Pretentious Dickweed, or Captain of the Soul?

Problems with The Artist in America. Started 4.19.25; finished 4.21.25.

A while back, friend and fellow Substacker Blaise Lucey posted a piece titled “Unapologetic Addicts, Dead Heroes: Alice In Chains as a terminal process”. In it, he wrestled with his relationship to the band Alice In Chains, especially in light of frontman Layne Staley’s isolationist lifestyle; preoccupation with addiction, both in practice and in songwriting; and eventual death by overdose in 2002.

The piece posed durable questions to me, as Blaise’s work often does. To what extent do we find catharsis and release in consuming darkly themed art - and to what extent is such art consuming us in turn? Do its practitioners' struggles go through some sort of osmosis, and become our own, in a direct, one-to-one way? Or are they always separate and singular in their suffering?

It also got me thinking about the function of the artist, socially speaking. What does the label “artist” mean? What is its virtue - and why are so many of us uncomfortable with it?

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The thing I know about art - above and beyond all other ideas about it, and regardless of medium - is that it expands your sense of yourself.

Let me amplify that, because all other ideas today tie back to that one. Art adds color and texture, unpredictability and agency, insight and intrigue, into days otherwise devoid of them. It demechanizes the spirit. It takes you off the algos, and away from other peoples’ efforts to extract your attention for money. It lets you reconnect with the parts of yourself that you must tone down each day out of expediency. The act of creation restores you to you: it subtracts all others for a time, that you may see yourself with new clarity. You are never less like a large language model than when you are goofing about with a new idea, and setting it to words or music or color. Who you are, were, and could be are much more fungible when art is happening.

And our selves thus expanded, a paradoxical thing happens: we think of others. The longer we spend in our own various creative processes, the deeper a desire to share some part of it with an audience ferments. The impulse towards connection and exchange kicks in: we want to know - start to crave to know - that our words or music or images are resounding through other minds. Nobody is a musician in their own bedroom, or a novelist in their own head. Art must be shared for it to be art: that's less an ideological proposition than a self-evident truth. It engenders personal growth, in places far deeper than the strictly personal.

So it’s great on a lot of levels.

Another thing I know about art: in the United States of America, the people who make it are by and large perceived as a class of useless, entitled shitheads.

We’ve built up a number of misconceptions about what an artist is and should be. The idea itself exists outside the realm of interest or accessibility for far too many, and artists themselves were complicit in placing it there.

You can see why it happened that way. Historically speaking, the drive towards iconoclasm must have been necessary for defying restrictive cultural norms and establishing voice, achieving freedom of artistic choice, and finding common purpose. In a modern context, however, these received ideas about who an artist is and what they must be end up doing more to hinder the exercise of artistry than they do to aid it, and they keep artists at the margins of our culture.

I believe that a new cultural and political awareness of the function and expression of art is in dire need, and it's to that awareness that I want to speak today.

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How does any of this rise to the level of real concern, though? What about the tariffs, Maxwell? Don’t we have enough going on without one more issue?

It’s worth our care for this reason: art and artistic practices are in dire need, across the cultural landscape. We need to see thoughtfully made representations of both fantasy and reality if we are to escape from the limitations of our own lived experience, and outthink the pending catastrophes of our species’ own devising. Moreover, we need to see ourselves as capable of representing our own lives artistically, that we may be more invested participants within our world, and grow more comfortable in making critiques and demands of it. And we need art for the same core reason we’ve always needed it: it feeds and elevates the soul.

Most Americans will never find an artistic form because they reject the idea that they ever could or should want to be an artist in the first place. Some of this is due to an inherited lack of self-belief; much is due to a sorry 50-year history of public divestment in art - but, in my view, problems of perception are preeminent. Most Americans today are unable to look at the image of who their country presents as “An Artist” and see themselves. Consequently, they don’t go into arts careers they may have been curious about, and they don’t pick it up as a hobby later in life. They find themselves passive in the face of culture: powerless to shape it, except through their choices or rejections in what to consume. And the more and more people live this way, the more capital-c Culture isolates itself - art-making becomes the province of fine-arts campuses and moneyed zip codes, and ultimately serves only the passions and class interests of such places.

