Only Jean Baudrillard and the Viagra Boys Can Save Us Now
How can artists help us understand a world that's gotten incomprehensibly complex?
An essential role of the artist is to articulate how they feel in order to help us understand our own feelings. It could be a skipped heartbeat when a certain someone walks into the room. Or it might be threat of nuclear war. In any and all cases, artists are supposed to be there for us.
Arguably, they’re not. As Tim Maughan writes in OneZero, the world is too complex for any of us to understand: “Vast systems, from automated supply chains to high-frequency trading, now undergird our daily lives—and we’re losing control of all of them.” If no one can comprehend the complexity of the world, then how can we expect artists to say anything meaningful about it? And if they’re merely giving us impressionistic bullshit that’s effectively untethered from reality, what good is that?
In a recent episode of Uncomfortable Conversations, Eric Weinstein went on a rant about this:
“Our artists have no idea what in the world is happening, and so their reflection of it back to us is really much more meaningless than, say, the artists of the 1960s, who seemed to have their finger on the pulse of the time. [Back then,] you were almost listening to music as if it were a news report.”
To get some insight on this issue, I hit up my musician friend Sam. I consider Sam an amazing songwriter. He’s written some lines that have helped me understand modern life in America. If any artist I know has a finger on the pulse of modern culture, it’s Sam.
“I think the overall concepts of news and truth and reality are vastly different now,” said Sam, seeming to agree with Eric’s general view. “Maybe there are certain things that feel universal. … But when we’re talking about things like social issues or even the cause-and-effect relationship of events that happened two weeks ago—I think there’s really not a hegemonic narrative that you can pull out anymore.”
But Sam took issue with the idea that art can ever be consumed “as if it were a news report.”
“The whole premise for art, at least for me,” said Sam, “is that you use fiction or hyperreality to elucidate reality. But you aren’t necessarily portraying reality in the work that you do.”
Sam and I bonded over the essay “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” by Jean Baudrillard, which furthers this point. Baudrillard would say that an event in the real world is brought to us through media presentations, which are curated to the point of becoming something new. Artists responding to “events” or “narratives” are really responding to simulacra, not to reality. Their art (say, an anthem by Bob Dylan) is just another layer of abstraction, in a sense further removing audiences from the reality of the news of the day.
To the extent that I’m understanding any of this myself (it’s all very complicated, indeed), I’ll just put forward one additional assertion:
Artists, it seems to me, can move forward in this landscape either by being aggressively naïve or by cleverly covering up layers of misdirected irony with even more irony. Or, perhaps most realistically, they can oscillate between both, which is the metamodern approach.
Sam and I did come up with one example of a modern artist who really captured the moment in a song. Unsurprisingly, they did it with an extremely heavy dose of irony.
Want to listen to a song as if reading the news, Eric? I give you the Viagra Boys. The conclusion of the song is almost something people in Eric Weinstein’s orbit could append to any one of their anti-establishment rants:
I can't believe it
When I was younger none of this existed
Everything was fine, everything was perfect and now it's ruined
It's ruined 'cause you voted on the wrong motherfucker
Because you didn't believe it
You wouldn't believe the sources that I linked you
I told you to read
I told you to do your research
I told you, man…
Find my full chat with Sam Eliot on the Team Futurism podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube: