.
You’ll be unsurprised to know that this all started with the new Taylor album. (Yes, I’m sorry, I’m a fan, let’s move on.) While I’m no stranger to Taylor critiques and I’ve been working on overcoming my inner rage for nearly two decades now, this time feels a little different.
The new album THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT just released last week, and even though I’m not really on Twitter or Instagram, I’ve seen…many hot takes about this record. And ultimately, I’m not surprised. They’re the same things people have been saying since Fearless, and all it proves is that we’re returning to our roots. People love to hate Taylor Swift, and that’s just the world we live in. But the more negative reviews and posts I read, the more annoyed I become. Not necessarily because I think this is her best record (it isn’t) and not even because this is my favorite record of hers (it’s not), but because people keep comparing it to her other works going on about how “she can write good music so why did she put out something so bad?”
There’s a lot to unpack here.
I could definitely write a whole essay about TTPD and how it is the most Taylor Swift record that she’s ever made, how it’s comparable to Red both in execution and perception, how it’s the reputation of her alt-pop records, how it’s scathing & whimsical just like Speak Now and youthful & creative like Fearless and her self-titled, and how it’s just as cringe as she’s always been as a Millenial and an artist. I could write an essay just about the lyricism on this album alone. I won’t, but I could. At this point in Taylor’s career, it’s obvious that the general public can accept her as a talented artist. Not everyone loves her, not everyone appreciates her artistry, but the woman has four Album of the Years and a hell of a lot of people really really love folklore. She’s made good records! People will admit that now! Granted, it’s annoying as hell that it took most of her career and eight studio albums for the world to see her as formidable and talented enough to be respectable, but hey, it’s something. The world concedes. Sometimes her art is good.
But that brings us to the nail in the coffin. She used to be good. Now she put out something that is bad.
Believe it or not, I think this applies to more than just Taylor. This year we’ve seen a ridiculous uptick in newly released albums. COWBOY CARTER came out just last month and while it was mostly released to wide acclaim, I did read quite a few comments and reviews from people saying it just wasn’t that good, that it didn’t compare to Beyoncé’s other works, that she could have done something different and better with the country genre. People like the new Ariana Grande album, but has it been getting the same buzz as her older stuff? Not quite. And yes, the new Kacey Musgraves album is supposedly so much better than her last release star-crossed, but will anything she makes ever stand up to her 2018 Album of the Year Golden Hour? Maybe not.
It’s hard enough to get one of your early art pieces to be successful and respected by the general public. Debuting is one of the hardest things to do in any industry because you’re trying to convince people that with one piece of art, you are worth paying attention to, that you are talented, even as you’re sometimes as inexperienced as you’ll ever be. But a lot of people argue that it’s even harder to make a comeback. The sophomore slump is real, but what happens when you’ve been in the industry as long as someone like Beyoncé or Taika Waititi or Meryl Streep? How are you supposed to remain relevant? To stay the same but change just enough to keep everyone interested? How do you remain true to yourself when you’re growing old and your interests evolve and you don’t want to make the same art that made you successful in your debut? What happens when you can’t (or won’t) replicate your biggest hit(s)? What happens when you do too much of the same thing and get boring?
When we start asking questions like this, we let the lies of capitalism bleed through, and more than that, we start placing the focus of art on the consumer. We all want an artist to make their best work, to come back with something better than what they’ve already made, and we claim that this is because we want them to master their craft. But over time, this starts to sound less like good intentions & a sincere desire for improvement and more like entitled consumerism. If art is so subjective, then why do we all believe we alone can declare whether a piece of art is worthy of anyone else’s time? And why do we continue to act like the most important part of art is the consumption? Why do we insist we are entitled to “good” art?
I’ll be honest. The first time I listened to TTPD I was a little disappointed…but not necessarily because it’s a bad record, more so because it was not reputation or Speak Now or 1989. Comparison was my undoing when I started listening to it because I wanted to hear another song like “Lavender Haze,” and this album sounds absolutely nothing like that. That doesn’t mean I hate Taylor or I think she’s a worse artist now or that I don’t enjoy this album. Objectively, not a lot has changed. This record is different than a lot of what she’s made in the past, but only because she’s trying new things. The roots are the same. The person making the art is the same. And frankly, this record is a powerhouse. The lyrics are a slam-dunk even if she does claim that Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist (there’s the cringey-millenial I know and love) and the instrumentation is fantastic. It’s long and emotional, it doesn’t hold back, and there are some songs on here that will make my all-time favorites from her catalog.
