Craftsmanship at an all time low…salesmanship booming….
We’re all ads now.
SouthPark nailed it.
P.S. – Selling things is not a craft. It’s a fart. Necessary, at times rewarding, and essential but so so stinky.
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In one of his recent videos, Scott Adams of Dilbert fame recounted an interesting episode from his career. He had had an epiphany. Delivered courtesy of one Bil Keane of Family Circus fame.
The revelation was that Scott was a cartoonist’s cartoonist. Meaning that he made cartoons that only other cartoonists would enjoy.
After some difficulty in digesting this truth Adams credits the nourishment he derived therefrom as integral to his success. Citing that his audience had often requested Dilbert spend more time in the office. Adams was loathe to humor this request given he’d been using Dilbert as an escape from his own cubicle farm. But, post epiphany he began to cater more to the audience than his personal tastes.
The takeaway seems to have been that a serious artist creates work for other people.
I disagree.
First, there is the question of selection. Adams appears to have unwittingly been making a niche cartoon. There are artists who are aware they are making a niche product. Their decision to do so does not of necessity imply self-service.
Whether or not this implication was a goal or aftereffect of Adams’s assertion is irrelevant. Since it falls into the cooky cutter trend of boilerplate advice for creatives that have littered store shelves since Boomers first began navel-gazing.
I call this boilerplate because writing with an audience in mind is as English 101 as it gets. Hell, it’s elementary.
It’s certainly true that this isn’t necessarily easily achieved and helpful prodding from the ‘greats’ likely helps things along. However, that does not change the fact that this is boilerplate.
And not good boilerplate mind you.
Every member of a given audience changes with time. An audience is not a monolith. Believing you understand their egos, their psyches, and their desires is far more egotistical than making a self-serving doodle.
It annoys me in the same way as the suggestion that using a third person voice somehow makes your writing more objective. As if one gained objectivity by pretending to be a disembodied being of no ego hovering wraithlike over eternity.
Mystics always want to escape the ego so bad they run right into it.
Furthermore, the idea that commercial success and broad appeal are indicative of the quality of a work is so readily dismissible that I will not insult you by describing how.
To be fair this is likely not at all what Adams meant but it can, and I believe will be inferred, by a good deal of people (my ex comes to mind). While it is certainly not Adams responsibility to preemptively perry every daft inference that’s made from his observations; it is my ardent joy to point out the daftness.
Yes, I will concede that solipsism is an ailment all too common among creatives. Putting Dilbert in the office was a good idea.
But, solipsism also occurs in macro-organisms. Remember when Dylan went electric?
There is no wisdom in crowds since crowds are made of individuals who understand very little about themselves.
To suggest otherwise is to utter vapid truisms like some kind of hysterical desert seer.
Yes, there is a brilliance and craft in making the profound accessible to the masses (whatever those are) and escaping one’s personal caprice that every artist should practice.
No, the pursuit of this does not make you a more serious artist or a better artist. This is because there is a distinction between may and will.
Trying to squeeze the unique mixture of information and reactions that is your art into a popular mold will not necessarily make it more palatable.
So, as regards the balance between audience and performer:
Let’s not run into the arms of one solipsism to escape the other.
While there is a large deal of sport and fun in this little essay for myself. I do have motivations that extend beyond knocking down the shibboleth of ‘creativity guides.’
Adams seems to have the same sort of problem that Tim Pool and Jordan Peterson do. That is he’s a shrink.
What bothers me about shrinks is that they believe they think in third person.
Which is what allows and motivates them to delight in ‘telling hard truths.’
These truths often being observations we’ve all already assimilated, digested, and fertilized our garden with.
There is also a belief among these sorts in their own powers. One that is nearly mystical in nature.
Tim Pool calls his ‘social engineering,’ Adams is a hypnotist, and Peterson fancies himself an adept diagnostician for problems that have eluded the greatest thinkers for eternity.
But this is all just a fancy way of saying shrinks annoy me – hence this essay.
Despite these points of contention, I value the contributions and insights of all three men.
Thanks for reading.
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Saturdays often find me gathering strength for the coming week. They are often as productive as any other day but their charm lies in that they don’t have to be.
So I sit here giving my eyes a rest, nearly blind without my contacts, perusing Vanity Fair. I come across an article discussing a zeitgeist shift of ‘serious writers’ ceasing to shun Television writing. Opting instead to embrace it and taking TV shows they watch ‘very seriously.’
I did not put ‘serious writers’ in snark quotes for any elitist reason. I am huge Michael Crichton fan and have always (when it’s done right) understood both the big and small screen as rich and valid mediums.
I put serious writers in quotes because the term confuses me. I feel that anyone who takes the trouble to write is a serious writer. Perhaps the piece was using the language to highlight the fact that accomplished writers (whose work is expressive of the sort of nuance that one associates with those who appreciate literary art) were no longer shunning an industry pariah.
Which is fine but I can’t help but fiddle the hilt of my sword. I am on guard for the king called disinterest and his prince ‘l’art pour l’art.’ A position that I feel is increasingly rare. When I hear ‘serious this or that pursuit’ these days I am wont to think that ‘serious’ means commercially viable.
I am decidedly steeped in Classicism as I’ve come to understand it. I do not mean by this any restrictive form but rather a mindset. A mindset tracing its roots back to the ancient city states of Greece where merchants were shunned.
The commercialization of science and art is a decades old story. It is a story too broad and important for this uncharacteristically cool Carolina morning. Books will be written about it for decades. The purpose of this wee essay is to serve as reminder that every fertile thing that elevated civilization is now being processed into quick, unnaturally tasty, canned goods.
Classicism is important because even if you choose Spam over a ribeye the makers of Spam should still try to make it taste like a ribeye. (Folks privy to the differences between the pop music of the 60’s and 70’s and the pop music of today will more readily understand this analogy.)
The Vanity Fair article is an excellent springboard for thrusting the Classic outlook back into the collective conscience. It’s a rich little morsel that raises all sorts of questions.
Questions like the namesake of this article: “Is ‘pitch culture’ gonna improve novels?”
If ‘serious writers’ are being funneled from the world of the novel into the world of the sitcom as the authoress suggests then what does this mean for novels?
I do not necessarily think it means anything foul. The pithier more economic approach of television writing is certainly good to have and maintain in one’s literary tool belt. And I do enjoy a good show so the presence of ‘serious writers’ means that I will have a richer life.
But, even if these pros I’ve highlighted existed without their shadow cons then one must still remember the ground bass of classicism. That little voice that says, “Is the greatest number, the greatest good?”
Paradoxically, I think that history attests to the fact that the greatest good, for the greatest number is meted out by that little voice. A voice that is often too modest and too much of a minority.
avoiding the cons of ‘Pitch Culture’ means giving ear to that voice.
What do I mean by pitch culture? To those unfamiliar with marketing a pitch is a proposal. It’s putting forward an idea that’s likely to get people hooked to a guy in the business of making money getting people hooked. And getting the guy to think that the idea will get people hooked. With so many hooks you can see how quickly the process gets crooked.
The obvious problem here is the difficulty of making something as inherently subjective as art as objective as a studios bottom line. This is an art in itself that I don’t necessarily disdain, I just think it like any market requires ethics and oversight.
You don’t want metrics, things that in themselves are fraught with the chaotic problem domain of social statistics, to become the cookie cutter for your artistic treats.
The article argues that today due to the presence of serious writers this cookie cutter approach is rarer. I do see some evidence for this but that evidence is of course shows that I happen to find engaging and is thus suspect.
That being said I feel that many shows are not so much abdicating the cookie cutter but simply using a cookie cutter that tries really hard to not seem like a cookie cutter.
Bill Hick’s classic bit on marketing where he mimics a sales panels thoughts ‘o you see what he did there, he’s going for the anti-marketing dollar, that’s really smart – the anti-marketing dollar is huge.’ (Not an exact quote) This impression is exactly what I’m talking about with the ‘anti cookie cutter cookie cutter’.
Everytime I hear words like ‘groundbreaking, raw, gritty, etc’ I immediately encounter a funny sensation. It’s a dull sort of malaise that settles over my mind as I picture a litany of industry standards like ‘Dr. House accepting his lesbian daughter while taking potshots at corporations and Jesus as he fights off zombies that put him face to face with the surprisingly violent nature of average people in a shitty situation.’ This is the cookie cutter that I call ‘shit just got real.‘
South Park did a really great bit that highlights the overindulgence of shocking realities when the character Butters tires of ‘all the gay weiners’ in Game of Thrones.
A pretty standard line of advice for any profession is that ‘you have to know the rules before you can break them.’
I think that the lack of a strong reading culture makes audiences particularly susceptible to cheap tricks. And if serious writers are going to revolutionize an industry known for cheap tricks they’d better be careful when catering to the whims of that audience and the farmers at Madison Avenue.
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I am not a salesman. I suppose I could be if I worked at it but I don’t find it very engaging. That’s not to say that Sales is a bad career or that sales people are bad. If you believe in your product or service it can be a fun challenge with a lot of financial rewards. There are a lot of lessons you can learn about yourself and life in general by learning the art of the deal.
After just a week at small direct-marketing company I could probably write a couple of pages on what I learned. A lot of it was simply coming to understand my own reactions and thought process and learning to steer them. Since I think that the latter is important I’ve compiled a short list of ways to do it.
Things I Learned from a Week in Sales
- It’s easy to agree with objections in the heat of the moment. Don’t.
- People are much less likely to commit to a product or conversation if you aren’t committed yourself.
- A lot of your first impressions of peoples attitudes and reactions are wrong.
- It’s essential to control your inner chatter. Not only is it distracting but it’s usually wrong and can destroy a lot of potential.
- A lot of people don’t really know what they think much less why. They’re simply reacting to the perceived contours of what you’re saying.
- Blood sugar levels matter a great deal.
- Being healthy helps you be good with people.
A lot of this is common sense stuff. I chose to call it learning because there’s a difference between knowledge and experience.
Sure the above observations could come from any kind of interaction. But there is a quality to business and professional interactions that drives the point home more clearly. Probably owing to the fact that you can’t opt out of paying attention to your own reactions, or simply write off miscommunication as being ‘just one of those things.’
All in all I had a good time trying out a new venture. I think that it is especially important for artists, writers, and the like to leave the comforts of Bohemia once in a blue moon. I definitely have a slightly less cynical view of businesses than I did before.
I think understanding the workings of humanity behind corporations and their clients will help me be a more insightful writer.
Is there a career or experience that you think would challenge you and refill your creative wells?
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