It's Good Enough To Be Good

There's never been a better time to simply be good at your craft

I have a new piece out at Typebar, an exciting magazine project that you should tune into if you like thoughtful, longform culture writing. It’s about a moment in the tortured arc of digital media history that I suspect many of you remember quite well, and what’s come after.

I promise this will never turn into another newsletter about politics. So I’ll simply say that I doubt anyone reading this is all that much happier about The State of Things than I am. Pick your metaphor: Chaos, tumult, widening gyre, etc.

Things are rough, and politics feels as inescapable as ever. I tend to think “everything is political” is most useful as a corrective. When I was in school, if a student said something along the lines of, “Well, why can’t the government do more about poverty?” the response from my teachers would often be something like, “Because the government can’t solve that problem.” This kind of hyper-political statement was somehow supposed to be a way of stopping discussion from Getting Too Political. It’s perhaps no surprise that my generation learned to foreground politics at every turn.

When overused, “everything is political” becomes an incantation along the lines of, “God is in all things.” You may very well believe that God is in all things, but it doesn’t do a whole lot to help you distinguish the qualities of a tangerine from those of a 2012 Nissan Xterra. God is in them both, but only one can help you drive to Costco.

An extremely famous and overtly political piece of art

If you feel like the most important thing you can do right now is to create the most explicitly political art possible, then may the God who is in tangerines and Nissan Xterrae alike bless and keep you. Someone always has to be doing that work. Orwell has meant as much to me as any other writer, and while not everything he wrote (especially some of his more forgotten fiction) could be said to be a targeted political salvo, he’s most famous for sallying forth into the fray of his moment. Maybe you can’t quite write Homage to Catalonia or paint Guernica, but there’s a lot to be said for the attempt.

If however you’d like to write an 800-page novel that records the entire life of a gamekeeper in 18th-century Scotland, as well as the lives of various of his kin and his lordship’s wastrel son who seduces an orphaned milk maid, interspersed with elegies about the decline of hunting due to deforestation, and encounters with the Scottish wildcat, then you should also feel free to do that. Best of luck on your sweetly melancholic magnum opus, Edgar of Loch Dumphrey. It will have nothing to say about contemporary politics, except by way of analogy, but I’d be curious to read it.

The trap I worry about at times like these is that artists will feel guilty if their work isn’t somehow Doing Its Part to participate unmistakably in politics. Guilt is usually a bad reason to make or not make art. And yet artistic subcultures tend to be suffused with guilt, and conscientiousness rarely goes all the way out of style even as chafing against it is also inevitable. So how do we resolve this tension between the urge to feel like we’re participating in the struggles around us, and the need to respect the autonomy of art in all its possible forms?

I’d like to suggest that our current moment offers us a rare clarity about how to move forward on creative projects without undue political guilt. That’s because one of the problems we’re facing is a crisis of disastrously low quality and sheer ineptitude. So much of governance right now, for instance, could be described as weaponized incompetence. Policies seem to get made precisely because the people who understand the domain say they’re a bad idea. “Ineptitude enshrined as virtue” is the exact opposite of a respectable artistic ethos.

AI slop meanwhile continues to wash up on the shores of the arts and all other forms of work. It’s like an oil spill accompanied by a flotilla of gleeful, rich oafs telling you how great the slick really is. AI definitely has its uses, even in the arts. But it’s become nearly impossible to think or talk through what those positives might be. The issue is that, from the very beginning, no matter how bad or stupid or simply wrong the output of various generative models has been, a segment of the ownership class has been unable to contain their excitement at the thought that the labor of artists, intellectuals, and their own employees might be devalued. “Bow before the slop” has been the imperative. Once again, ineptitude enshrined as virtue.

So you would be forgiven for concluding we live in distinctly artless times. But at least one happy revelation bubbles up from this depressing muck: The value of simply doing good art has never been clearer. The work doesn’t need to be overtly/directly/explicitly/correctly political. It’s good enough for it to be good. Skilled artists doing sincerely intentioned work are by definition pushing against the honoring of ineptitude. Or to put it more crudely, to do good work is to defy shitty work.

I tend to resist measuring the value of art by whether it unequivocally displays the correct politics. But I understand why, especially now, reassurances might be sought. So take this as good news about the worth of being good at what you do in a time that celebrates cynicism and fecklessness. If you find yourself feeling guilty because your creative output doesn’t feel political enough, consider that, even if you don’t set out to create Political Art, there’s a greater political valence than ever before to capable craftsmanship. Your gentle epic about the auld gamekeeper has value not only insofar as it’s a good novel, but because it’s an act of care and skill in an increasingly crude and oafish world.

This may all sound precious. It probably is precious; I’m not immune to treacle. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of lofi remixes of scores from the original Pokémon games. I don’t say any of this, however, to provide easy affirmation. It’s hard to become a good artist, and harder still to make good art. If you take on that challenge, you deserve the occasional pat on the back.

All I ask in return is that you try to make your work good.

Calvin and Hobbes Corner is going on a brief hiatus while I figure out what to do about the fact that GoComics, which I’ve been using as the way to both read and link to individual strips, is now paywalled. I’d like to keep analyzing Calvin and Hobbes in this newsletter, if I can make it work, so let me know if there’s another good resource out there that you’d recommend.

A Poem

Asmaa Azaizeh is offering sacrifices.