On Consumers Making Art

There is this idea picking up steam, particularly in regards to animation and video games, that the reason for the percieved drop in quality across a medium is as a result of the consumers who have supposedly done nothing in their lives but interact with their medium picking up the tools and creating something that is simply a bastardization of every piece of fiction they’ve seen so far. A lot of god awful remakes that feel like little more than rehashes have only solidified these thoughts. I heartily disagree.

The core of this argument comes particularly from two individuals. The first is Hayao Miyazaki, prominent animator, who said something along the lines of otaku animators making garbage. Forgive me for not looking up the quote, because there are so many forged Miyazaki quotes at this point that I’d regret trying. The other is Orson Welles, prominent film maker, who talked briefly about the overwhelming number of homages, some unconscious, that he’s seen portrayed within films.

You need to understand two important things about the both of them.

One is that Miyazaki has hated anime since Astro Boy aired on TV, the anime that pretty much characterized what Japanese animation would look like going forward. This was because of its low budget nature that convinced producers to primarily fund low budget anime. Miyazaki wanted to make animated films much like he did in Studio Ghibli as his inspirations lied within the realm of very early Toei productions such as Hakujaden. He hates 70s anime, he hates 80s anime, he hates 90s anime, and its very likely he’d shit talk your favorite.

Many people bringing up Miyazaki only bring up his argument in the context of incredibly modern anime, forgetting that he’s talked weariness of the ‘anime boom’ of old and made many of these disparaging statements about the medium before Ghibli was even formed. I’ll leave it to you whether or not you agree with him, personally I’ve grown very tired of his opinion because he’s incredibly crotchedy about pretty much everything in existence and the Japanese have long since wrote him off in this regard.

The second is one you probably realized, but Orson Welles straight up admits that people can actively defy his idea that you shouldn’t watch too many films and still create absolutely amazing films. His issue lied somewhere completely different, it was one of unoriginality and ironically an actual lack of knowledge on film. Also, this was in the 80s, again long before the zeitgeist of today that people often use these statements to criticize.

The problem is not in consumers making art. Consumers of a medium can create great art. I mention animation and film here, but really imagine if someone were to tell a writer that she has “read too many books” or that an artist has seen “too many paintings”. Imagine disparaging a musician for having listened to “too much music”. When I write it like this, it seems almost ridiculous. Great writers read. Great artists see, and often copy. Great musicians listen. Why can’t a great animator/director watch, or a great developer play? What makes these mediums so different?

The answer is nothing. Great animators do watch, there’s hardly an animator who does not watch many animations, and it is similar with great directors and films. Similarly, great developers do play, and the great revival of games was lead by people who played games so often and grew opinions and ideas on what kind of game ideas would be greatly enjoyable. Capcom’s star developers were primarily composed of arcade game addicts who had a knack for understanding the way players would feel about scenarios, because they too have played games and have been in the same situation.

The problem lies in a completely different location from one’s hobbies. It’s the idea that there is a “just right” within a medium. That there are rules that must be followed, that there are problems that must be solved as objectively as 2+2=4. The idea that you may not be able to make it to this “just right” creates fear. Fear is what stifles creativity.

Fear leads to this idea that there are but two options, you either play into the cliches and trends of the genre and create something that comes across like little more than a store brand version of your inspirations. There is a fear in experimentation, a fear in difference, so you hurdle up inside of a comforting space of ideas you believe everyone loves. It is another bland adult comedy, it is another generic battle shounen, it is another moviegame.

You can’t think that there is a right way to do anything, or that there are truly rules that must be followed and guarded. This is what people will want you to believe, because it is easy for critics to think within these metrics and critics are much easier to listen to than ever before given the instantaneous nature of the Internet.

Listening too much to that “just right” capitulates on the ideas, leaning too much into safety creates blandness. Regrettably for some this safety does in fact lead to financial success, in spite of what you’re lead to believe, but it also leads to cultural stagnation.

In the words of Giovanni Giorgio Moroder, the grandfather of Euro Disco and EDM:

“Once you free your mind about a concept of harmony and of music being “correct”, you can do whatever you want. So, nobody told me what to do and there was no preconception of what to do.”

And, free of this preconception and bias, he invented what would later become known as the sound of the future.

You can either lose yourself in the idea that you can create nothing original in the face of having seen so much before, or you can understand that they have not beaten the path you must follow. I would say the latter idea leads to a much more interesting life.