Beyond Cliché and Pretense: From the Canon to Constellations
The Importance of the new type of Artist
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Nothing is a cliche anymore but everything is pretentious. The contemporary fragmentation of media has rendered the concept of cliché obsolete and fostered perceptions of pretentiousness, necessitating a new breed of artists who merge criticism with entrepreneurship to cultivate a shared cultural consciousness.
If you don’t spend a lot of time on social media, one of the things that gets talked about a lot recently is when movie stars get interviewed on the red carpet, people ask them their favorite films, and if someone doesn’t like “popular movies,” everybody has an opinion on it.
Recently, Austin Butler, star of Elvis and Dune 2, said that growing up his favorite movie was The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. For some reason, young people found this very pretentious. I was born in the late 1980s, and so The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly had been out for well over thirty years by the time I reached early adolescence.
The standoff riff music, “the good, the bad, and the” whatever’s left naming convention, and the closeup of faces imitating a gunslinger fight in the street were also still ubiquitous in my childhood and teen years. The idea that someone like Butler who’s in his early thirties would need to be pretentious to see it when he was a kid is silly–heck, the idea that he could even avoid it is crazy. It was playing on the classic movie channels constantly.
I think this is a result of the fractured media landscape that we have now. I’ve seen TikToks where high school teachers will play what their kids are listening to by way of playing shared Spotify playlists they made for study halls. I’m always shocked that it’s more like one a “Mix 96.5” radio playlist than a Top 40 playlist. This is fun because students can listen to everything they want.
But in a different way, we lose a sense of the shared meaning of what is important and beautiful now.
As a result, we have this weird scenario where nothing is really a cliche anymore. A movie star can say that one of the most popular, copied, ubiquitous movies of the 20th century was his favorite movie as a kid. It’s not a cliche because nothing is shared. We–all of society but especially the youngest people–are all consuming completely different stuff. Something has to be absolutely, sickeningly ever-present to feel shared. Between memes, edits, remixes, etc., there are refractions of refractions of refractions, and there is no longer a monoculture. So, even if someone says something popular is their favorite, it would feel ironic.
But the tradeoff is that everything is pretentious. If you don’t pick something popular, and someone doesn’t know it, it is just too easy to assume that you are trying to be different and choosing to be pretentious. This is what happened with Austin Butler. Because we no longer have shared tastes and a hierarchy of art–complete with “high art”, “low art”, and grungy, anti-establishment counter-institutions, there is no longer a place to slot people’s opinions into. So any unexpected opinion is simply a pretense.
I don’t know what the endgame of this is but I think it’s one of the reasons that we need a new type of artist–one who is part critic and part entrepreneur, born of the internet. It’s why I wrote my Third Year Online Creator Playbook. Specifically, steps 1 and 3 of the playbook are important:
[1] Make your own canon.
To make your own canon you need to be both a fan and a critic--someone who loves and appreciates and someone who has discerning taste. You need to know why you love what you love, separate it from the rest, and explain why it's good. Get started by cataloging the art and ideas who made you who you are, and making your own best of lists. As a way of being, celebrate the things you love, focus on what you want to see more of, and study the people who are great at what you love.
[3] Promote your aesthetic.
Leave the idea of 'guilty pleasures' behind forever. Be unapologetic about what you love. Make a routine of consuming and creating the art that you love. Promote your own aesthetic standards. Promote your own canon. Routinely share them in bite-sized pieces and prepare magnum opuses. Insert your own works of art alongside your canon. Share your own art alongside the things that inspire it. Be honest about what inspires you.
Building your audience to do both of these in public is important. Artists of the future who can do this and build enough of an audience are going to replace the old, monoculture canons.
What will come next will be more like a constellation. Right now, I know a ton of online creators, for example, who are huge fans of Derek Sivers. I don’t know how popular he is in the mainstream, but there’s a potential for misunderstanding along the lines of Austin Butler’s “pretentiousness” there. If one of these creators breaks into the mainstream and someone says, “who’s your favorite writer?” and she says, “Derek Sivers.” Someone might be like, “Of course! Pretentious! Someone I’ve never heard of!”
But if the next three or four writers who break it big do the same thing, suddenly Derek Sivers will be a very important writer. An even bigger thought leader than he already is. (I just picked Derek Sivers at random without checking his numbers–he may already be huge–this is meant as no insult, I like his stuff.)
And so what happens is, these little individual canons unite to become a sort of constellation. I am not against people being able to listen to whatever they want all the time, and getting all of these different options. But I am for leveraging our own individual tastes and abilities as creators and promoters of our individual aesthetics to try to create a shared sense of what is important and beautiful now.