Rise, Cult of the Amateur!

In 2007, cultural commentator and internet pundit Andrew Keen published a book called The Cult of the Amateur, about the rise in novice…

In 2007, cultural commentator and internet pundit Andrew Keen published a book called The Cult of the Amateur, about the rise in novice music, film, and arts production in the wake of the internet. The book was an unambiguous screed against our era’s DIY, Deviatart, Youtube, Garageband-based culture, an entirely self-serious take-down of the narcissism that leads neophytes like you and me to create and share our works.

I remember Keen’s neoluddite foaming because he was interviewed on the Colbert Report. I remember watching the episode while doing lunges in my underwear at my mom’s house.

The claim that the internet and its tools have destroyed contemporary culture is not a unique one. But Keen’s anti-amateur screed, in particular, has stayed with me over the years. I hear traces of it in every complaint about self-publishing, or Twitter, or Vine, and the devastation these art forms have wrought.

Yes. Art forms. I’m here to argue that each internet/social media tool we have on hand is an art form, an object of ritual in the cult of the amateur, and that each one has immaculate potential. But first, let’s look at Mr. Keen’s dumbfucked premises.

The central argument of the book, I guess, is that technology has made it far too simple for anyone to create mediocre art, and social media has made it far too effortless for anyone to share their dross with other people, irrespective of actual quality. Instead of consuming masterpieces, the author bemoaned, we were cut-and-pasting our own pathetically derivative albums, short videos, ebooks, and visual art together. Worst of all, we never had to face any criticism for it.

This brings us to the author’s other chief complaint: on the internet, there are no indicators of whether a person is a serious, formally trained artiste of if they’re a college drop-out typing poetry on card stock in their basement. In such a free-wheeling creative world, there’s no need for formal arbiters of culture; that is to say, critics, like the book’s author himself. Those who comment on culture are rendered obsolete, because there is no mainstream culture to reflect upon.

Similarly, Keen was concerned that the democratization of art brought with it the death of the career artist. The artist can’t make a living peddling his highbrow wares, the argument goes, if we are all too busy producing and consuming our own slapdash, culturally illiterate knock-offs. If we make our own art, we don’t have time to admire the masters, I guess was the idea.

And finally, Andrew Keen claimed that the cult of the amateur artist would kill the mainstream culture-at-large. In a DIY world, there is no standard bearer. Nothing has any cultural currency.

Where would we be without proper symphonies and painterly masterpieces, produced by cloistered, financially supported experts? What pitiful state would our society be in without the canny observations of esteemed auteurs, the tight prose of professional essayists? If we all spend our days making Youtube vlogs in our pajamas instead of honoring great works, our cultural glue will melt and social order will slide apart in sticky globules. That’s the fear.

This argument may seem small and petty, but it has been made many times. It was said of the tape recorder and the record player; of the hand-held camera and the printing press. Then the camera phone, then Instagram, then self-publishing. It will continue to be made, almost always by the people who stand to lose money when art is demonetized.

That person, the whinging luddite, is not you. The cult of the artistic amateur is not a threat to you. In fact it can save you, or it already has. The internet makes you an active producer of content, an agent rather than a consumer, an artist instead an object. The cult (by which I mean the internet and all its tools) gives you a voice, an audience, means of creation, and a historical record.

It might run popular culture into a literal bankruptcy. It has already begun to chip away at the corporatization of music, design, gaming, publishing, and even production of cheap gift tchotchkes. The big 6 publishers have begun to crumble and legions of artisanal publishers lie in their wake. We have begun to buy our cute plastic crap on Etsy now, or to 3D print it ourselves, instead of going to the mall. These are great developments. Cult of the amateur, rise!

— — — —

Let’s tackle the anti-amateur arguments one at a time. The first claim is that technology makes it too easy to create without ever mastering the requisite tools (or the art form itself). Everybody can throw a warm yellow filter on their Instagram photos; nobody learns to take a real shot with an SLR,. Everybody can button-smash a sick lick on Guitar Hero (or could, back in 2006); nobody can play a real instrument. And so on.

This phenomenon does result in a lot of naive art. Meaning art that is produced by people who has no knowledge of the art form’s lineage and the ongoing cultural conversation it is a part of. Lots of meaningless shit results: sepia-tinged bathroom selfies, backyard music video reenactments that completely miss the references in the original song, whatever. Great. Whom does this drivel hurt? No one.

Naive art can be fascinating, both psychologically and artistically. It shows us how someone instinctively reacts to the tools of an art form, independent of skill or instruction. And since all instruction is tainted by prejudice, path dependence, and the conservatism that comes with experience, avoiding its influence can be great!

Children, infants, retirees with iPads, bored people who would never, ever consider themselves to be artistic — — they all have the tools of creative expression in their retina-screen-smearing paws.