But the truth is, people listen to a new album expecting it to be good. Whether we mean to or not, we press play believing we are owed something worthwhile, something better than we consumed last time. We know that our favorite artists are talented, that they win awards (or don’t!) or get great reviews or hit the bestseller list and we assume that from here on out it’s only going up. In some ways we want more of the same - just a better version of folklore - but in other ways we want something entirely new - Lemonade but make it country - something that proves that the artist has become more experienced, has grown in some way, is better than they’ve ever been. It’s easy to convince ourselves this is out of the kindness of our hearts, that we’re just pushing them to be the best artist they can be. But if we wanted to do that, wouldn’t we accept them right where they are when they put out a new piece? Wouldn’t we meet them where they’re at, understand that they are growing just by creating something new?
On the one hand, I get it. Obviously we don’t want our favorite artists to make art we don’t enjoy. There’s nothing sadder than outgrowing an artist who used to mean a lot to you, or watching them make art that you personally don’t agree with or believe in. It’s not fun! But do we really need to resonate with every piece an artist puts out? If every book an author wrote was your favorite, then what do you learn from that? How do you grow? I think sometimes we get more out of the artworks that we dislike, that we criticize, that we don’t understand immediately because it forces us to think critically. If everything was easy, life would be so boring.
And the reason why I think a lot of people have a hard time enjoying this record is that they’re looking for something easy to consume. Easy is a relative term here that fits each person differently. To me an easy record is reputation, full of heavy beats and pop hooks and quiet emotion, but to someone else an easy record may be RENAISSANCE or The Joshua Tree or For Emma, Forever Ago. Easy doesn’t mean thoughtless or popular, it means MADE FOR ME. It means relatable. It means THIS FITS MY EXPECTATION AND IDEA OF A PERFECT PIECE OF ART. It means subjectively that I think this art is doing something and it’s speaking to me and it proves that this artist is talented in my eyes.
People want a song to play at a party or a song they can cry to in bed that fits their story exactly, and they want an album they can digest properly that says all the right things and doesn’t make mistakes and is sonically and technically perfect. They saw how Taylor performed on folklore or 1989, that she bore her soul but not too much because she still made a cohesive piece of art, that she was clever but not too cringey, that she was mainstream but also managed to do something that’s never been done before, and they hoped that she would channel all of that into another album that’s accessible to a wide variety of people. They think they want something raw and real like the 10m version of “All Too Well,” but then when it’s presented in the form of “But Daddy I Love Him,” a cringe-worthy pop-country song about the general public and how they ruined a relationship she really wanted, suddenly the art is “bad.”
It’s what we all look for when we consume art. We want something that checks all our boxes, even if we think our boxes are outside the box. Whether that’s a painting that’s technically beautiful or a movie that’s just quirky enough to be unique while not being annoying to us personally or a song that we can put on repeat that makes us feel alive in our own way, we look at art and want it to cater to us. A lot of times this leads us to think art should be everything it’s not. We put our own expectations and ideas on it, burdening the artist and the art itself with ideals and daydreams and impossible standards that eventually turn into a cage. We think we are allowed to do this because we want the artist to live up to their talent, we want them to create their best work, to really flex their creative muscles and create things that outshine all their previous art pieces, we just want the best for them. But if you listen to this album, you will understand that that is not only detrimental but it’s also not the point.
When people call art “bad,” more often than not, they are not allowing the artist to be human. We want perfect art, but we have a hard time accepting that humans are fallible and their art is never going to be technically perfect, at least not every single time. You cannot make two 1989s. Beyoncé is never going to create Lemonade a second time. But that’s not actually the point, is it? Beyoncé didn’t set out to make COWBOY CARTER to create the perfect country album. She set out to make a Beyoncé record and she set out to prove something to herself and her fans and the public. She wrote that album as a way of self-expression because that’s what all her albums do. Maybe we all think she could do better than Jay-Z (it’s none of our business) or that she should stop shaming Becky with the Good Hair, but if we’re so focused on that we can’t appreciate the art she’s making. Her cover of “Jolene” isn’t just a diss track. It’s a reinvention of an iconic song, it’s putting her mark on an industry that won’t allow her to exist, it’s putting her feminine rage into her lyrics to express her feelings. The content is relevant sure, but the point is the expression. It’s the exploration. It’s in the path she’s walking, not the destination she’s walking toward.
