Triumph In Blog

Artists Only

Or, how I hate the word “Entertainment”

I have previously decried the idea of performing live as something that I don’t really personally like to do, which I assume you all know because you’ve read my previous writings. It’s not necessarily my cup of tea, live music, and I don’t exactly love being in the audience or on the stage–but I don’t necessarily hate performing in general, do I? I certainly put enough of myself out there trying to and occasionally succeeding in making people laugh, or instructing people, or just plain addressing them. Public speaking doesn’t really come across as difficult to me, so why don’t I like the idea of putting on a show?

Well, some of that is certainly personal. I find that a lot of what I make is less palatable than what would be put in front of a crowd, and represents a lot of my feelings that are less fun to explore in a group, if for no other reason than specificity. No, my own feelings don’t make nearly as much sense as my own autistic, ideological commitments; if I was somehow equipped and funded to make live music, I would certainly give it my best shot despite the suffocating, exploitative lifestyle it entails. In fact, that’s what I find that I actually resent–“show biz” as it were.

I’m far from the first person to complain about the commodification of art though. That’s just pedantry at this point, so I think instead of punching up at capital, I’ll punch down at the proletariat. I think there’s a curse of anti-intellectualism among much of the first world public these days, and one such facet of that belief that I personally take issue with is the ever-spreading, all-consuming overreach of “Entertainment.” Does anyone else feel as sick reading that as I do? If you take it for what it explicitly means, what does it imply? Something made to occupy and satisfy the time commitments of braying throngs of petulant dipshits? Is that why we make what we make, to “entertain?”

No, you “entertain” a dog that cries when it wants to play. You “entertain” people waiting around for an appointment because they can’t go anywhere else. You “entertain” a baby that would absentmindedly drink cleaning solvent if you didn’t pay attention to it. I generally regard the general consuming public as that last one, but I think there’s another being that requires “entertainment” which a lot of people feel kinship with, that being the king in his court. Let me clear: I’m not just a frustrated misanthrope writing this because I hate the bloated drunken masses of America, although I do often think that way. Not everyone has lopsided or entitled expectations, and in fact most people out there in the jungle are probably way nicer and more patient than I am. Plus, I haven’t made that much stuff, and not many people are watching, so what much pressure is there on me, right?

But what do we gain, collectively, by reducing artwork to mere “entertainment?” To me, and in fact to many people more dedicated and experienced than myself, art is about expression, mood, the rendering of a vision, and the asymptotic pursuit of perfection. There is a rich and enormous history of thought and of feeling, and a proverbial tree of heroes connecting us to everyone before us who ever understood that there are feelings that simple words or theses can’t encapsulate. Many people do not understand this at all–people who do not create or even feel the urge to, and have no drive to understand or empathize with other people’s visions. To them, it’s impossible to tell the difference between something somebody made out of love, and something made to turn a dime or fill up space. At least, until they either by force or accident are exposed to something that changes them, preferably when they’re young.

In truth, there’s little sense of superiority or exclusion here. Not everyone gives a shit about everything, and that makes perfect sense, and it’s fine. But through many various cultural and political factors, there has become a sort of adversity on part of those who don’t care. Everyone has the capacity to understand art and what goes into it, but in the hilariously easy lives of the first world public, nobody is ever encouraged to do so in any meaningful way, unless by happenstance. People seem to get kinda pent up about it! We end up with a massive plurality of people who care nothing for creation and barely understand their own feelings by the time they reach adulthood.

And yet, two things simultaneously remain true: the long tapestry of art as trade and as lifestyle continues to exist through the (dwindling) efforts to preserve what was made in the past, and those who don’t care to be a part of it have lots of superwages and free time to consume whatever is put in front of them. So what happens? A vacuum is created where the majority of people want to engage with something, but don’t care much for what it is, while the quantity of things made by people who do care keeps logarithmically decreasing. As we can observe in modern, fascist, American society, the endless efforts to kill off the arts as profession (American Perestroika in motion as of 2025,) have resulted in a large number of facsimiles to fill this void. This is a result of mass money laundering through dying artistic institutions, yes, and the needs of our economy for constant capital, but also an intellectual result of a declining appreciation for artistry and the thought process behind it.