The tools of amateur art also bring new creators into the fold. Most Instagram users will stick to selfies, food, and vacation shots, but a few will discover they have an eye for framing. Some might venture into ‘real’ photography. At the very least, Instagram (or Garageband, or Final Cut) present tools and constraints in which a variety of interesting things can be produced. Not everyone snapping dicks on Snapchat uses the medium artfully, but I suspect a sizable minority do.

Next is the argument that online, creation is too democratic. There is no dividing line between the expert and the novice. I call this the IOS App Store problem. So many games, so many developers, so much garbage. On Amazon, newbie self-printed books appear right beside professional, conventionally published bestsellers, and the untrained eye might miss the difference. The floodgates are open and the poopwater is getting in along with the clean stuff.

Oh, fuck you if you make that argument. For decades the arts have been policed by the careful, fearful limitations of big publishers and distributors. Creative people have vied for attention and exposure, pitching to record labels and film producers and agents, only to be ignored because their work is deemed offensive, niche, inaccessible, unprofitable, or just plain weird.

When large, profit-motivated entities arbiter culture, all that gets in is bland, widely marketable bullshit. Sorry, I know a lot of ya’ll love The Avengers or Harry Potter or whatever, but you know these beloved works are the products of a sausage factory. It’s a miracle they have any sensibility or quality at all. For every Dark Knight there are about fourteen Daredevils; no good art becomes better through the work of a committee (just look at the King James Bible for fuck’s sake).

But in the cult of the amateur, the profit motive no longer drives distribution or production; the creator’s passion does instead. Yes, this results in dinosaur romance novels and slash fiction. Maybe those things aren’t high art, but they are wonderful. How wonderful it is that people can make such fucked up things, love them very dearly, and share them with us all!

The last big anti-amateur argument is that easy creative production makes us all narcissists, and distracts us from consuming meaningful art. If we spend too much time producing out own shitty makeup tutorial videos we’ll have less time to read Proust. If we spend a lazy Sunday filming stop-motion animation Vines of our stuffed animals humping each other, we won’t watch any Fellini. Oh good heavens.

This argument gets thrown around in the publishing industry a LOT. It’s no secret: books about the process of writing and publishing novels sell way better than actual novels themselves. Oh shit. It’s true! Bullshit writing tips are also the most popular writing exchanged on Tumblr! Everyone loves the fantasy of making art and being read, and fewer and fewer people devote time to actual reading. It’s kinda boned.

This hand-wringing really comes to a head every Nanowrimo November, when scores of amateurs nestle their asses firmly into their chairs and try to bang out 50,000 words of fiction. These fuckers can’t write for shit, the lit critics whine! Why don’t they just read actual literature! No one will ever read those words! And no one should — who wants to read a gender-swapped version of Rockadoodle, for god’s sake? (I do).

I have noticed that a lot of serious, skilled writers fall for this last bit. They want to sell books, after all, and if everyone is writing instead of reading, it might really cut into their profit margins.

Sorry folks, this argument is also bullshit. As a culture that has, for years, been dominated by passive media such as films and television, we should make nude blood offerings to the gods to thank them for giving us the internet. Yes, the internet makes it easier to create; yes, it makes it harder to turn a profit from creative works; No, this is not a negative thing.

In the olden days (you may groan now), all art was amateur. It doesn’t matter what era you choose as your ‘olden days’. In prehistory and ancient history, our ancestors sat around the fire, sharing their God and Goddess slashfic and exchanging headcanons. In the eighteen hundreds, families bought sheet music rather than records, and played the tunes together in their parlors (this was the inspiration for Beck’s Song Reader project, which was a coolass idea, dammit).

Amateurs wrote books by hand, then using small presses. Amateurs made pots from clay and shaped them into animals and faces. Amateurs painted the caves, wrote early graffiti, invented new instruments, cut crop circles, wrote epic ballads, told ghost stories, and kept journals.

If you love any work of art that’s more than a hundred years old, you probably love the product of an amateur, who was not critically vetted, who was not edited professionally, who lacked a distributor, who owed none of their creative success to some blowhard commentator from Silicon Valley.

The cult of the amateur used to be all-encompassing. Each of our forebears belonged to it and took part in its ceremonies. They sewed their own clothes, carved tools and ornaments from wood, penned stories, scrapbooked, made pies, sang little ditties, and drew in the mud.

Not all of it was great art. Most of it was middling and shitty, like most people. But all of it was theirs, actively created, carefully shared. It is better to create than to passively consume. I am planting a flag in that belief. Most of those who argue otherwise do so because they profit from passive consumption.

Make your shitty art. Share it. And just like that, you’re part of the cult. The cult will take nothing from you, and requires nothing in return for membership, but what it gives back is constant, historical, enriching, and immense.

Remember: NaNoWriMo starts the day after tomorrow. Rise.

Originally published at erikadprice.tumblr.com.