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What's wrong with art today? A growing number of essays and general complaints are taking this question to the source: the audience. Or at least that seems to be the primary focus of these pieces; the most compelling problem is the uniform psychological profile of the audience, who is "baby-brained," censorious, prudish, squeamish and reveling in their own political ineffectuality to go beyond the most basic critiques or superficial representation, blah blah blah.

Obviously I don't find this idea very convincing, though it seems very easy lately to write an essay about this, bonus points if you hail back to a supposed lost golden age of maturity or liberty in the 1980s or 90s, have it go mildly viral, and then go on with reviewing the latest netflix originals, or whatever. It's become a sort of abundant meta-sludge for people already hooked up to the content sludge pipe. Like a lot of online discourse, it spends most of its time reading bad faith motivation and evidence of the fall of civilization into observed, perhaps mildly annoying behaviors. The "everyone-screaming-in-one-room" format of centralized social media also means there are abundant behaviors to observe and get mean about 24 hours a day.

I mean, in what other era would unattached adults have access to, ie, parents' opinions on what cartoons their children are watching alongside or within their "cultural feed," or at all? Still, I'm sure my mom must have had them, and I'm sorry for insisting on renting Rock-a-Doodle so many times, the real tragedy being that I don't remember any of it. Things and people that existed before are pathologized as unique symptoms of our age, by whatever shoddy logic, for substack writers to be the Sole Voice Crying In the Wilderness about, and if you liked it, consider subscribing.

I have two points to make, besides that I'm kind of sick of this. The first is that I don't think this attitude about audience is realistic or productive. I don't really think about "an audience" in this way when I write, nor do I think about morality, or beauty, though usually a few political ideas are informing how I write. Writing is something I am rarely, if ever, paid for and yet mostly starts somewhat involuntarily for me; I always come back to it in some form, (criticism, blogging, fanfic, narrative games, novels) no matter what else I try to do with my life. I realize stealing time from a desk job to write this, purely because I want to, makes me "lucky" in certain respects and maybe pitiable in others. Who cares though, what matters is it mostly works, more than trying to make writing my job would, anyways.

So I don't think of my audience as being a uniform, slightly dim mob that I have to impress my superior ideas or sensitivity or morality or aesthetic judgment etc on. If I think of audience at all, it's my own singular experience of encountering a Chris Kraus book or a Hito Steyerl essay or a Thomas Mann or Pynchon novel for the first time, feeling a connection across time and space, the world newly legible in an unexpected way, purely from linear text, and I hope there's a line or two in my own work that hits someone that way. I think if you get trapped in the other mindset, you make boring work; the firebrand "everybody's thinking it" takedown writers rarely last long before becoming a stultified element of the establishment themselves, unless they can form an actual critical angle of their own, beyond "It's their fault! The audience is too stupid!"

But "the audience" doesn't make, "the audience" doesn't distribute, at least not at scale. This audience-focused critique, ironically, reinforces the rather corporate idea that commercial ubiquity responds to and fulfills actually existing audience desire. At best, "audience" "desires" are obliquely represented in metrics where it's big enough to be framed as demand, and little else if not. Acting as though "the audience" is stupid comes as an uncontroversial, natural conclusion is a kind of mental back door people seem to use that can justify both graceless and unambitious clumsy obvious allegory, as well as depoliticized lowest common denominator comfort food. And a lot of these critical essays, while clearly believing themselves to be transgressive, are basically in the allegorical style, a useful role in creating a narrative which serves the attitude of grim realism that surrounds the inevitability of underwhelming commercial work.

So my second point is significantly more obvious: these essays lack a structural critique, of course, except in vague, faulty terms of broad, predetermined "downfall of civilization" rhetoric, which is certainly shareable and makes you seem briefly smart; who doesn't feel like civilization as-is is quite... bad? But things like the determining power advertisers and payment processors have over content rules for online distribution platforms, or the homogenizing impact of everyone-in-one-place algorithmic feeds that bury niche content, shrinking free time and the aggressive professionalization of previously accessible formats like games, home video or comics are apparently not nearly as worth mentioning as "the audience" simply having an unchill vibe now-a-days.

Zine fairs, small presses, weirdo distributors and local film festivals, if they're brought up at all, are talked about as utopic relics of the past; but they're still here, somehow surviving the booms and busts of online attention, and they have multiple and varied audiences of their own. Of course, my eternal frustration is that the margins of the critic who hitches themselves to a metrics-based online platform are deliberately never generous enough to take their eyes off the slop chute of the algorithmic feed, to look at the environment around them. If it's not put in front of them consistently like jangly plastic keys it's stopped existing, to the point where critique just degenerates into fractally more minute and paranoid meta-discussions of scene or audience... Then the work they're supposedly looking for also vanishes.

Well, in the end, sex can become just as rote as sexlessness. A particularly annoying trend on Indie twitter this week seems to be saying devs will add "sex" (whatever that entails) to a game, if some pathetic beg for followers or likes is reached. Similarly to people for whom sex functions as just a giddy provocation or transgression (usually with a heaping helping of the most amateur, rather than fun, Evil Bisexuality), people who only want to do it if they get enough "likes" are some of the last people I want actually depicting sex in the first place. Again, the abstraction of "audience" must be deferred to, again it can be blamed for producing something likely pretty mediocre. But if you want some games made by people who put sex stuff in out of pure zest for life, there's always the new Domino Club drop.