I’m not exactly Adorno, so it probably feels like I’m making a lot of leaps there if you’re not on my marxist wavelength already. So, think of it like this: right now, most Americans have fake shitty jobs they hate and that burn them out completely, so all they can want or afford to do is sit around watching TV or browsing Tik Tok in their free time. For people in this position, without external interference, they will probably watch absolutely anything, because most of it is just background noise to drown out the sounds of our imperial stranglehold on the earth loosening rapidly. If you set before such a person, say, Orphée, they may notice, or they may not. If you set before them The Masked Singer, they may notice, or they may not. This is what I mean when I refer to art being “reduced to entertainment.” Is there not more value in something somebody cared to pour their heart into, versus something made to be background radiation with celebrity cameos? Is this stuff really all the same, all made to be put in front of bored losers who don’t care?

The already diminishing arts in the first world are washed away much faster when they are made to share space with the cashgrabs and the low-hanging fruit. This has been something rubbing some people the wrong way for decades, and television is just the easiest example–well, video games are actually, but this is annoying enough without me talking about video games as high art. I’ll get into that another time. What we gain from this culture, this reduction, with respect to the question I posed a minute ago, is an exponential negative feedback loop. Nobody scrutinizes what goes out, and people seldom notice what goes in. Fewer people make art that they love, and fewer people have the capacity to recognize it when they see it. This is what “entertainment” is to me: things that are made to appeal to a lowest common denominator, because it matters less that they have something to do or say, and more that they get views during a timeslot. This stuff just isn’t all the same, but people come to reckon it that way.

Of course, it seems presumptive of me to place the blame for this on the consumers, yes? In a sense it is; although the disdain is not completely unwarranted, I have already conceded that this vacuum exists mostly because of institutional failure, and the cretins that infest it are both direct and indirect products of a post-profit-decline economy. I jape a bit, but not all people watching things on their couch are truly “losers,” and as hard as it is to curate high art now, it does still exist. People still make things they love and have places to put them, but the whole system just keeps losing energy. But I did seem kinda mad a second ago, and I said I would punch down. And I am going to do that, because, empirically, I’m giving people more credit than they deserve!

We manufacture a lot of unchallenging dogshit in this country, but unfortunately my “noble savage” conception of a crestfallen middle class too tired to curate their own art nouveau just isn’t what we see when we query the public for their opinion. Let’s make another thing clear: there is NO American proletariat, at all. It does not exist. If you don’t believe me, give my boys J. Sakai and Immanuel Wallerstein a ring and they can explain it to you. The sprawling, stratified middle class of America is what makes up the consuming public I’ve been discussing, and do they seem to recognize the inherent contradictions of “Entertainment” as categorization? NO! Constant capital is one thing, but would we make this crap if there were no market for it? Art as an institution has been hollowed out mostly because there has been no pushback, and the perception of major artistic endeavors being known scams is about 100 years old by now.

How often have things truly visionary or auteur been popular, or even famous? We still talk about the same handful of highbrow (most of them are pretty middlebrow) movies from no later than like 1994 as the unquestionable best of all time, and I don’t think there have been any famous painters in decades. Music is a wasteland, we’re essentially done with literature as an avenue for anything important, and at this point, as many fat nazis are keen to point out, we don’t really even make pretty buildings anymore. Do people actually want to know about high art, or have we spent enough time without it being foisted on us that the same uneducated masses have become abjectly hostile to it? How many twitter discourses about cartoons, how many people wearing dashikis to Black Panther showings, how many lawsuits over live-service video game microtransactions, how many anythings do we need before we admit that the American public is terrified of things they may need to engage with?

I would contend that it’s not enough to say that art has been overtaken, forgotten, or scrapped for financial reasons. At least in America, art is simply the opposition to our culture! I like to believe there are many sensible people out there who want for things to be less droll and unoriginal (or simply ugly, when applicable,) and in truth you do hear some people indicate a sort of worry as adults that they have not developed a sense of taste, and they want to compensate for it somehow. However, most Americans compensate for this the same way they compensate for everything else: massive repression. They get mad, they double down, they retreat into mentally inhabiting their precious childhoods. The broader cultural picture seems to be that most people grow to be unchallenged, uncritical adults who care only for what is popular enough for them to passively hear about, and when you suggest to them that it may be beneficial to think harder and be more present and care about anything, they will become hostile as their worldview is challenged.