There are two main preconceptions about who An Artist is which go furthest in turning people off the idea of becoming one.

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The first preconception about artists which people reject is the idea of artist-as-sufferer. Pre-remakes Tim Burton, Lana Del Rey, Sylvia Plath, Burroughs and Cobain and Kahlo and Bukowski, they provide the template: you know the type, even if you don’t share my fondness for it.

I want to make clear that it’s how we conceive of this sort of artist - rather than an artist’s output itself - which is at issue. All the people listed above are still valorized as artists worth studying, and for valid reasons. But it’s a pretty reductive and shortsighted notion to assume that all artists have to fit into their mold to qualify as artistic. Unfortunately, this is a logic which has become too-widely adopted.

If suffering is seen as the essential act required for Real Art, then it is the job of the Real Artist to suffer more in pursuit of art. No one really likes suffering, of course: that’s the nature of the thing. So what we end up with is exaggeration, to the point of outright fabrication. What we get is young people amplifying typical adverse life events within upper-middle-class families into generational trauma, good lord, in order to seem like they’re worthy of a seat at the table with the few poor students and ethnic minorities who’ve won a full-ride lottery, and who must’ve suffered more than they have already, right?

The preconception of artist-as-sufferer pushes us through all sorts of ugly permutations in academic competition and human relationships. It creates pantomimes of oppression. Operating under these conditions, art, rather than serving as a means of self-knowledge and actualization, becomes its opposite: a source of deranged ambition and pretense.

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The second major preconception is that an artist must style themselves as an outsider-activist and provocateur. They are expected to reject any professional commitment more involved than gig-work, and to embrace whatever viewpoints will create maximal distance between self and society. Politically, artists are expected to live as close to the edge of the Overton window as possible; at the seamy nexus of the dirtbag left and campus radicalism. Conventional political wisdom, or any sort of empowered government authority, is to be scoffed at and defaced. Culturally, this means that popular artwork - the product of acceptance from the society they are so eagerly court rejection from - must likewise be scorned. Authenticity can only exist within outré or marginalized subcultures: the more inaccessible from the norms of conventional media presentation, the more “authentic”; the more “real”.

Cue the Portlandia parodies.

This second conception is so particularly noxious to so many Americans because of the hypocrisy afoot. Many of these would-be radicals come from pots of family money, making the sincerity of their stances immediately suspect and performative. Choosing an arts degree in an age of generative AI has never been a riskier bet, and federal loan and assistance programs have been giving students less and less ever since the Reagan Revolution. So, the more impractical the choice to invest one’s life in the arts, the fewer and fewer people can afford to make it - the more and more an arts degree becomes a signifier of privilege, and another victim of an ever-increasingly stratified society.

This dynamic is rightly read as a betrayal. To hold up a mirror to society and level critiques at its injustices is, was, and will always be a core function of art: that we should engineer a political economy wherein this task falls largely to people of privilege constitutes a theft. I can understand how a well-intentioned art kid of means would have a hard time seeing it that way, but let’s take a moment to face it: we can only go so far in out-kicking our upbringing.

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These two conceptions of artist often put up unnecessary hurdles to the act of creation, and make art-making more fraught, more problematic, and certainly less joyful than it needs to be. The conceptions also have an exclusionary effect: people who live outside them, and closer to the norms of society writ-large, are not accepted as contributors, irrespective of the quality of their ideas or the skill in their technique.

One of the most beautiful features of art is how it exceeds any one person, any one ideology, any one organization or corporation. It demands a riotous plurality of mediums and experiences in order to mean anything. And it is endlessly rewarding in its multiplicities. A Complete American Art will be able to yap with the dockers, sing with the seraphs, and quote the old-world masters; it will be, in effect, perpetually incomplete, perpetually evolving. It will be worthy of the abundant sense of dynamism which is a melting-pot country’s greatest potential strength.

It will be as much as it can, to whomever it can.

It will look much different than it does today.

Next time: I’ll get specific about what that means.