It’s the same thing Taylor does. It’s what Maggie Rogers does and twenty one pilots and Sam Hunt and Shaboozey and Chappell Roan and T-Pain. Most artists are creating art because they need to release something (literally and figuratively), whether that’s their inner demons or their inner joy, it doesn’t matter. And while there definitely is art made as a result of capitalism that may be less than authentic, most of the successful names out there (either in sales or popularity or pure talent) are making art because it is authentic. Taylor didn’t write TTPD to win a fifth Album of the Year, she wrote it because she is a human who has felt a mountain of emotions in the last few years and she needed to put it into a piece of art or she’d go insane. And people forget that just because she’s also a businesswoman.
I think about this in relation to “Instagram poetry” all the time. Sure, objectively, a poem by Rupi Kaur may be more straightforward and “easier” to digest than a poem by say, Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson. But does that make it “bad?” If it doesn’t match the standards of a classic? If it seems like it took less time to make? If it’s shorter or more modern or more cliché or more cringeworthy does that mean it’s not poetry? I guarantee you that when Kaur was writing milk & honey she felt every word she put on those pages. The art was real for her because she was putting her humanity down on paper and her humanity looks different than anyone else’s. And there are plenty of people out there who resonated with her words because they felt something too. Maybe it doesn’t deserve to be as celebrated as something that “took more time,” but how can we measure creation? “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” were written in the same day in almost no time at all, and “Love Story” only took about thirty minutes to write. Does that make them better or worse than “Let It Be” which took months to come to fruition? And shouldn’t we celebrate that some art flows out of an artist’s pen in such a short time? Maggie Rogers created her new album in less than a week, isn’t that impressive? Or is it lazy?
This brings in another point of contention: what if the art is actually, truly, unworthy of consumption because the artist is not talented enough or experienced enough to make truly “good,” enjoyable art? Who can say that a work is truly, genuinely “bad”? Is Rupi Kaur untalented (unintelligent, uncool, uninspiring) because she writes a lot of poems that are essentially just single sentences? Is it “bad” that a lot of her poems seem like obvious metaphors rather than an elaborate layering of literary devices? Do you truly believe that nobody finds comfort or joy or solace or understanding or inspiration from these short poems that so much of the world deems lazy or boring or cliché? Does it matter who appreciates her work if she finds freedom in it herself?
We all have accepted that Beyoncé is talented now, but what about when she was starting out and her girl groups weren’t winning competitions? Everybody is obsessed with Noah Kahan and his album Stick Season, but what about his debut album all those years ago? Ariana Grande debuted on a Nickelodeon show as an actor, so why is she a successful pop star now? People laughed at Lin-Manuel Miranda for attempting to write a rap song about Alexander Hamilton, but after years of hard work he created one of the most successful musicals of all time. But what about JoJo Siwa? What about a band like Nickelback? How does Tate McRae compare to Ava Max compare to Sabrina Carpenter compare to Taylor Swift compared to Olivia Rodrigo compare to Billie Eilish? Is Barb & Star Go To Vista Del Mar a cult classic or just a “bad” movie? Rocky Horror Picture Show did not do well when it first released, but now it’s beloved by so many, is it “good” or “bad”? What about the 2022 Persuasion? House of Gucci? Does Black Panther: Wakanda Forever count as art? Is that movie more artistic than Eternals (2021)? Are both of those movies “bad” because they’re Marvel films? Are they bad because they were created after End-Game and all the films after that film don’t have the same artistic care that the early films did? Is House of Leaves “good” art or is it “bad” because it’s too complicated and theoretical? Is a graphic novel like Monstress “good” art because it’s visual and takes a long time to draw or is Les Miserables “good” art because it’s long been held as a classic and it’s incredibly philosophical? Are both of those books “bad” because they’re inaccessible to some people and needlessly complex? How do you decide what is “good” and what is “bad” even if the work itself is inexperienced or not technically correct or if a large majority of people agree that the work is not worth paying attention to?
