You Don’t Respect Art
Creating beautiful things is the hardest thing I’ve ever attempted. Writing poetry that moves people. Writing novels that tell thrilling tales. Painting a masterpiece. It’s like trying to hit a target you can’t see. It can’t even be defined as such until after the fact. Often the artists making masterpieces don’t know they’ve done so until long after the work is complete. Art is hard. Yet we now live in an age that is less kind to art, artists and creators than ever.
The ultimate insult is asking for a piece of art for free. To do this is effectively saying to an artist: “your skills, investment, and labour are worthless.” Yet it happens so regularly it’s become an internet joke. It wouldn’t even occur to most people to ask a waiter to do a week’s worth of serving for free, but art is seen as something different to work. Partially, this is because artists are assumed to enjoy their work. It’s certainly true that most artists enjoy what they do, but even people who enjoy their non-art jobs still expect to be paid.
I suspect the deeper reason for this is that talent is regarded as something akin to a magic power; something people are just given. You either have it or you don’t. Because non-artists don’t realise that even the most talented amongst us still need tuition, time and the costs/practicalities of making the artwork involved, it seems little bother to ask for a piece of art for free. People who ‘commission’ art in this way don’t seem to realise that working at a loss is worse than not working at all.
People don’t see art as work or as an investment, so the rules of work and investments don’t apply. Just to begin creating a body of work as an oil painter, for example, the materials you would need including professional quality paints, paintbrushes, pre-stretched canvases, artist’s mediums and other tools would set you back at least £500. Just to start. But a more insidious form of trashing art and artists has emerged, and thanks to the internet, it takes a greater toll on artists than ever before.
Social media has heralded the great age of the performative disappreciation of art. People now demonstrate who they are, what they value, and what they want other people to think about themselves not by their own deeds or through their own creations, but by declaring their negative feelings about other people’s art. To them, hating on a work of popular art, regardless of the quality of its content or execution, is to make a statement about themselves.
An even worse form of this behaviour can be seen on any review site, where people publicly disparage the art, and often the artist personally, to make themselves feel better about themselves. Generally, not liking a work of art, be it a movie, TV show, novel or painting, means little more than you simply do not like that particular work of art. It doesn’t mean the artist or creator is a bad person or even bad at what they do. To suggest so is unkindness for the sake of being unkind.
I, like many others, was disappointed in the way the ‘Game of Thrones’ TV show ended, but that doesn’t mean that the shows creators, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, or even George R. R. Martin, the author who wrote the books on which the TV show was based, are bad people or bad creators. It just means I didn’t like the ending. Nothing more. I’m still grateful the show was made and I enjoyed being in that fictional world for many hours. Just not the end.
Art criticism has become far too personal, aggressive and visceral. In the internet age, artists even face death threats for committing sins such as failing to adapt a beloved book series “correctly” or creating content deemed “problematic”. People who truly appreciate, respect, and value art tend not to do this even with the most populist or poorly executed forms of entertainment.
I’m not saying that all criticism is bad, far from it. There’s a gaping chasm between a thoughtful, constructive review from an informed reviewer and a hit job. As an artist, I appreciate even negative constructive criticism as it almost always makes me a better artist. But reviews that attack me personally just make me want to make art less. If you partake in these types of online mobs, or write hit-pieces without considering the difficulties and limitations of making the art, just admit you don’t respect art or artists of any kind.
This is the sad thing about creating art today. The environment in which artists now create is subject to an unprecedented level of negativity. Most non-artists have no idea what it’s like to be publicly reviewed. Imagine you have millions of managers all giving you a performance review at your place of work. The performance reviews are all negative, make unnecessary and unprofessional comments about you as a person and are public. This is unfathomable to most people. But this is what creators now have to weather just to make art.
The result of this behaviour is less art and a decline in the quality of art too.
Today, I read that the future of the brand new Amazon Prime series ‘Wheel of Time’ is already in jeopardy because fans of the books have been so vocal and aggressive about the series not being a faithful adaptation. I hadn’t read the books before I watched the first four episodes of the show so had no prior attachment to the material, but my first impression was that it is a generally well-executed High Fantasy series but one which will need time for the exposition to unravel.
‘Wheel of Time’ doesn’t quite have the production value of ‘Game of Thrones’ but it’s enjoyable nonetheless. I hope Amazon execs aren’t ready to pull the plug just yet. What about all those who weren’t already fans of the books, have no intention of reading the books, and are quietly enjoying the program without any of the baggage? What about those who, like me, recognise that books and TV/movies are so different as mediums that there can’t ever really be a complete adaptation of anything.
If raging mobs on the internet are going to strangle programs in their infancy, however, why bother getting invested? It’s already become a problem that studios are unwilling to invest in projects without an existing fan base. Even companies like Disney hardly take any risks on original content anymore. Movies and TV shows require mobilising small armies of manpower just to create a few hours of high quality content. If projects with existing fan bases are going to be prematurely torpedoed too, there will soon be nothing to watch.
Even the second part of ‘Dune’ — DUNE — wasn’t automatically greenlit until its promise of box office success was realised. If serious artistic creators are continually pilloried and personally attacked for failing the impossible task of pleasing everyone, only the thick-skinned children of the rich will be able to withstand the professional roller-coaster that is art-making. To some extent that’s already true. Them and the kings and queens of cheap, unscripted short-form content: the Youtube/Tiktok influencers.
Thank you for reading — I hope you found my thoughts interesting. You can find links to my other work here: https://linktr.ee/sayde.scarlett
