win and tonic

themadeshop:

Authenticity is a paltry standard by which to appraise an idea or a work of art or a politics. Authenticity is a measure of provenance, and provenance has nothing to do with substance. An idea may be ours and still be false. A work of art may be ours and still be ugly. A politics may be ours and still be evil.

— Leon Wieseltier, Against Identity (via austinkleon

I may need to read the entire (very expensive, oy) book to ensure I have the entire context, but this quote goes against everything that I know about the intrinsic worth of one’s creative output and I’m not sure if my almost visceral aversion toward this challenge of my worldview is because 1. I’m confident with anecdotal and empirical evidence that it is actually incorrect (as empirical as evidence can be when discussing the worth of anything (see: currency, the assignment of any number of brain chemicals to things outside the self (read: love), the electoral college)), 2. This challenge to my way of thinking is causing my lizard brain to retaliate in a not entirely unpredictable way in an attempt to defend of my own deeply treasured outlook on life and those around me, or 3. I am a stubborn child who doesn’t want to update his worldview because I am comfortable here.

Backpedaling as far as I am about to might be off-putting but please, bear with me:

Intrinsic worth is a philosophical concept that states basically this: Because we (humanity) are alive and aware, we have an assignment of worth that is automatically non-zero. Now, first: this sort of dips into the “zero tolerance” end of things that I have a particularly long and verbose opinion on (in short, “zero tolerance” has zero use in our society: Everything is a spectrum, there are too many variables when there is even one sentient mind present in the equation, The Intolerance of Intolerance, &c &c), but this sort of self-congratulatory worldview hasn’t settled with me as much as of late. We are variable in a mathematical equation in which variables from before The Big Bang and well into the future are arranged on both sides of an equal sign - we aren’t special. And that’s okay! I’m hardly a nihilist - in fact, therein lies my appreciation for humanity, because it was impossible and yet here we are makes me weep in reverence if I think about it for too long. The fact that life is short and I have an awareness of my own tiny slot of it is pretty freakin’ rad.

So that doesn’t really sit well with me these days, the intrinsic worth of humanity I mean, because all life is simply a state of matter and information - who is to say that a blade of grass has more value in the universe, on any metric, than the star stuff that it is comprised of? Because proteins act like a machine then the sum of its parts are greater than those parts laid end to end? If so, to what end?¹

But so there exists a sort of economics of eudaimonia. The pursuit of happiness, or, at perhaps its most reductionist state, comfort, is the drive that living things possess in order to propagate. This is why society was built: so that we could control our food, our environment, our social structure. We all just want to be happy.

And what has been a source of happiness for as long as we’ve been able to attribute “sentience” to our species?

Art. (Duh.)

Art is information, arranged or found, presented by a person with the intent to inform or delight. I’m pretty damn pleased with that definition, though I am sure there are those who make an art of out defying it (I did a thing there, did you see it). But there is an almost inconceivably large amount of metadata between an artwork’s conception and its presentation - hell, even before its conception. And one of those variables is one that I find to be very important: authenticity.

Mad Men depicts a world of advertising in its birth that shows how authenticity can be manufactured - or, at the very least, rearranged. Don Draper’s presentation of the Kodak Carousel is rather telling:

Nostalgia - it’s delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, “nostalgia” literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called The Wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved.

The evidently direct line into people’s appreciation of objects and experiences is what makes Draper so good at his job. Pulling at heart strings &c but for what purpose? To sell a product.

And that isn’t evil, no, that’s not what I’m getting at at all. I’m not here saying that if your creative output is used as a means to put food on the table that it inherently inauthentic.

But perhaps it’s a little less authentic than expression born out of the sheer necessity to express.

“Perhaps”, because sometimes there exists an overlap of one’s passion and one’s paycheck. Adam Lisagor’s endorsements of things that he genuinely wants to share with you has an absolutely refreshing feeling of authenticity in advertising. He’s using his skills to share with you something that he believes will improve the quality of your life - and he’s effective at making you believe it, too. Part of that is presentation; but part of that is curation. He’s only showing us the cool stuff, and simply showing us what it can do.

But if we were to take two pieces of prose, say, that had equal amounts of aesthetic beauty (theoretically, as if there could ever be such a metric), and we told you that the first piece was a carefully edited and re-edited stanza of specially curated thought created for the sole purpose of getting published so that the author could then buy a yacht with its profits, but that the second piece was born from a bout of hypergraphia from a lonely person struggling with depression - which would you value more? (And, maybe worth investigating further, is that Okay? And where did that come from? Is it a selfish urge on which the whole basis of “liking” and “hearting” and “faving” things in social media is a way to say “Yeah! You are someone like me who can gain success and notoriety, and I want to believe that through the encouragement of others I can achieve the same!”? Or is it more altruistic than that, beneficial to society in some larger, perhaps more skeumorphic way in today’s post-post-industrialist world?)

So what I’m getting at is that authenticity is a metric, but not the metric for appraising the worth of one’s creative output - but, again, a very important one, at least for me. Ugly things that are authentic can seemingly eke toward - approaching, at least, if not surpassing - apparently beautiful, inauthentic things in terms of appraisal. When the punchline to this incredible finger-tutting video was a brand name, I was a little disheartened - until I realized that it was probably made by someone around my age making something cool in exchange for money. And that’s awesome. (Or perhaps just maybe something something Monkeysphere, though I way more like to think that authenticity in advertising in a post-DVR world is a thing that exists) I think back on the Old Spice Guy campaign, run by a couple of witty dudes who think quick on their feet. I think of my friend Chris and the unexpected fame garnered from his pixel art of a feline pastry. And I think of all my friends who are literally making a living from their art, people who draw pictures for an admission price or a commission list, or authors who made a goddamn media label all because of the internet’s appreciation of a book about boners and feelings.

But then I think of my adoration of Justin Vernor after having locked himself in a cabin in snowy Wisconsin for three whole months following a band breakup, a string of failed relationships and a debilitating illness and simply making things as a form of therapy when suddenly he finds his creative output the baseboard of astounding success, and maybe, just maybe, I might realize that perhaps “authenticity” isn’t the word I want to value highest in my appraisal of one’s creative work, but “romance”.