According to Google’s top result, you’re supposed to dig a grave for a pet at least three feet deep. I started digging at noon, and it was almost eighty degrees. For some reason, I wore a thin, athletic long sleeve shirt, and some thin athletic pants to go with it.
All the while doing it, I thought for the umpteenth time something I’ve been thinking regularly in the past month: it’s a blessing to be unemployed. Being unemployed allowed me to dig the grave without being stressed in the back of my mind. A grave is hard work, banal, sweaty, and a difficult workout that wears on your bones. And, after all, isn’t that a great way to summarize the life of the person who will lay in it? It’s only right that, if you’re taking the time to send someone off, to build the place that will serve as the memory and celebration of their life, the process gives you a taste of the life you’re serving. Its as true for a cat as it is for any person.
And then I thought about being unemployed, and how absurd it sounds to people to wish for it. There are good reasons for that, too. I’m stressed as hell about money. Making rent and paying bills are impossibilities only solved by the kind of miracles that only seem to happen when you need them most. I can’t rely on them, and I’m due for missing out on seemingly divine help whenever I’m in a time of need.
Yet I can’t help but feel better in every other facet of my life. I don’t have T.V., and I haven’t had cable since the tenth grade. So, I don’t watch television. I have a little laptop, just a little bitty old guy. Small and dark blue, almost black, but it’s got too bright of a shine for that. I’m writing on him right now. I don’t watch youtube, or Netflix or anything, because I’m too poor to afford Netflix, and also because I’ve just lost any and all taste for commercial art.
I spend my days reading fiction. I used to love fiction, but I haven’t read it like this since maybe the seventh or eight grade. I take notes, and I keep an eye for the style and its effect on the experience. How it makes me feel towards certain characters. I’m trying my hand at writing a novel myself. I say that to point to the fact that being unemployed has allowed me to pursue this artistic dream. Not in a shallow way, or in idea, but in fact. And, even when no one reads the final project, it will still be a great blessing to have had the time to do it.
Then it occurred to me. There are plenty of unemployed people out there, perfectly stable financially—through the largess of their too-nice partner, or because of they lucked out in the birth department—who end up as complete bums. These people play video games, watch youtube, visit online forums, or watch Marvel movies, the office, or anime on repeat. These people haven’t achieved any of their dreams, or tangibly pursued any of their interests in an active or creative sense.
Which reminded me of Netflix. A conversation with a friend the other day served as the occasion of this reminder. We were talking about art (which is why art is on my mind). We talked about the problem of art in capitalist society. Along the way, I remembered an advertisement-esque twitter screenshot from when Netflix’ streaming first took off. The text lauded Netflix (in that unironically millennial type of tweet which starts with the phrase “remember that time when…”) for sending an emergency vehicle to a woman’s house. Netflix knew to send someone to her house because she had been watching Netflix for some absurd amount of time. As I remembered this, it dawned on me that Netflix probably stopped doing that kind of thing. There’s probably so many people out there who watch Netflix all day, every day, that they couldn’t possibly stop them. I wonder if they could even publish the numbers of people who constantly stream. Maybe the numbers would be so big that releasing them would cause a public frenzy.
It was this thought that helped me confide in a friend that, actually, I don’t like any commercial art anymore. As if I’d confessed Christian doctrine in secret to avoid the KGB’s atheistic mimicry of divine omniscience, they expressed their agreement with me in a silent nod. And we then discussed in whispers the corruption of commercial, popular art. If reality television was the natural sum of an entertainment business model which prioritizes quantity over quality at the cheapest cost in order to fill a 24/7 news slot, then scripted reality television shows are the natural result. Just drop seven emotionally-ignorant people in a townhouse for a summer, get the world’s best editors, and hours and hours of inescapable, addicting, mindless content inexorably ensues. You can be a Ph.D with an IQ of a million and spend an afternoon watching one of those shows. They’re cheap mindless crap, and that’s why the History Channel devolved into Pawn Stars and Storage Wars.
And that’s what they’re doing with superhero movies, and with the dramas the big studios do every November to get on the Oscar’s nominee list. There are people in big suits and deep pockets who have whittled down little formulas for every genre. They have a department of scriptwriters who specialize in workshopping pre-existing templates to appeal to a predetermined set of basic, addictive psychological needs. To get people to spend money on the thing.
There’s a rarity of good creative visionaries in entertainment because of all this. Every facet of it is the same. And isn’t that what George Lucas was saying when he said that filmmakers in the USSR have more freedom than American filmmakers? And isn’t that why there are is such a preponderance of people who spend their lives centered around their films? Or their television shows? Or their video games? Everything that Americans have been fed, as far as their entertainment industry goes, is completely determined by appealing to the basest needs of individuals in the most shallow and time consuming way. This is by far the gold standard, and its why Americans are so prone to spending their days attached to the shallowest forms of entertainment. It’s why, when they are finally able to have time to relax and do nothing, between meals, or during any point of downtime, they turn to something mindless.
And you have to think about what that takes away from people on a personal, and intimate level. By bombarding people for a lifetime with empty, mindless content, and an infinite variety of means to achieve cheap satisfaction, the American entertainment industry has successfully defined the world of art as something judged solely by its circulation, popularity, and economic success. It sends the message that art isn’t something that I do for the sake of those around me. Art is something I do alone in my own personal pursuit of aggrandizement. Art for the individual has atomized into corporate sub-cultures. Now the writer writes Naruto fanfiction. The painter creates commissioned furry porn. And the actors stream reaction content on youtube and twitch.
