Don't Meta My Art
Don’t tell me how to make the damn thing, just make it!
Marketing 101 says identify a person’s problem then offer a solution. This is true for dishwashers (achieve more convenience), it’s true for fashion (achieve more style), and it’s true for the overabundance of How-To Guides online (achieve your dreams!).
In a recent Note,
said: All of my most engaged-with posts are “meta” posts about me writing . . . about writing!I’ve seen about a thousand other writers on Substack saying their most popular pieces are about how to find success on Substack—and these are talented writers producing engaging work—yet their more artistic pieces, if I can generalize, don’t “resonate.”
Imagine going to a museum and instead of the walls being filled with Picassos and Monets and O’Keeffes and Kahlos, it contained outlines of the Water Lillies Triptych with a paint-by-numbers guide beside it, maybe a looping video of Bob Ross doing his thing.
I mean, the Bob Ross does sound enticing, but not exactly because he’s eliciting the same sense of wonder I hope for when entering a gallery of the masters.
On the other hand, take the recent museum exhibit in Paris called Paradis Naturistes celebrating the history of nudism in the country, and where patrons were invited to strip down and view the exhibit in the nude themselves. Hard to imagine such a full-frontal experience happening in Puritanical America (not as difficult with the French).
Why does it seem so far-fetched for people to simply engage with the arts in this country? I think a lot of it has to do our culture’s obsession with productivity. We always want to be achieving our goals, progressing in some tangible way, engaging in the mythical spirit of competition, that supposed meritocracy open to all. What a shame.
There is so much value in just looking at paintings, just reading, just walking, with no other intention than to simply experience beauty in the present moment. As
writes regarding an ancient and forgotten form of reading: simply allow [the text] to enter you and flow through, like a river. No analysis necessary.Meta as a word, of course, has entered our cultural lexicon thanks to Mark Zuckerberg. The word itself means “self-referential,” as in making a film about making films, communicating about how we communicate, or creating a Substack post about creating successful Substack posts. To borrow a phrase from the theatre, it means breaking the fourth wall, directly addressing the context of a thing instead of just creating the thing.
Meta is the perfect name for Zuckerberg’s overarching enterprise. Because it speaks to how using Facebook forces us to take a step back from real life. It means a sense of removal. It means going on vacation and instead of just enjoying the trip, thinking about how you’re going to post about it, how you’re going to craft this moment into looking like a great experience, instead of just focusing on having a great experience. The same goes for making art.
When you perceive life as contained by something like a social media platform, there’s another phrase that comes to mind in describing what meta is . . . incest. It’s regurgitating material in a closed-loop system that incessantly voids itself of nutritional value, requiring a constant supply of fresh meat to join the rot party—which reminds me of the time I bought a fly trap for our chicken coop, watched it fill up with fly carcasses, then watched maggots hatch and feed off the dead flies inside . . . in other words, meta is fucking gross.
Free the flies! Free the art!
But get this: talking about doing something has been proven to release the same dopamine hits as actually doing the thing, so I can understand why it’s attractive to talk and not do.
Talk is cheap. Unless you do the thing, you’ll have nothing to show but empty promises—that does more self-harm than even a modicum of actual production will provide.
In the end, people will forget these stories about how to be successful on Substack because: 1) they’re merely ephemeral dope hits, and 2) they don’t even work. I’ve written before about How to Life Hack. Spoiler: not possible.
So don’t talk about making the thing. Just make the thing. Make the thing! MAKE THE THING!!!
I’m going to laugh if this becomes my most popular post.
-Martin
If you liked this, here’s another . . .
I’ve always wondered where Urkel went😂
This is great, Marty. Also: Are you working on a behind-the-scenes post about detailing the process of writing this essay?