Better together
Article based on the video “We Need a New Art Scene”
We need an art movement that can shape history. We need something genuinely powerful that resonates with people on a deep, spiritual, and psychological level.
It’s no secret that mainstream media institutions can’t tell a compelling story to save their lives. You can throw hundreds of millions of dollars at a project, but it doesn't resonate with people because there’s no natural law that it conforms to. There's no telos, no purpose for the characters on a deep spiritual level. There’s really no divine law either. The writers and artists today reject that there is such a thing as divine law which informs what man is, what man ought to be, and what man can become. They think that human nature is fungible, that it's infinitely malleable, or it's designed to be this sort of attempt at transgression. And so they lose the ability to really tell stories which are archetypal in that sense. Even this notion of like a mono-myth, whether you believe it or not, there's enough there that someone like Lucas was able to tap into back in the day that still shapes culture to this present moment.
The issue with mainstream art and culture institutions like Hollywood, record labels, and publishing, is that they gatekeep those people who do have a proper understanding of human nature, who actually can tell powerful resonant stories, who can create art that actually speaks to the reality of the human experience and to the spiritual nature of mankind. And so those people are turned away. And I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
To get around that really requires building a new art scene. We need to create entirely new networks, entirely new art institutions that can rise above and go beyond the gatekept, stagnant, old-school art institutions that exist today, that go around Hollywood, around the theater world, around the publishing world and the publishing industry.
But these things can’t be done solo. That's why all the great culture-shaping art that comes out today is, in some sense, technological and institutional. It requires a high level of organization. It requires really armies of people. Film is the defining total artwork of our time, and to a lesser extent, video games. What film is, these are armies of people that are moved around, that are highly organized, that are specialized. It's like combined arms warfare. And they're directed at a problem. And they have their generals, they have their politicians, they have their leaders, they have their propaganda to make sure that they can get recruitment. Make no mistake, it is a cultural and spiritual war that art is a part of, that films are directed towards.
Today in Hollywood there is this incredible mastery of the technical side of filmmaking. The camera technology is phenomenal. The vast teams of digital effects artists, people working in pre-production, people working on set design, people working on simply organizing or like setting up locations, doing the lighting, doing the color grading, doing all the layers of actual production. They've got the technical machine side down, the process, the workflow. But because they reject or miscalculate human nature on the script writing side, then fundamentally all that effort, this campaign of effort, these hundreds of millions of dollars, it all gets directed towards something that simply just doesn't hit people hard, it doesn't hit in the heart because our subconscious recognizes that it's on some level untrue. Or it is weaponized against the spirit, it is weaponized against people’s souls because it's art that actually is corrupted on a deep level.
Although there's a lot of value in being an individual who can go out and create on your own, that isn't shackled to teams and boardrooms, that's able to have an independent voice, that's huge. The best ideas often do come to people when they're just alone. They're on their own, maybe they're out for a hike. They're allowing nature to inform them, they're allowing the muse to inform them. That can be really powerful. But if you want to actually create something of any significant complexity or scale in its scope, you need teams, and you need collaboration. You need a group of people.
One of the big limiting factors for me is realizing I need more collaborators. I need to be able to collaborate with people who have specialty skills who understand composition, lighting, audio engineering, video editing, sound design, music, all sorts of art. For me, I'm realizing, if I want to up my game, I can only up it so much as an individual. I can continue to improve my craft and my studying of how to make good content, make good films. But at a certain point, I will need to bring more people into my sphere. That's something I'm looking for is like, who are more people I can collaborate with? Who are cinematographers and editors and audio engineers, and sound designers, and influencers, and writers I can team up with?
…because if you see the really talented productions out there, they are a team effort. And that goes into both the production side and the promotion side.
Peter Thiel has a book called Zero to One. One of the big points in Zero to One is that great distribution beats great product. And what that means is that the work of art that is able to actually get in front of people and get seen is always going to have more of an impact than the work of art that is not able to actually get in front of people to see it to begin with or to experience it to begin with. Even if that work of art may not be as technically as good. If it actually gets in front of people, that's often what matters more. That's the same reason why you might have a great indie film or a great film overall that comes out, but it doesn't have A-list celebrities. It has no-name actors, and so it tanks at the box office. It doesn't get seen. People don't think to watch it. Even if the acting is just as good, even if the acting is better, even if everything else about the film is better, then the distribution, that's what separates the success in the realm of actually getting seen.
And it's easy and tempting, I think, as an artist to want to reject that or scoff at it and say, "Oh, well, I'll be good but be in obscurity." But at the end of the day, the purpose of art is for it to be experienced and for it to be seen by the right audience. And you need to find ways of making that happen or find ways of making it sustainable on some monetary level. I don't want to say all this to discourage you from creating in a solo way. The importance of just having quiet, the ability to work on a project in solitude, in peace, that's so essential to great art to have that space. And there's a lot that you can do. I don't want people to say like, "Oh, I won't create art because I don't have a team. I don't have big backers."
I’d say, “no”, create your art, build your portfolio, find that small audience if you can. Just know that to get to the really high level, that sort of stuff does require a larger team and distribution. It may require collaborating with influencers. So if you do a video project or book release, maybe that requires having a bigger influencer working with you. Maybe you can tell a good story with someone local and something simple and low-cost and if so, go for it. Do that if you can, but you're going to get better distribution if you have some name recognition with whatever your project is, or you have a big publisher, or you have some sort of ability to use a certain level of existing fame or a network to grow from there.
Really, when it comes to a lot of social media platforms too, there are these network effects that take off. And they also tend to have these sort of exponential growth curves where it's always hardest at the beginning to get seen. And if you keep going, it gets easier and easier to build momentum, to continue to gain reach. It gets easier the more you do it. You can scale things exponentially in terms of your reach, if you're continuing to iterate, continuing to try to improve.
And that's the other thing too; it can be very tempting to want to blame the algorithm. And to some extent, I think there are issues with how social media algorithms do tend to go to the lowest common denominator in terms of who they target and how they promote content. The rise of short form content, I think is a great example of that, how it is this sort of reduction to the most base stimuli and how can you get the most base stimuli to appeal to people and get them hooked in a way that's ultimately not for their long-term benefit. It is easy to sort of blame the algorithm and say, "Well, it's all the algorithm, that's why I'm not mega successful or that's why my art isn't getting seen by tons of people." But I think it's a greater challenge that sometimes you just have to be way better than everyone else, or you have to really like push yourself to mastery of your craft. You really have to push yourself to how can I get something really good at the end of the day.
For the variables that I have control over, I want to step up and improve on what I can control in a project every time. And I think that's the attitude we need to have. Like if I'm a photographer, how can I get better at photography? If I'm a painter, how can I get better at color? How can I get better at composition, at painting motion,etc.?
It all comes back to the matter that you need a network and a prestige pipeline. So if you actually want recognition, you need outlets who will critique, who will review, who will push your art forward if it's of high quality, who will build like a path for patronage, who will build a path to get it seen. So there's this whole ecosystem of artists, of reviewers and critics, of even fans and supporters, that's always huge. And of influencers who will help promote or feature in art and around an art scene. And that's where we really need to take things from here.