Sometimes we are so focused on making sure a piece of art is well-made, entertaining, enjoyable that we forget that the art was made with reasons in mind. And here’s why my initial definition of “bad art” is important. There is “bad art” that does not live up to its promise. To me, an album like Midnights is “bad” not because the songs aren’t enjoyable to listen to, but because its goal was to be a concept album, and I think it falls flat in the execution. It’s good art not because it’s a perfect concept album about a bunch of midnights in Taylor’s life. It’s good art because Taylor puts her emotions into songs and you can feel her humanity in a song like “Anti-Hero,” even if it’s “just a pop song.” All of these things are true. And people hate that song and love that album and everything is subjective.
But the point of art - and I’m talking real, authentic, human art here, not AI bullshit or art that studios commission or sequels that are made out of capitalist greed - is expression. It’s one person or a group of persons who have something to say, something to feel, something to prove, and they are making that hoping that someone will finally see them. Maybe they want to better their craft or explore a theory or just have fun doing something that brings them joy. And sure, maybe they want it to pay for their rent or maybe they’re hoping millions of people will fall in love with it, but the art that is most special gets made whether it becomes successful or not. Artists make art because they need to. Everything that happens after that is just a side effect. This is true of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé and even that girl you follow on Substack who writes about what it was like on Club Penguin in 2006.
It’s reductive to imply that Taylor released 31 tracks on her album just because she wanted to break the Spotify one-day record. Sure, maybe she wished that would happen (she already held the record, didn’t she?) and maybe it would be great if she could have another #1 album for her record-breaking career. Maybe she does want more money to fund her personal art projects, to pay for her mom’s medical bills, to donate in secret or pay to her crew or buy whatever it is billionaires buy in their spare time. Maybe she wants to buy another private jet, I don’t know. But if you really truly believe that she just cranked out 31 songs - after recording and releasing dozens of songs over the last few years already - because she’s greedy and money-hungry, then you don’t understand artists. And I’ll be so honest…who the fuck cares if an artists wants their art to be successful? Isn’t that kind of the dream?
This is why it’s so annoying for people to diminish her work or Beyoncé’s work or honestly, any artist’s work as “bad” just because some of the lyrics aren’t your style or because everybody is listening to it or because an artist is trying something new and different. No, not all experiments work, but I’d argue that the point of making weird art is not to make something successful, it’s to experiment. It’s to try things and feel things and see what brings you the artist joy.
Remember in 2013 at the Grammys when Taylor was up for Album of the Year? And she almost won, thought she did and so did her entire team, but the card said Rrrrrrrandom Access Memories instead of Red? That album was hailed as a failure upon its release by critics. It was too chaotic, too all over the place, not nearly sonically cohesive enough to win the Album of the Year accolade. At that point Taylor was still technically in the country genre, working off her hit single “Mean” from Speak Now, and when she made Red, she was nothing if not experimental. That album was her first step into a pop sound, working with Martin and Shellback and incorporating dubstep into her music. The general public hated it. It was her second album to sell over 1m copies in the first week. It has become a cult favorite by Swifties, and even now with the general public years after its release. Pitchfork apologized for giving it such a low rating when it first dropped. Its single “22” has made an impact on twenty-somethings everywhere. That album is the reason 1989 exists. That album gave us the 10 minute version of “All Too Well” that has been heralded as a genius as the longest number one hit of all time. And the reason it is so beloved, even with its chaos, is because it’s one of Taylor’s most human albums to date.
