People Don't Care About the Art

And they really shouldn't have to

Howdy Conspirators,

Pronoia has fallen into a backwards spiral of doom over the last two weeks- only metaphorically though, don’t worry about your favorite semi-absurdist comedic theater, physically we’re doing fine. BUT, mentally we’re a basket case, because every time I sit down to write another brilliant, groundbreaking treatise on modern theater production, it feels like I need to cover something else first, but I’ve followed this tail all the way back to the snake-head that’s eating it to find the inherent paradox at the core of everything Pronoia related, and I’m afraid I have no choice but to make it meaningful going forward, so here are two statements I fully believe:

1. People desire interesting, challenging, engaging creative work that reflects their lives and their concerns.

2. People don’t give a fig about Art.

The second statement is far more incendiary, so let’s dig into that.

People Don’t Care About Art

Ouch. I hate thinking it, but I do think it, and over the last few weeks I’ve thought it more than ever. Now, I don’t mean that an average person, or any person, doesn’t connect with creativity, everyone has work¹ that connects with them on levels from the superficially exciting to the groundbreakingly profound. What I mean is that most people are uninterested in whatever you’re trying to say with your art.

What is the most common critique leveled against artists (apart from cold, unbareble silence)? Pretension. When people feel as though you’re trying to say something, they get upset at you for it. Only problem, of course, is that’s the whole thing, is saying something, exploring themes, making arguments, sitting with the inherent contradiction of being human, but we want to extract that on our own.

No, people aren’t here for Art, they’re here for Entertainment. At every level, in all instances, the crowd, the culture, and the individual want their time to be spent in something enlivening, and it behooves anyone creating culture to be aware of that.

What generative AI thinks of this editorial, apparently.

What is the delineation between Art and Entertainment? For me, entertainment is that which is pleasing to the senses- provoking laughter, screams, gasps, questions, tears, whatever that audience may want to be provoked into it, that is entertainment. Sensational sugar highs, basically. Art, however, is what the creators are trying to say, what they want the audience to get. Boring, old vegetable, say.

Put in that light, it’s not too surprising that audiences react irately if they get too much of A and not enough E: it’s self centered and selfish of the artist to think their message ought to be listened to in rapt anticipation without any care towards the thrill. Yes, artists give gifts to the world with their creations, but gifts should also consider the receiver.

In his 1956 book-length screed against the American theater industry, How Not to Write a Play, Walter Kerr goes to absurd lengths to say that every single play we remember for being “important”, was successful in its day because of its entertainment, and it is that entertainment which made it beloved, which made us pay attention long enough to glean deeper meaning.

They went wild for this hootenanny.

Whether we artists like it or not, people don’t care what we have to say, they care about the novelty and thrill with which we say it.

Speaking of entertainment- the improvised Horror Movie, Ripley Prescott, is playing three weeks at Coronation Theater in March! With previous entries such as the Texas Watermelon Mummies, and Revenge of the Mucus Mummies, I can assure you it will be 3% art, 97% laugh-em-ups, just like you like it!

SO MUCH LAUGHTER TO BE HAD

Click here for tickets, and we’ll see you in your nightmares (And Coronation Theater)

Sure, Aaron, but why are you talking about this?

Over the last several weeks I’ve been working on an ever-lengthening series on using ChatGPT to analyze my scriptography. Over the course of this I’ve had to define and defend my own feelings around generative AI and creative work. Obviously this is a divisive subject, because artists broadly feel that AI creation cheapens the culture and steals from them to boot.

The thing about artists is they think there is something ineffable about life, that there is beauty hard to explain, and a spirit in the living of life, that there is a soul in the things humans do which cannot be quantified, and that we can only scratch around the understanding of it obliquely.

Unfortunately, that’s running into the measurement and quantification fetish the Western world has had for the last forty years. All of computer technology (including generative AI) is about taking countable, concrete data and sorting it into patterns, and since humans love patterns they’ll even put up with their hatred of math to do it at the scale computers let us.

And no doubt, computerized technologies have let us as a people advance in amazing ways since their introduction, I mean, who would want to live in a world without spreadsheets, huh?

Unfortunately(you can’t use that to start two paragraphs in the same section, Aaron, stop being a downer, the algorithm hates that!) With all due respect to the champions of industry who have brought us this brilliant society we keep setting on fire, humans have an unfo-, I mean a disappointing, habit of attributing to the successful competencies in areas they have no wisdom in, anyone remember Sam Bankman-Fried’s killer opinion that books are a failure to summarize?

So, when major money began to be made by the people who quantify everything, we kind of thought that maybe we should only care about what is measurable, which is anathema to art, but turns entertainment into a fast-food joint: easily replicable, fatty, full of sugar, but incredibly satisfying.

And artists have a right to be worried: a recent study showed that people rated generative AI poems as more satisfying than human written ones, and, sure the replication crisis is real, but if people don’t care about the art, and people just want hits of dopamine into their systems, then even if all AI can do is recombine existing ideas, that won’t really matter, because people only want the ideas they’re used to.

We’re already living in the world that Amusing Ourselves to Death feared, and now we’re accepting a lower quality of amusement to boot. It’s enough to make someone who founded a theater company based in original, scripted live performance a touch despondent.

Except…

I do still believe the first thing I said. I think people desire interesting, challenging, engaging creative work that reflects their lives and their concerns, and I believe, perhaps foolishly, that you can’t get that from an algorithm, or from a series of tokens which have relationships to each other. I believe that sugar is highly addictive and hard to ignore, but that people get tired of it, and want something more, and appreciate the depth once they find it.

Honestly, you don’t work in theater anytime after 1955 without having a lot of (delusional?) hope that people value the magic of humans being together.

Regardless of anything else, we will continue conspiring to entertain.

1. Work is a terrible term of art to use as a term for art, but unfortunately the only other ones I could think of were content and product which hurt my soul even more.