Art matters, but why? #

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the cheap art manifesto.

I can’t remember when or where I first saw it. Somewhere online, probably, back before the web really began to curdle and crumble, back when having serendipitous encounters with interesting things was normal. But I do recall feeling the shock of something like recognition when I discovered it. The manifesto expressed something that I deeply believed but hadn’t found the words to properly articulate. It was an uncomplicated and strident statement about the inherent populism and egalitarianism of art. How could anyone read this and not feel the urge to just scream HELL YEAH:

ART has to be CHEAP & available to EVERYBODY. It needs to be EVERYWHERE because it is the INSIDE of the WORLD.

In my own small way, I’ve tried to follow these values. I make zines and preach the gospel of zinemaking to anyone who will listen. (Speaking of which: You should make a zine.) I sell my work when I can, but I price it as cheaply as possible. My hope is to make people laugh, to share something I’ve thought about or experienced and, hopefully, to recoup my expenses so I can sell at another show and table at another fair. Making money from my art is never something I’ve wanted or expected, and I don’t dream about my stuff hanging in a gallery. I would rather burn my entire body of work than let a rich asshole use any bit of it as an investment asset.

But I’m also discovering that the cheap art manifesto no longer speaks to me in quite the same way as it once did.

I still believe in many of the ideas it embodies: I don’t think art should be a tool of the rich and powerful; everyone needs and deserves art, just as much as they need and deserve shelter and food and a sense of belonging. I don’t want art to be a luxury good, even though our society too often treats it as such.

No, my disenchantment with the manifesto has more to do with its optimism and belief in the power of art to change the world. My discomfort is with this whole bit:

ART SOOTHES PAIN! Art wakes up sleepers! ART FIGHTS AGAINST WAR & STUPIDITY! ART SINGS HALLELUJA!

I want to think that art soothes pain, that it will wake people up, that it pushes back against war and stupidity — that, in other words, it has some material, positive impact on the world. But I’m no longer sure that it does.

Actually, that’s not entirely right. Art can do all these things, but it’s not a given. And it feels wrong to advocate for art on the grounds that it changes the world for the better when it so often does not. I’ve started to feel this way, in part, because I’ve also come to distrust similar arguments that defend fiction as a tool for promoting empathy and human understanding — a justification that just doesn’t match up with reality. Plenty of awful, unempathetic, miserable human beings read fiction — some of them even name their vile tech companies after things from their favorite books — and it seems unable to change them into better people. (This is an insight articulated by critic Lyta Gold’s book, Dangerous Fictions, which I enthusiastically recommend.)

I guess I’m in a weird space right now: I want to defend the necessity of art (and fiction), but I’m no longer entirely sure how best to do that.

I’d welcome your thoughts, if you have them!

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A new review #

Also, speaking of zines: Here’s a reminder that I’m reviewing them! I posted a new review a few days ago on the zine-focused corner of my website, and I wanted to reshare it here:

Subvert: Issue #1 by Selby P.: I love reading overtly political zines, and Subvert certainly is that. The subtitle of this issue is: “It’s time to take a stand against censorship.” And the zine as a whole is a direct response to the second Trump administration’s assault on free speech rights in the U.S. I like a lot of the aesthetic choices Selby makes here: The black-and-white approach feels old-school punk and the monospaced, typewriter-adjacent font is a great touch. The style fits the substance!

Content-wise, Subvert feels mostly like an exercise in political education. It wants people to wake up and think about what censorship is, and it encourages its readers to push back against the suppression of speech in whatever way they can. And one of those ways is by making zines! The final few pages include a practical guide to making “yer own zine,” as Selby puts it. Hopefully, readers will take their advice, as physical, printed zines are a useful way to subvert (hey! that’s the title!) the ugly, repressive, dystopian nightmare that is most of the modern internet.

Selby also shared the following message when they sent me their zine to review:

“I’m always up for trades! If you want to trade zines, please message me via Discord (@SelbyP) or Reddit (u/Obsessed-with-zines). If you can’t/aren’t comfortable trading zines, I’ll send any of my 3 minizines to you for free!”

Sounds like a great deal to me! Here’s a link to buy Subvert: Issue #1 (and Selby’s other zines) online: selbysstudio.etsy.com

If you make zines, I want to read and review them. Get in touch and I’ll share my mailing address. Or if you’ve got a digital zine, just send me a link.

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Links #

Finally, I’m trying a new thing. Well, it’s really an old thing, but it’s new for me. About six billion years ago, people used blogs to share links they thought were cool. Then social media killed blogs and people started sharing links on Twitter. Now, social media is unbearable, so it’s (hopefully) back to blogs. Here’s a few things I read this past week that stuck in my head (also posted here):

Trump FCC Installs Babysitter At CBS To Ensure The Network Kisses King Donald’s Ass – Karl Bode, TechDirt

Welcome To (New, Sort Of) Webworm – David Farrier, Webworm

Meta’s flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York. He never made it home. – Jeff Horwitz, Reuters. The entire story is bleak, and there’s also some good insight into the way sycophantic, affirming generative AI chatbots are being used by social media companies as yet another way to keep people plugged into their platforms — a logical extension of their business models:

But [Alison Lee, a former researcher in Meta’s Responsible AI division] believes economic incentives have led the AI industry to aggressively blur the line between human relationships and bot engagement. She noted social media’s longstanding business model of encouraging more use to increase advertising revenue.

“The best way to sustain usage over time, whether number of minutes per session or sessions over time, is to prey on our deepest desires to be seen, to be validated, to be affirmed,” Lee said. Meta’s decision to embed chatbots within Facebook and Instagram’s direct-messaging sections – locations that users have been conditioned to treat as personal – “adds an extra layer of anthropomorphization,” she said.

A glacier burst, flooding Juneau. Again. This one broke records — Douglas Fox, Science News

Salts and Peppers Build a Union at Starbucks — Jenny Brown, Labor Notes

‘Absolutely immense’: the companies on the hook for the $3tn AI building boom – Financial Times. Money quote here:

“People are making forecasts on the assumption that all enterprises will start to use AI technology and pay for it, and pay enough for it to justify the return on investment for all these training facilities,” said a banker who works on data centre deals.

“The conclusion is that we’re all going to be using AI all the time for everything. That’s an incomprehensible world, but one you need to believe in order to not see how this all ends up losing money.”