This newsletter is a little different from the last ones. If you enjoyed it, let me know and maybe I’ll do more in the future.
For a long while I found content to be an ugly word. It’s a trash compactor of a word, seemingly able to swallow any type of creative expression into its black maw. Movies, books, and TV shows? Content. Records and magazines? Content. Photography? Content.
But I think I just didn’t understand what content was. I don’t believe many people did. It was a word rarely said aloud or written—and in those instances, generally used to describe an emotional state—and then suddenly, it was everywhere, wielded loosely and freely, like a machete in the bush.
Only, all that hacking didn’t lead us to any point of clarity. At least I still feel lost about it. And I don’t want to be lost. So I intend to develop something like a definition here, with the understanding this idea is a work in progress. To do that, I’m going to juxtapose content with what I see as its counterpart in regard to human expression and creativity—that would be art.
A word upfront: Generally speaking, I believe art is more important and meaningful than content. But that doesn’t mean content is the opposite of those things. It’s just different. Art and content each have separate goals and functions for creative people and their work and we’re trying to better understand what those are.
Anyway, let’s see where this goes.
Content takes
Art gives
If we’re being honest, we sometimes want certain emotions taken away from us—pain, boredom, tension. We also want some decisions taken away from us, too—what to eat, what to watch, what to read. Those impulses aren’t wrong in moderation. But too much content will leave you empty and hollowed out, a sensation anyone who’s binge-watched a show or doomscrolled before bed will recognize. The same is true of creating content and why so many social media creators get burned out, quit, or suffer mental illness. Content is like pizza—you should definitely eat pizza while you’re alive but not for every meal.
Art, meanwhile, gives you an emotion, an image, a story to carry with you and use however you choose. Making art gives the artist a deep sense of focus and purpose—a well they can return to and feel nourished by until the day they die. Hemingway says in the beginning a writer gets all the kick and the reader gets none, but the eventual goal is “to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself. That’s the true test of writing. When you can do that, the reader gets the kick and you don’t get any.” In this regard, an artist has to learn to let go, that his art doesn’t belong to him, but instead to his audience.
Content is familiar
Art is foreign
Content uses something we already know and recognize to make something new. Like hanging with old friends, we connect to a piece of content because of our past relationship to what it references, although we welcome a fresh twist or spin on things. Content is lucrative for this reason—most people would rather spend more time with people they already know than break their bubble and make new friends. If done well, the familiar nature of content provides context for creatives to connect with an audience—it’s a show that you’re willing to meet people where they’re at, a gesture everyone appreciates.
Art is like traveling to a foreign country. If we aren’t open enough, if we aren’t familiar with its customs and traditions, if we don’t understand the reference points to recognize what is universal, we won’t get it. That’s okay. Maybe we aren’t supposed to get it just yet. You never eat sushi only to try it one day and find you now love it. An artist must remember the foreign nature of his art and be willing to build bridges to this new exciting world that his art creates. A$AP Rocky, for example, uses music videos “to give people an experience as a preview into a world that they’re not familiar with.”
Content spreads
Art attracts
Content holds a clear advantage over art in its ability to spread, to blow up, to go “viral.” Strangely, content tends to finds us and not the other way around. We might think of a piece of content we create as like a wave in the middle of the ocean, capable of traveling great distances and growing to great heights, until it crashes upon some faraway shore. Don’t get it twisted—content can’t go on forever. Its fate is to perish, to become obsolete, to go out of fashion. This ephemeral nature is what makes content fun and serves as a reminder not to take it too seriously, both as consumers and creators.
Art holds a clear advantage over content in its ability to stand the test of time, to endure. We still cherish books, paintings, and statues that are hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. We tend to discover art, or stumble upon it, or have it passed to us like an heirloom. We don’t always understand what we love about a piece of art, or even what makes it great. At least we can’t always articulate these things. All we know is we are drawn to it and that’s enough. For this reason, art develops cult followings, a pack of true believers willing to proselytize its value until the end of time.
Have more thoughts on this but that’s enough for one newsletter. Should I do a part two soon?