If you’ve listened to any of her interviews about that album, you’ll know that she didn’t set out to make it sonically cohesive. She wanted it to sound like a breakup: crazy, chaotic, all-over the place, emotional. One minute you’re crying over your sad beautiful tragic love affair, the next you’re dancing and singing at the top of your lungs about how it’s miserable and magical oh yeah. The album is successful and “good,” not because it’s respectable or overly insightful or intelligent or “cool.” It’s successful because it captured a moment in Taylor’s life, a pile of confusing emotions that allowed her to sort through her heartbreak in an effective and beautiful way. It gave her the freedom to explore art in ways she’d never done before, testing the limits of her musical abilities and attempting new things that set the ground-work for the rest of her career. Without Red losing the Grammy due to its lack of cohesiveness, she never would have made a record like 1989. Without the pandemic to encourage her to try out a new sound with new collaborators, we never would have gotten folklore. And without her experiences working on folklore and evermore and Red and the success of Midnights and the rerecordings, she never would have attempted to make a record like TTPD. Every piece of art she makes is a result of her previous artworks and personal lived experiences. It’s why any artist exists. It’s why COWBOY CARTER was made, because Beyoncé felt shunned by country music. It’s why This Is Why exists, because Hayley Williams worked on her own personal records and decided that Paramore could borrow from those sounds. As an artist grows, so does their art. And I think it’s such a waste to discount these types of experimental pieces as “bad” just because they aren’t cohesive or they’re different from their critically acclaimed works. Or in the reverse, to shame the works that aren’t as experimental. This Is Why won Grammys because it’s great, but that doesn’t mean Paramore or Riot! aren’t also incredible works of art. Art just resonates differently with different people. If you think an album like TTPD is “bad” just because she names Patti Smith and Dylan Thomas in one of her songs, I don’t know how to explain to you that art is so much bigger than that. Did you not listen to the lyrics in “So Long, London” or have you just never been heartbroken before?
Let’s look at this in relation to something else polarizing like, say, a television finale. Two obvious “bad” finales come to mind: ABC’s Lost and HBO’s Game of Thrones. Television is a tricky game because some shows read more like art than others. There’s a show like Bob’s Burgers that is technically art, like I could not animate or act that show to save my life, but the reasoning behind its creation probably is closer to being a weekly joke show that makes its viewers laugh or feel better than say, a Work of Art. When it comes to shows like Lost or Game of Thrones, the creators are telling a Story and that story has an arc with characters and development and expectations. People put their own ideas on the story, but the writers have a goal in mind. If the execution at the end isn’t what you wanted - say, someone becomes king on the Iron Throne or maybe you find out a bunch of people are in purgatory - does that make the show bad? Does that taint the entire show or just that episode or only that season? Can you see the value in the good parts of the show if the ending is butchered? Does a bad ending change the thesis of the show as a whole? How do the pieces of the art work together to create a complete project?
Is it good enough to go on an artistic adventure or does the artist need to reach a complete, well-executed conclusion? Does it matter if the content is “good” or entertaining if the creator went on the journey to create it? What’s more important here, the final product or the time it took to get there? Does an artist owe their art or their audience or their self?
Part of why people are so upset about Lost and Game of Thrones is that both of those shows started off strong. They were created thoughtfully and executed well, and you could tell that the early episodes felt like Art. They were intentionally made. And over time, things changed. The story continued, the actors kept giving their all, but the writing got weird. Lost was hit by the Writer’s Strike and Game of Thrones ran out of adaptable content. The shows kept going, but by the end, most of the general public believed that the magic had disappeared. The execution was sloppy according to many many people. The finale of GOT was not at all what the fans were hoping for, and a lot of people felt blindsided by its content, in a way that they couldn’t understand or make sense of. Lost became too meta for its general audience, leaning heavily into things like time-travel and supernatural phenomena. People hate when you end a show going “Maybe they were dead the whole time…” and Lost did that in its own way. Neither of those stories ended the way the main audience wanted or expected, and since they subverted expectations in the wrong way, the creators were crucified for ruining good art with a bad ending.
In a perfect world, all the art we consumed would be exactly what we wanted in ways we could never have come up with ourselves. We want artists to read our minds, tell us what we want to hear, in a fun and exciting way that makes us feel both seen and entertained. We want happy endings or intentionally sad endings that are worthy of tears. We want tasteful albums that poignantly expound on the human spirit in a way that is respectable, or just disrespectful enough that we can feel appalled in a socially acceptable way. You can curse on the album, but not too much. You can add meme-speak to your book, but only in very specific circumstances. You can make a romantic comedy film, but only if it has a deep underlying message and an intense side-plot that makes the romance worthy of our attention. We want our humanity to be plotted and planned just right, to be written in sweeping prose that is eloquent and perfect but not too perfect, and we want our artists caged so they will perform when and where we want them to at a moments notice.
