All Of The Good Things, None Of The Bad Things

There’s a trap that I think many smart people making art fall into, including myself.

It’s when you know what good looks like - beautiful, clean, layered, complex, simple, skillful, unique, impressive - and you can optimize towards that.

You know what makes you cringe - amateur, shallow, ugly, superfluous, repetitive, cliche - and you can optimize away from that.

What you’re left with is a big pile of all the things you like, or at least all the things you can identify that you like. It’s got all the good things, and none of the bad things, so it must be good, right? But still, you just can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t right. Maybe you get feedback like “Technically brilliant, but lacking musicianship”, or “Cool, nice” (that second one is the worst).

Sometimes, I consume some piece of media and think to myself, “If I made this, I would hate it. There is absolutely no way I could ever bring myself to share this with the world. It has so many flaws, and its redeeming features are few and far between.”

Nevertheless, it’s far more appreciated than anything I’ve ever made.

This makes me think that the “all of the good things, none of the bad things” approach to making art is barking up the wrong tree. Sure, good things are good and bad things are bad, but art is not the sum of its components. Or perhaps more specifically, art is not the sum of the components you can identify.

Maybe this tendency is especially strong in those who like to analyze and understand. I love to pick apart a Tricot or Noisia track and figure out what makes it work. I love breaking down a story to understand the characters and themes. I especially love doing a deep dive on some algorithm powering a feature in a game that I previously thought was technically impossible. Not everyone consumes art that way, though. It seems plausible that, in spending so much energy analyzing art, we delude ourselves into thinking that we know what makes it good. Perhaps this is why great critics are rarely great artists.

I’m not going to pretend I know what to do about this. I’ve certainly never managed to overcome it myself. It’s probably worth paying less attention to the good and the bad, though, and more on being authentic and vulnerable.

- omegastick