Thirsting in a Sea of Slop

Dessert-only island...

VT52 is back as our first returning author (finally validate our decision to make reusable custom author cards for each submission!) and today he’s thinking about the death of art — or perhaps just the death of our ability to find potable art.

Enjoy!

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

In 2019 it became clear to me that something in our culture was fundamentally broken, and it was Star Wars that made it obvious. Online hatred for the new Star Wars trilogy had already reached its zenith, and the whole ordeal was beginning to taper out. Art felt dead to me in a way it never had before. Obviously, people still make it. But in the past decade or so, interacting with art—especially fiction—has felt hollow. You’ve probably heard that art sucks nowadays because of woke. Get the politics out of my video games, am I right fellow chuds? Many would like to attribute the creative drought to the actions of political zealots. However, I think there’s a deeper problem at play.

I associate this style of criticism most closely with a specific podcast I used to listen to called Every Frame a Pause, or EFAP for short. Fitting its acronym, it was a chaotic, sardonic show which usually responded to recent movie releases or video essayists. Mauler, the owner of this channel, has also created some of the most (in)famous reviews of said trilogy to date. To the credit of the hosts, they certainly knew a thing or two about writing, cinematography, and game design. They were quite good at explaining why something was bad and contrasting it with a better example. Yet as the Star Wars sequels began to fade from recent memory, I began to question what the actual end-result of their project was, other than comedy. When the sequel trilogy was in the limelight, it was easy to believe they were leading a crusade against the slop-ification of art. These so-called “toxic fanboys” were seemingly going to tear down the shoddy products of late, and reveal the path towards a better media landscape.

But year after year, Hollywood did not respond to their critiques. No matter how many internet arguments their sympathizers won, the same “mistakes” were repeated again and again. Some consumers, dissatisfied with the state of popular media, eventually realized that being right wasn’t enough. As the old saying goes, if you want something done right you have to do it yourself. Surprisingly, EFAP did just that. A frequent member of the podcast, known as the Critical Drinker, successfully crowdfunded his own movie: would this be the trailblazer film that could return us to the days of quality cinema?

Unfortunately, no. The movie was funded, but ratings were unfavorable. Looking at the IMDB page, you’ll find many reviews by his own fans, stating that the movie was bland, uninspired, and generic. The fight choreography and audio design were praised, but the story lacked emotional weight.

By following their own critique, they revealed the fatal flaw of the whole enterprise: trying to create a better movie by combining better elements is like trying to manufacture a better man by welding one together from existing parts. You know how it should function, but you're missing an essential force that cannot be found within the craft itself. The end result has all the charm of Frankenstein's Monster.

You could fix the amateurish elements of the production, but the blandness is baked in. Even if your writing is solid, it won’t matter if it has nothing to say. What many of the people in this community are asking for, whether they intend to or not, is merely a higher quality of slop. This may seem unnecessarily harsh, but I believe it is one of the biggest problems with our cultural output. Even when the directors refrain from shaming “whiteness” throughout the entire runtime, the end product usually amounts to nothing more than jangling keys in front of the audience for ninety minutes. Does anyone still remember that Top Gun reboot from 2022? The one everyone was praising as a good old-fashioned non-woke classic? Can you even recall the subtitle?

Because of this, it’s impossible for the broader culture to share a deep aesthetic experience. The common complaint is that “the right” isn’t making quality art to take the place of the garbage. However, if you do some digging you will find “the right” actually is making art, and a lot of it is quite good. But the experience of engaging with such art is schizophrenic. You can read a great short story on Substack, but the wider culture will never acknowledge it. Dare to mention it in public and your friends won't know what you’re talking about. You won’t see it referenced in casual conversations.

If kino is posted in the middle of the woods, does it really make a gem? One might think that if you build a better book, the people will come. But if you know anyone who has finished a creative project, you’ll know this is far from the truth.