Whether they were worried already or not, the instant the average American is confronted by the idea that they have not committed to understanding or feeling anything, they will absolutely lash out. This is not restricted to the intake of media, but that’s kind of the easiest situation to generalize. It’s not enough that most people couldn’t name a single opera or haven’t read a single book as an adult, but to suggest that it would be healthy for their psyche to do so is now an attack on values, or some sort of moralism. Again, this is very American in general–tell someone it’s unhealthy to be fat, or unhealthy to be in a loveless marriage, or unhealthy to give their kids ipads, you will always get the same response. To ask someone to be present in their own life or try to consider other people’s thoughts, to see themselves as a participant in the world rather than an interloper in jupiterian excess, looking for distractions between now and the grave…these are all frightening and malicious transgressions against the comfortable simplicity of life at the top of the global financial heap. To ask people to discern between art made by people to encapsulate a vision and “art” shit out by boards of directors to tranquilize old people is to ask them to hold a belief that they had to independently formulate, based on an informed and critical worldview. This is utterly fucking horrifying, on top of being (I mean this actually, not being glib,) pretty difficult. Really, it’s downright un-American!

I’m getting away from myself, but this is all what I consider the consequence of the idea of “entertainment.” The idea that anything that someone would give themselves and their whole life and mind to create is simply made to be flashing colors for the most entitled people in the world. The idea that not only is there no value in discerning between things of quality and things of convenience, but that the things which demand to be paid attention to and attempt to formulate ideas are offensive to viewers, and should be scorned and whisked away. The idea that the easiest lives on the planet must be made so much easier by a bulwark of infantilizing, trivial media that even the minds contained within are boys in the bubble, completely inoculated against the terror of different ideas. The idea that to have to try to do something–anything–even for your own benefit, is too insurmountable.

Art is not “entertainment,” for all that art is many things and holds many different meanings. One thing I personally refuse to consider it is “entertainment.” I do not make any “entertainment” (insert statler and waldorf saying “you got that right!”) and I do not view anything else I find valuable or meaningful as “entertainment.” I do not need to be “entertained,” at least not while I’m sober, and that’s not because I’m the end all be all god of critical consumption who decides what’s important and what isn’t. It’s because I care about what I spend my time doing, and I care to look into what other people think and feel and why they externalize themselves in their work! Even the dumbest, most unassuming things can have effort in the details, or the construction. Every new streaming service miniseries or AAA game or BookTok romance is nothing short of absolute poison, and it exists in such quantity because most people would evidently rather be poisoned than have to think about why they get up in the morning! I can get mad and pretentious all I want, but isn’t that just sad and pathetic if you step back and look at it? There doesn’t need to be “woke” or whatever other stupid, made-up thing–our culture is just as dumb and simple as it’s always been, and to stand up and say that is a losing battle on all fronts.

So fuck “entertainment;” I am not an “entertainer,” and nobody I love or respect is, and I find it sad when people find their profession in the arts to be as an “entertainer.” I also don’t like “storyteller,” while I’m thinking of it, nor do I like “Producer,” and I ESPECIALLY hate “content creator.” Although, that last one sort of does accurately describe a lot of the people who would wear it as a title. Not everything has to be high art and everything has its place, but if you don’t stand up and draw a line between what is important and what isn’t, if we can’t collectively curate some things we think are meaningful, how long until we stop caring entirely? As I’ve described, there are a lot of dark forces at work to undermine creativity, every second of every minute of every day. How about we call ourselves “artists,” which is what we are, and we get together in a People’s Republican Guard and force people at gunpoint to go to art galleries, or experience fine dining?

If you’ve read all of this, thank you for indulging me. If you find me too pretentious to stomach and you think I’m just blowing wind because another person on letterboxd got 10k likes for saying that the puss n boots movie is better than Edward Yang, I will indulge you back and give you some ammunition to reinforce the notion that this is all in my head, and that thousands of years of culture dying out for AI dog videos is actually fine and the future is secure and god is in his heaven etc. I will do this by listing some of the really stupid and basically worthless, insanely popular things that I like, and I will resist the urge to qualify them as I write them:

Hopefully that makes this a little more digestible. Let me temper this ranting and raving with a final stinger: I don’t think that everything has to be high art, or that everything that people put their backs into has to be deeply meaningful or transcendent. Things that are easy and retarded have their place, as I said, but to be a functioning person with a healthy mind who can participate in a world of different cultures and values, I think it’s important to recognize the differences. “Entertainment” means nothing, you can always be caring about your life and what you spend your time with, and even as lowly, loathsome, and fragile as we are here in America, there are still valuable, beautiful things and people who nurture them. Sorry if I seem flippant or standoffish when I say that everyone is fat and stupid and I hate them and the world is ending, but if you really think about it…it’s sorta true?

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