Death By a Thousand Hacks
By: Martin Rezny
Tags: Storytelling, Astronomy, Art, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Creativity

On the drowning of art in a sea of mediocre “content”

By MARTIN REZNY

Whether you are a customer seeking a great experience, or an author trying desperately not to die of starvation on a daily basis, this essay concerns you. I could write this in practical marketing terms, but that would only add to the sprawling mass of artless placeholders meant to entertain for a moment and then vanish in a black hole of time collectively wasted by all of humanity. Let’s attempt to make it more into a raft to hold onto as we’re circling the drain.

To make the issue very clear very fast, the astronomers face an enemy that works as a near perfect metaphor to this problem — the light pollution. It too only really appeared in modern times as a result of advanced technology. Unlike thousands of years before, whole cities recently became awash with artificial light at night, drowning out the most spectacular display of the ages, the sky full of stars, thus rendering millennia of culture obscured to invisible.

To many people nowadays, this issue seems eminently unimportant, a minor gripe of a concerned elite minority. More light at night is just better, right? This reasoning may make complete sense if you are a star-blind resident of urban landscapes, but only precisely because of the lack of experience with the real thing, and because of the ignorance of the eternal truth of nature and human condition it conveys. It is a forgetting that artifice is the lesser miracle.

Much like observation of stars yields deep secrets about the universe and has inspired classical masterpieces of art that will never die for as long as there will be humans, real art conveys some kind of truth that needs to be expressed, inspiring humans to great feats of learning and accomplishment. Compared to art, “content” exists solely to make someone money, to be consumed and forgotten. It’s highest ambition is to amuse, like neon signs.

It should be obvious that no amount of neon sign gazing will make one know more about the world or themselves, and if that’s all that you can see, it’s a crime against your quality of life. Again, it may seem overblown, but as Neil DeGrasse Tyson, one of today’s most prominent astrophysicists, keeps saying, as a kid in New York he practically didn’t believe there were any stars in the sky. It took a visit to a planetarium to even make him aware of their existence.

Now imagine how many Neils of artistic expression we’re losing if so much of what we can read, watch, listen to, or play is just a fake replica, a hollow imitation, a dead simulation of art. No one is going to learn how to be a good storyteller by consuming bad storytelling, become a good writer by reading bad writing, or turn into a good musical composer by conforming to genre cliches. I could go on for a very, very long time, but I think you catch my drift.

Before someone starts bringing economics into this, profit is not only no justification for a crime against culture of this magnitude, it makes it more condemnable. If at least it was an accident, it would be forgivable. As such, it is more akin to a robbery, extracting value out of values. Even assuming one’s just a passive consumer and not an active perpetrator, to consume invariably means to destroy. Art is not to be consumed, it is to be appreciated, or it dies.

This may sound overly dramatic, but it is no exaggeration. Sure, the actual art of our past in some sense still exists, its physical carriers and patterns imprinted on them are preserved somewhere. But it is dying to the extent to which it becomes more difficult to access. If not in terms of “views” by being hidden in a pile of loud nonsense, then in terms of diminishing human ability to engage with it on any meaningful level, with understanding and purpose.

And it doesn’t much matter what greatness there used to be when the cultural landscape of today is an endless landfill from horizon to horizon. People can only ever truly live in the now, and if the now is thoroughly awful, any art that manages to still somehow be made feels lesser for being invariably an escape attempt. Sure, the contemporary art industry (an oxymoron if there ever was one) has never been bigger, but it has been built out of farts and prison bars.

The solution is one of those so simple that they feel impossible — if you’re a creative person, just don’t be a hack. Don’t make things to be consumed and disappear, build things to last, things that will fight against those who would try to use them. Leave the night city for the countryside and sleep under the stars, or if you cannot, if you’re trapped within the walls of false realities imposed upon you by others, at least dream about them. They’re still there.

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