Basic shit is likeable shit
It's better to say something meaningful - but only if people can understand you
I recently saw the Keith Haring1 exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario. This was my favourite piece:
It was an excellent description of every startup pitch deck and product launch, every album, every piece of art, and literally everyone’s Twitter and Instagram feed2. I chuckled.
Being a bit of a self-righteous jackass who fancies herself above the usual pedestrian thirst-trap posts (cleavage-baring selfies3, that super predictable one-foot-forward thing, etc), I’ve curated my Instagram stories to mostly the following:
My cat4
The latest place that I’ve fucked off to in order to run away from my problems
Art that I actually really like
The Haring piece fell squarely into category three. I thought it would be a great way to let the world know what a witty, acerbic mind I have (so cultured!).
So imagine my abject horror when I realized, several minutes later, that somebody had unfollowed me.5 What the hell? It’s not like this was some basic Sunday morning namaste yoga bullshit. Or some painstakingly angled bikini shot from Bali. Or a picture of my baby. This here is a post of real substance! It’s incisive social commentary! How dare you?!
This was, of course, stupid. And hypocritical. Being a libertarian, my favourite response to people who don’t like a certain book, song, restaurant, job, or life philosophy is “well, nobody is holding a gun to your head and making you do this - so leave.” One of my favourite sayings is “don’t stress for more than 5 minutes over something that doesn’t involve actual love”. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve told people, struggling with similar anxieties, that you simply can’t please everybody, and shouldn’t try.
So why was I having so much trouble taking my own damn advice?
Not being liked by a specific person is fine; not being liked in the abstract is anxiety-inducing
If you’re fundamentally a good person and you also have people who dislike you, it generally means you’re doing something right. It means you have values that you are willing to sacrifice other people’s approval for. Sometimes people will make their dislike known. When the person doing so is someone whose values don’t line up with yours, and whose life doesn’t look like something you’d want to emulate, being disliked can actually be quite encouraging.
To see a follower number tick down, however, is to feel like people, in the abstract, looked at what you had to offer and judged it to be poor.6 If you’re of a certain anxious and neurotic bent, it’s only a few slippery slopes away from “oh my god, people don’t like me”.
Basic shit is likeable shit
One of my friends recently lamented a date that he went on by describing the woman who showed up as “rather basic”. I find it funny that the word “basic” is used as an insult because most things that we would describe as basic are also extremely easy to like. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why a conventionally attractive woman who poses zero intellectual threat and has normal boring hobbies (“I’m a foodie, I love to travel, and I’m doing my yoga instructor certification”) would be appealing to huge tracts of the population.
I recently listened to a podcast that explained the appeal of Andy Warhol’s celebrity screenprints. They are the art-world analogue to having a basic bitch on your arm:
You could classify your Warhol buyers as people who are cash rich but time poor. And what Warhols do, above all, is they're attention grabbing. They become a must-have because you can appreciate a Warhol very quickly. We immediately recognize something as Warhol, we know it's a Warhol, and if we put it on our walls, everybody else will know that it's a Warhol too without any explanation needed. So it's a very time-effective purchase.
-Alice Sherwood, on Andy Warhol’s Factory of Truth (Cautionary Tales, with Tim Harford)
The irony of all my Insta-related hand-wringing is that Haring is not that far off from Warhol in terms of popular appeal and ease of appreciation. The message of Glory Hole is rather on the nose, and is not even particularly original7. Also, who could possibly dislike this sort of thing:
So was my post too basic? Was I not basic enough? Was it even about me? (Almost certainly not).
But I think it makes sense that popular appeal is inversely proportional to the amount of effort needed to understand your work.
I think a certain degree of popular success can be achieved in one of two ways. One of them is easy, if not soul-sucking - and one of them is very, very hard. The first is that you make yourself vanilla enough for everyone, by not saying very much at all. The second is that you do the hard work of taking something which is usually very hard to understand, and finding a way to express it clearly. That’s why it’s so fun to listen to Feynman explaining things.8 That’s why angry, disillusioned men who would never otherwise pick up a philosophy book find Jordan Peterson so compelling.9
It’s probably also why the most common piece of negative feedback that I get on my essays is that they can be disorganized and incoherent. Thinking is only half the battle: you don’t get very far if the people looking at your work have no idea what is going on.10 It’s fitting that the Keith Haring exhibit was subtitled “Art is for everybody”, because art isn’t just for self-expression. You have to carry it the rest of the way, to the people who will actually be looking at it.
There’s nothing wrong with being basic, but there is something better. It is having something meaningful to say, in a way that can actually be understood. So that’s the goal. Here’s to hoping I get there - one essay at a time.
#83
It was ironically subtitled “Art is for everybody”, but was also only open to AGO members:
I wish I could say that it’s a good description of this Substack, but I don’t think it is, because I don’t have a dick because there is no throng of adoration. There is occasionally an earnest conversation with someone who actually likes what I’m doing here, though. And I’m not gonna lie - I live for those.
Cuz let’s be real, I don’t have any
Definitely the crowd favourite, by several orders of magnitude. But are you even surprised?
Never mind the many, many other people who took the time to express their approval for my latest act of inspired art curation via various emojis, Insta DMs, and all that other dopamine-laden bullshit. To further reveal what an unoriginal, mainstream basic bitch I am, here’s some oft-quoted HBR nonsense about how it takes 5 positive interactions to outweigh 1 negative one.
Depending on how badly you ruminate on things, you can go through all kinds of technical acrobatics to figure out who it actually was. I refrained from doing so in this case simply because the level of neuroticism that it would imply seemed extremely unbecoming, even to myself. But did I think about it? Did I Google articles on how I might do so? Absolutely.
After all, Christianity has made it cool to hate non-humble people since, well, 1st century AD, I guess.
Slight tangent: I have, in the past year, come to recognize the value of religion, and I have found that the secular world leaves me wanting in many respects. So I find the following video very interesting because I can’t really disagree, at first glance, with anything that he has to say. It all makes so much sense:
Then I realized that the reason I don’t disagree with most of this is because the way that he describes grappling with uncertainty is pretty much identical to how I parse the Christian concept of surrendering to God’s grace:
I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything - and many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here...and if I can't figure it out, I go to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things.
This is why calling him “the stupid man’s intellectual” entirely misses the point. It’s easy to be an intellectual; any idiot can do a PhD and write a paper that only a handful of people in the world can understand. They’re skipping straight past the hard (and meaningful) part, which is figuring out how to get the rest of the world to understand it too. Case in point: I stopped reading that article about halfway through because I had no idea what the author was trying to say.
Incidentally, this is also why most modern art sucks. But since I give myself the leeway to make crappy stuff in the process of trying to figure out how to make good stuff, I figure others should get that leeway too.
This is why I’m ok with giving money to the Tate Modern even though most of the floors are utter garbage: it’s worth it for that one occasional thing that actually turns out to be pretty fucking brilliant.