Is content destroying art?

A lot of people seem to think that ‘content’ is ruining art,¹ there are a couple of reasons they give. One of the more obvious and common criticisms of the term is that it groups a broad and diverse range of things together - all kinds of music, visual art, video, writing and more.

This is definitely the way that I have often thought about the art-content debate in the past however when I considered it, I realized that some of the stuff I like and think of as art cannot be easily categorized.

Bo Burnham’s “special” Inside is a blend of music, acting, social commentary and narrative. Music performances are performances as much as music and engaging with the crowd is an important part of any rock concert. The idea that art must stay within set boundaries also seems antithetical to the whole thing. Art often pushes boundaries - art that is seen as playing it too safe is sometimes called content as a criticism.

Another point that is often brought up is that the way that ‘content’ works is not always good for artists - social media, which is often synonymous with the term, can be bad for artists because it require extra work on top of making the art itself, with sometimes little reward.

Big, ugly platforms

I think that this reveals the main issue that people really have content.

Content is not allowed to live on its own. Even the word itself implies that the ‘content’ is just something to fill and be of use to something else, like the contents of a sofa.² It must fill something. Elin Lööw sees content and art as on a spectrum where on one end is pure art that comes only from the creator and the other end is marketing which is defined by a external aim. Content has more of a external purpose or there is external control over it.

As I am someone with their own website, its probably not a surprise to you that I don’t have a very high opinion of platforms. Platforms constantly seek to be the ones that use their external will on content because they are worth nothing without it³. These platforms (like social media or video-sharing sites) single aim is to extract as much value as possible from people on their site.

They have the power to decide what content is in their domain of control - they can suppress (‘shadow-ban’), boost and moderate to curate the contents that people see. This moulds the very definition of content to their will.

In theory this could at least make the experience good for the users of these platforms. So why does content seem to feel so weird and soulless so often? Because platforms think that the users will not leave⁴ they make the experience of the platform worse for customers in order to make more money. In the end, content on a platform is defined by being whatever makes the most money for the platform.

This is content that keeps people on the site longer, increases engagement and pleases advertisers. Even people who think of themselves as artists can end up creating content for a algorithm rather than creating people - platforms use metrics and psychological tricks to get people to make the content they want them to make.

Not everything platforms is closer to content than art. A creator called kira haponova releases short films on YouTube that I consider art, like this beautiful mediation on parental expectations of love life. These artistic short films coexist with her more content-like blogs showing that it is possible do both as a creator. I think she achieves this partially by being selective about the platforms she uses - she has said that she doesn’t use TikTok to promote her videos because she doesn’t like the short video format that it promotes.

I completely agree with her on that, delete TikTok now.

Anyway…, the external force that makes something on content is not always platforms - sometimes it is the consumers or community that the content is created for.

The audience

If a creation is made by someone to please a audience rather than for the inherent value of the creation it is content.

This isn’t always bad. In fact it often is very good. Most of the media that most people consume is mass media - TV shows, the loading screen on your computer, your jeans. It wasn’t a artist with a vision that decided to make it - someone looking at data or making a business decision decided what it was going to be.

Sometimes that person is also the the artistic one on the project. Many smaller content creators do it all themselves. Other times they are totally different people. Either way the decision is made. And we often like the outcome.

Great things often need a lot of work, a lot of people, to be great. If we only tolerated pure artistic expression there would be less great works and we would all be the sadder for it.

When content takes the audience as the external force rather than a platform, the content can be much closer to what the audience wants. Content has b ecome enough of an insult that we often don’t call this content but it is.

Another reason we like content, sometimes over art, is because it often fits into our schedule. I know that every Saturday I can sit down and listen to a brand new episode of the fantastic BBC podcast More or Less. For 10 (!) years Tom Scott viewers could watch a new Things You Might Not Know episode every Wednesday (and he now hosts a weekly podcast: lateral).

These things are most definitely content but they are also good.

In conclusion

I don’t think that content - stuff that is strongly influenced by what someone not-the-creator wants - is bad for art. I do think that platforms like social media and video-sharing platforms culture a type of content that is good for them, not us. This is not good for art. Platforms push would-be-artists to create content and content creators to create that benefits them not us.

As always I don’t (yet?) have a solution. I will instead leave you, with a website that inspired this piece. Salad magazine seems like a perfect example of content-art unburdened by an algorithm or corporation. They have only had three short editions so far but I am hoping that more come along in the future.

As always I welcome comments and complaints - mail me at tomjbrandis@gmail.com. Sorry for all the YouTube links, I prefer not linking to big platforms but there are still a lot of people that I admire on them!

Footnotes