Does it really matter if Beyoncé makes the perfect country album or does it matter that she decided to shake up the country music industry by calling people out for their racism? Sure, “YA YA” is a fantastic track, but would it matter if her new songs were genuinely unlistenable? What is the difference between a “bad” Beyoncé album and a “bad” JoJo Siwa song like “Karma?” (Which isn’t even a song she wrote or created, it was written by someone else…) Does JoJo Siwa still get to claim that her art is “good” even if she didn’t really have a hand in creating it? Does it matter so long as she can relate to the emotion and content in the song? Is it still art even if the music video doesn’t look as good as a Lady GaGa video? Is her so-called invention of “gay pop” worthless because it’s already been done before by someone better than her?
Another thing that’s compelling (upsetting) about consumers is that we get bored and move on quickly. COWBOY CARTER came out just a few weeks ago, and it’s already old news. TTPD just came out, but give it a few weeks and Billie Eilish will drop a new album. We always want the next big thing, and when it arrives, it doesn’t take long for it to phase out of our line of sight. We see an obnoxious amount of TikToks and Reels for a few weeks, then something new pops up and we move on to the next big thing. It’s one big circle, and it’s a wonder we ever enjoy things. We all have a hunger, as Florence Welch says, and it’s insatiable. There is not enough art in this world to fill us up.
More than that, we change our minds, backtracking like we want to rewrite our histories. When Hamilton first went to Broadway, it became an instant classic, with ticket prices about as high as you can imagine...but now, almost a decade later, more and more people are criticizing it vehemently, claiming it was never that good to begin with, that Lin-Manuel Miranda is (fill in the blank insult here). And sure, we should criticize media in hindsight, and no piece of artwork is perfect, but people so quickly bury the things that once brought them joy. It’s like when I was thirteen and all my friends made sure we talked about how immature High School Musical was, and how could we ever have enjoyed that garbage. Newsflash asshole: High School Musical was a hit in 2006 and it’s still a hit now, even if it’s objectively “bad” art. The same thing happens in reverse too. The general public dunked on Lover when Taylor released it in 2019, but suddenly last summer when everybody saw her on tour they managed to make “Cruel Summer” a Hot 100 hit four years later. We are all humans who cannot make up our minds and we change at the drop of a hat depending on which way the general public moves. We’re easily swayed, easily tempted, and easily affected by others’ opinions.
For most of this piece I’ve been talking about big name artists and creators. Obviously everyone has an opinion on Taylor Swift and lots of people have seen Game of Thrones. But art is bigger than its biggest names. Artists aren’t defined by their commercial success or how many people consume their work, they should be defined by the practice. Sure if someone is commissioning artwork from you, then maybe you should be catering to their opinion and their vision, but if you’re just an artist writing on Substack to explore the inner workings of humanity, what is there to prove? Your “best” work is almost never the “best” work that your audience loves. My favorite posts and photos and poems are not usually received well, even though I think they deserve to be. The pieces of my art that have meant the most to me are pieces I have created with blood sweat and tears with little to no pay-off other than my own personal satisfaction knowing I am creating something and growing in the process. That two and a half hour reaction video I have lovingly crafted was not created so three hundred people would watch five minutes of it, I made it because it was fun for me and because I wanted to watch all two hours of it myself. I have my own standards for my art and almost nobody else understands or appreciates them. Frankly, I don’t give a fuck if this essay isn’t inspiring to you because I feel something and that makes it meaningful to me. I guarantee that Taylor won’t hear you talk about how she was so much better on folklore and that she doesn’t even care if she was because this new album is one she claimed she needed to make to remain sane. Beyoncé doesn’t care if you think she can do country better than COWBOY CARTER because she’s proud of that album and she put everything she had into it. She is her own artist before she is yours.
