When I first got interested in Jazz, I bought all sorts of music from multiple musicians and groups, liking some more and some less. But it seemed that at some point in the 1960s, I was finding less and less of the music to be interesting and entertaining. More and more from that point on, the music seemed to be deliberately less accessible, more intricate without being pleasant or compelling to hear, and (as I characterized it years ago on the old blog) more oriented to other musicians rather than the non-musician general listening audience. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen shows that this happens in many artistic and creative pursuits and groups them all together in a phenomenon he calls “the death of the reader”:
This is what I call “The Death of the Reader”.
Authors write for readers, who aren’t authors. Artists paint for non-artists. Musicians play for non-musicians.
This keeps fiction, art, and music grounded.
But when any group stops creating for an external audience, and starts trying to impress only each other, they create a weird, self-reinforcing feedback loop.
This isn’t clothing, or even fashion. It’s a costume party. They’re all trying one-up each other with something weirder and more eye-catching.
So when an athlete, of recent and topical celebrity, who isn’t a part of their Bored Billionaires’ Club, shows up in a dress that’s just a dress, of course they are going to mock her. She’s just revealed that she didn’t get the memo. That she’s not an insider.
How she looks to the world at large is not the point.
This is why 99.999…% of copies of Infinite Jest have never been read. This is why John Cage “wrote” four minutes of silence. This is why competitive bodybuilders from the 80s looked like Greek gods, and modern ones look like gargoyle freaks.
It’s all the Death of the Reader.
Hollywood doesn’t make movies for you now. They hate you. They make movies for each other.
And then cry about how you didn’t buy a ticket, because they think your only role is to pay for their onanistic circle of self indulgence.
This game isn’t going to stop. It’s just going to keep getting weirder until someone’s dress malfunctions and catches fire, and the rest of us all have a good laugh.