To help us understand the true issue plaguing fiction, I have to go back in time, to a point when I was actually excited about the modern creative world. I was still in school, and my family—along with some friends—had gone to Comic Con. This was before the time of the dreaded Funko Pop. Despite the consumerist nature of the whole thing, and the frequent displays of poor taste within, it was clear that everyone involved was possessed by an almost mystical energy of excitement. Looking back, it was quite clear what was going on. This was a collection of people who had experienced some kind of deep meaning within a story, some meaning that their peers didn’t understand. Here, other people would not think they were weird for believing that their favorite obscure anime was important. Even if they didn’t share an interest in the same things, they had all felt that spark of inspiration and transcendence. The dream of every nerd is that someone might actually listen to an explanation of their favorite fictional story and its deep insights about the universe. I don’t think people care nearly as much about this as they used to.

That might be hard to believe, looking around at the avalanche of plastic crap we’ve been buried under. What I mean is that I don’t think people care about the artistic merit of the media they consume any more. The only nerds you see these days are those who simply want better slop, or ones with deeply seated autistic interests. Gone are the days of the guy who thinks you “just wouldn’t get” his favorite anime, present are the days of the 30 year old who can recite every episode of Paw Patrol from memory. The former type of nerd, the type who wants to tell everyone about the significance and meaning of his favorite works, has become a rare sight. All media discussion has turned into summarization, reaction, and prediction. “Wow guys! Did you see the scene where Punch Man punches Vampire Girl in the coochie? I’ve never seen so much blood in my media/content! Bro was out of pocket in that episode. Do you think he hooks up with her in the next episode, or does she fall deeper into her coma? Maybe both?”

This shallowness is best epitomized in the popular modern refrain of “just let people enjoy things!” What is this statement, if not an admission that everything we consume is meaningless—and that’s a good thing. Consumers of culture have gone from desperately trying to defend the artistic merit of their mediocre products, to actively offended by the suggestion that media should contain artistic merit.

No, the problem is not with the art, but with our relationship to it. Simply put, there is no culture of artistic improvement within the modern world. Media criticism has disappeared. The critique that remains is not critique. It does not have a vision of what art should be, communication is not fostered between its participants, it does not have a canon of exemplary works, and it cannot explain why those works hold significance to our culture or the human experience. In other words, it is not critique, but bitching. Bitching about gay race agendas that are not going anywhere, yelling at a brick wall.

What the world needs now is a community of people who are truly interested in art itself. An audience who can truly receive a work—not to simply experience it, but to understand it and share it, in the way the classics are still discussed and passed down today. We need elites, including literary ones. We need awards, reading lists, and tastemakers. The Passage Prize is a great step in this direction. To truly capture the culture however, we will need analysis. We will need a way to communicate these insights to normal people, a way to convince them of the quality and importance of new works and classics alike. In simple terms we need to tell the normies what to read and how to read it.

This is the missing link. One of the functions of an elite class is to maintain a canon of quality works, and quite literally tell people what to consume. It may sound strange to liberal ears, but why do most people go to theatres instead of film festivals? Because a theatre will only show something if it meets a baseline level of quality, and is likely to please the target demographic. Whenever you scroll Netflix recommendations or see a New York Times Bestseller emblem, you are subconsciously thinking: “Show me something worthwhile. You know what’s good, and can just tell me so I don’t waste my time.” This is why the media landscape feels so dismal—the present elite have utterly failed at this job. Finding something good is much harder than people realize. Publishers and studios used to perform this job, and their failures are thoroughly felt.

When curators are doing their job, they present aesthetic propositions to the people, in the form of media artifacts. Via revealed preference, the disorganized masses affirm the judgements of said curators. Propagandistic? Maybe, but the people crave it. Pick up the crown.

Without a network dedicated to improvement, analysis, and recommendation, new works are doomed to fall between the cracks of the algorithm. If “the right” wishes to take power, good art is not enough. We must develop a culture which seeks not to simply consume art as entertainment, but to establish its place in society, to critique it, to advocate for it, and to bring its insights into the real world.

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