We exist in a culture that feels entitled to people because of social media. Since we see what everyone is doing every second of the day, we believe we know people and we believe that we have earned the right to their entire selves. Regardless of whether the art is good or not, we deserve that art because we put in the time to get to know the artist. It’s disrespectful to the consumer that an artist would put out an album they don’t like, a movie they don’t understand, a book that’s not as good as their last installment, because we paid for this. People pay you monthly to read your Substack, doesn’t that mean they deserve your best and most entertaining work? We are not buying pieces of art we are buying people’s souls and expecting to hold some kind of control over them. We’ve heard ten albums about your life, we think that guy you’re dating is a bad influence on you and he is not who you should be with. We’ve watched you grow up on screen, we think it’s really unhealthy for you to smoke all that weed. We know that you’ve been stuck in a conservatorship for years, it’s really scary to watch you dance around your mansion with knives. We know best. We want what’s best for you. We think you deserve better. We think we deserve your best.
People criticize Taylor for writing lyrics about how she was raised in an asylum, and we all know she literally wasn’t and yeah maybe that’s an insensitive line, but the metaphor reflects on the intense scrutiny of living in the public eye. We’ve seen this happen over and over and over again with artists of all kinds. Britney shaved her head in 2007. Rihanna has been on a music hiatus for years even though her fans are literally begging her to release anything. We’ve watched actors of all kinds give up on acting because the industry fucked them up so bad. Child actors and adult actors alike getting abused by people on set, horror film stars being run ragged by their productions, actors of color not getting the success they deserve because #HollywoodSoWhite. We see authors and musicians and actors and artists of all kinds outed before they’re ready. And on and on and on. Celebrities aren’t safe, but neither is the little artist that could. If you’re trying to make your art seen, you have to put your whole life on the internet and broadcast your deepest darkest secrets to the world. People won’t buy your book if you don’t explain how it correlates perfectly to your specific “trauma.” People won’t listen to your songs if you don’t explain that they’re all about your toxic friendship or your hopeless situationship. Your art cannot exist on its own, it must be picked apart and explained and torn to pieces before anyone can appreciate it. And in the process of declassifying the art you create, your audience is also examining your soul under a microscope. You and your art are connected you see, each one feeds off the other, and if either of you makes a mistake or doesn’t hold up to the cross-examination, you’ll be sentenced. You cannot try something for the sake of it unless you’re sure you can justify it with hard-work or pure talent or legitimate quirkiness.
And we do all of this under the guise of wanting “good” art. Is it not enough that the artist chose to pick up their paintbrush and immortalize a moment in time? Is it not enough that the artist is exploring their humanity? Is their humanity not enough? Are they simply a meal destined to be consumed?
This is amazing. It is such a fresh perspective on art. It has given me so much to think about as both a consumer and a creator. i think the purpose of art has become so success oriented (at least in my mind) that i feel like i can’t ever post unless it’s polished and perfect (regardless of how much i personally love it). I’m committing to allowing my art to fluctuate in quality from now on. thank you!
After reading this piece I am both speechless and also desperate to SAY ALL THE THINGS. (I'm afraid I won't make a lot of sense because my thoughts are all over the place, but let's give it a shot!)
There is definitely so much entitlement, especially on social media, when it comes to consuming art. It seems like people believe that because they don't like something then it must be inherently bad, rather than maybe, just maybe, it wasn't intended for them. Maybe they weren't the targeted audience. Maybe the artist created this thing because THEY needed to, like Taylor Swift has with TTPD. It's like all intentions from the artist are completely forgotten and it's just the consumer being all "what about me?".
Or perhaps, even simpler, they didn't enjoy it simply because they didn't and should just move on. Sometimes I wish I could scream at people to stop spreading such negativity about somebody's else art.
Personally, I don't believe there is "bad art" or "good art". Art is art. When we create or write, every piece of art helps us to grow as creators and artists, but also human beings. It allows us to express ourselves, to explore our creativity and to put our emotions/thoughts into something physical to be witnessed, to be seen. It's only when it becomes consumed by others that labels such as 'bad' and 'good' come up. And that's especially true when people are paying for it.
I just don't understand why people can only choose to see good or bad. Why can't they look/hear something and like it for what it is? Why can't they see what they don't like AND what they do? Or why can't they simply say "that's not really for me and that's okay"?
Anyway! This is such an incredible post. I loved every single point you touched upon 🤎