But art is something you’re supposed to do with other people. It’s something that should be done in common with people, in places where communities gather and spend time together. If you’re an actor, you should want to act for the sake of itself. It’s about performing in a local play and explore the idea of conveying a fairy tale on a budget for its own sake. If you’re a photographer, you should do it because you love the photos, or if you write poetry, you should do it because you simply want to communicate that way, even if no one reads your poems outside the book club.
But because art is everywhere performed as a mimicry of itself, as something handed down in a centralized, massive scale, there is no interaction between the people who make the art and the audience which sees it. It’s handed down as an untouchable idol that is somewhere, somehow, perfect. Art is searched, and art is readily available to everyone for free. It’s from above, and its everywhere. It’s on advertisements, playing everywhere you go, on your phone, on the radio, in the books you read. All around it’s available as something to be perceived and assumed. And to top it off, the author is functionally non-existent. They’re a faraway saint you can email or tweet at hopelessly.
Everything about presenting art like this is problematic. And that’s because its a lie. Art is messy most of the time. Most of the time, it’s bad. But there’s value to bad art. I think of two immediate reasons for this. For one, it awakens the critic, and forces observers to articulate their own opinions and apply their own heuristic by which to judge the work. Applying these heuristics over time can play an integral force in appreciating art—whether it be a painting or a song on the radio. It gives people the opportunity to engage actively in the discipline they’re observing through a dialectic of criticism. This is the movement of a subject applies their heuristic, evaluates and reconsiders its effects, and then changes it to better express their taste. And then they apply this newfound heuristic in place of the first. This process never really ends. And bad art is good because of its ability to throw you into this dialectic and force you to take an active role in the discipline.
And yet a second reason for the importance of bad art appears. Bad art is an indicator of healthy community; the isolation of the American from the experience of bad art is also an indicator of the average American’s loneliness. Art is intrinsically an intimate experience; it is an expression of the self that those have chosen to present to the world. The fact is that our only experience of art is in its most manicured, contrived form. And our reception and experience of it is limited to contexts that are predominantly private and separate from public, communal life. When we experience art this way, we’re excluded from an important opportunity for intimacy that our society so desperately needs.
And in its place, it sends the message that all of our art needs to mimic the perfect art we see around us, in its goals. It needs to be monetized in order to be valuable. This is why everyone you know is starting a podcast, or becoming a twitch streamer. Everyone wants to express themselves, and they want to do it with others. However, they have little time to do it, and they have bad examples of what that looks like. So, they think they have to make money with it; they need to create a viral video, or a funny podcast because they want to make money and become a celebrity.
When no one should have to have a justification for talking with their friends, making music in community and sharing it with their loved ones, or writing poems and books that no one will read. These things are inherently valuable for their own sake. They’re valuable because they allow self-expression and introspection, and they’re also valuable because they force you to participate in the self-expression and introspection of others.
So while I was digging the grave for my friend, and thinking about why I hated commercial art, I realized there was nothing wrong with how I felt about unemployment. Sure, unemployment is a problem en masse when people are lazy bums without any drive for some kind of societally meaningful passion. But people aren’t inherently lazy bums who lack meaningful drives. People are what you make them to be, and we have made a society which severely punishes people from asserting themselves determinately in all meaningful senses of the word. We direct them to work at least 40/hrs a week, and if they’re lucky they can make ends meet with that; we strip them of the communities, relationships, and examples necessary to participate in artful disciplines, or to understand all disciplines as art.[1] Most of all, we strip them of the opportunity to be passionate about anything in an active sense. We’ve created a world which prizes art exclusively as relaxation, as something passively enjoyed, and its measure of success is merely the quantity of viewers, rather than its inherent process and value.
I suppose the Marxist way to express that is to say that art has become nothing more than a commodity. It’s not a profound claim, but it is striking how widespread art’s commodification has become. It’s like a disease which has spread everywhere. You can’t be proud of calling yourself a writer, it feels, if none of your work is published or you’ll get laughed at. Granted, it would be strange to introduce yourself as a writer first, knowing it’s something you only do as a hobby, when they really just want to know what you do for a living. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? The source of the problem. We’ve made a world where art is only allowed to be a hobby, and even if it’s the thing you’re most passionate about in the world, it’s embarrassing to identify yourself with it. And the frustrating part is that it doesn’t have to be that way.
So I don’t think I’m wrong to be happy about unemployment. At least, I shouldn’t feel bad for enjoying the time I have to do the things I want to do. I finally have time to dig graves without feeling guilty, to do some yardwork, to organize my room, and just try learning other things. I’m not asking for much, really. I just want enough time to help out those around me. And I want others to have that freedom, too, without having to feel stressed about where to find rent.
Digging the hole took about two hours. I went inside, and they began to euthanize the cat. The doctor had a difficult time finding the vein, and the fifteen-year-old-cat was strong to the end, requiring multiple injections to take him down. I laid him in the grave. It’s a good thing to experience and be around death. So I was happy I had the time to do it.
1. Isn’t what’s true of art true of trades? Shouldn’t we long for a world where people are prized for being good electricians as they are praised for being good artists? Shouldn’t push people to learn electrical, agricultural, carpentry, etc. theory for its own sake? So they can be excellent at the things they’ve become passionate about?