An Artist's Duty
Permutations on creativity
I recently came across this claim by Alan Moore, famous author of V For Vandetta, Watchmen, and some of the best issues of Swamp Thing:
“It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they wanted, then they wouldn’t be the audience, they’d be the artist.”
I also, while admittedly being a shit and taking another TTRPG influencer to task recieved this rejoinder:
“People can do what they want with their game. Just because you wouldn't run this in your game doesn't mean other people can't run it in their game.”
which, too be fair, is something I would actually say in defense of good gaming. I am at the forefront of telling corpos where to stick it when WOTC tries to tell me how to tell a good yarn with my players. However, then we have this person:
Karen Rodriguez at Literary Fancy
Go ahead and check out Mrs. Rodriquez work.
I’ll still be here when you’re done.
You’re back?
Cool.
So what do all three of these takes have in common that I am talking about today? They are not about the art, or if you prefer the more neutral word content, that is being created. Moore is saying that the artist is, essentially, immune to criticism because true art is made for the artist first and foremost and if the artist is happy then it doesn’t matter. The second was in response to me defending an influencer I accused of misrepresenting the game environment because players can “do what they want so its fine,” and the third if you take even a cursory glance is a succession of what we can only loosely call articles that wildly misrepresent art criticism in literature and might well be AI. I’ve even called out the last of these personally arguing that if her work isn’t artificial intelligence which it may well be that it lacks academic rigor. I will always say regardless of how someone gets to the end of a project that they should have enough self respect to see to its quality so they can know for themselves they did their best.
Here’s the problem:
These people aren’t talking about art, or at least not art for the sake of art.
In artistic and literary circles we idealize the artist who does what they do for the sake of art. We all have a creative urge that drives us to create for the raw need to create and theoretically don’t care what other people think of us about it. To heck with everyone else, I have my art!
I really wish that was true.
However, as Siobhan Gallagher has pointed out here,
I said I was glad I wasn’t the only one who noticed the one way and transactional nature of discourse here on Substack and they responded:
“Again, it ties back to a lack of readers. Fans will talk about your fiction, while other writers want you to read their fiction.”
If we take that for true then any time you exhibit your art, whatever it is, however it is, for the public it becomes audience driven. You aren’t making art because it makes you warm inside, you’re making art because you hope other people will like it, and liking it perhaps you hope deep down that it will translate into some kind of fame or recognition.
Once you begin seeking an audience you have a duty to that audience.
Alan Moore is not wrong. A pure artist in pure creative industry owes nothing to anyone. However, a pure artist should accept he is going to be purely hungry. Art does not put food on the table. Even if we go back to the masters they had patrons who paid they bills, they offered schooling to like minded young people for fees and influence, and they trained the children of noblemen so that the two-bit thugs the lord was raising might have some courtly talents worthy of marriage. Moore himself worked for Detective Comics Vertigo imprint. He didn’t create the Watchmen. He gave a bunch of corporate acquisitions that were about to enter the public domain a new context with an award-winning story so that DC could keep them, and he got paid for it. He got paid for V for Vendetta, he got paid for Swamp Thing, and they were all made for the commercial market with general audiences.
Now if you want to suggest Moore should get paid more for his work and that its relative success should translate to more wealth for the creatives, that’s a conversation about comics and the mafiosi-like cartels that comics linger in. That’s not about the creative and their duty to the audience.
The second comment addresses the audience, essentially stating the audience has a right to interpret the information in any way they see fit. This is also true. However, that’s not what’s going on. The original poster is again one of the YouTube based TikTok inspired commentary bots who puts their kindergarten takes out on the internet and walks away. In particular, the original poster was talking about the meaning and the form of the World of Darkness game line and how different character types act. However, their interpretation is derived almost wholly from the most recent Paradox led fifth edition and the amalgamated twentieth anniversary editions, wholly unaware, ignorant, or heedless of changes in the game lore over time. This is a propensity I have seen multiple times in long-running fandoms where when the canon changes and someone espouses a contradiction the casual response is to defend new canon because “things have moved on.”
This is dumb.
This does not work.
While on a long enough curve most things do change, evolution is not an objective ladder where change equals improvement. Sometimes change is lateral, and a change for convenience may be equivalent to something that already exists. Yes, it is incredibly useful my phone has a clock, a calculator, and the internet. However, that does not invalidate that I can read a traditional clock face, that I can do math the long way on paper by hand, or that I can use a library. By extension the lore of a game line is the lore of a game line, and we should not discard old lore just because it is convenient when that lore has a greater and more complete understanding of the intended material. My argument was, and here is, that the guy creating videos on a platform for public consumption has a duty of creation to the audience.
If I am a brand new person who has never experienced a media and you are an ambassador for that media, then if you wildly misrepresent that media to me, you are a liar. In business we call that a bait and switch tactic, and it is vastly illegal for a reason. The creator has infinite time and ability to research and prepare their content. In matter of point I started writing this article almost two hours ago because I was disrupted by work in the middle. They aren’t just sounding off or giving their opinions to friends around the table. They’re sharing it with everyone, everywhere, on the internet. It’s for an audience they hope will return over and over again, therefore it should be honest.
Anything else is deceptive.
Which brings us to our last commentator. Mrs. Rodriguez was not very enthused by my criticism and informed me the following:
“Your (and others) opinion of me, is none of my business.”
This was after asserting to another criticism that here intent was to “spark conversation”, and create an “online book club space” after people were dismissive of her article 10 “Happy Endings” in Classic Literature That Are Actually Horrifying. Presentations such as this are indicative of the totality of Literary Fancy in that they have the scholastic chops of a Vanity Fair article and the depth of a children’s swimming pool.
Here’s the problem: our opinion is very much her business.
Her entire business model is built on giving her opinions and then having consumers accept those opinions will be accurate. That means, by extension, that if they are wrong - possibly AI generated without a second going over - and unsubstantiated that they are spreading misinformation. We would hope people are readers. We want people to be readers. However, as Siobhan Gallagher said, most people especially here aren’t readers but they are desperate to be read. Thus we accept the opinions that reaffirm our own presuppositions. We accept them as legitimate without doing our own leg work. Consider her new postulate 5 “Wholesome” Children’s Classics That Traumatized Entire Generations (And We Just Accepted It).
Let’s see, shall we?
Charlotte’s Web. How many people have actually read this? That’s not a dig at the book. It’s a statement how most of this supposed trauma is not from the book but the film depictions of the same.
Where the Red Fern Grows. I read this one in fifth grade. I remember it because it made me cry. I was not the only one who did. So first and foremost the word TRAUMA is doing a lot of buzz word heavy lifting here because it is not well defined. Is just crying because something is sad traumatic? Is my life utterly ruined forever because I read a sad book? Let’s go deeper.
“What People Think It’s About: A boy and his two dogs in the Ozark Mountains. Adventure. Coming of age. A classic.
Correct.
What It’s Actually About: A boy saves for two years to buy two hunting dogs. He loves them more than he loves anything on earth. One dog is mauled to death by a mountain lion while protecting the boy. The other dog lies down on her brother’s grave and dies of grief. The boy is left alone. That’s the end.
There is a lot more to it than that. There are multiple episodes and stories inside this overall narrative. What Where the Red Fern Grows is ACTUALLY about is growing up. It’s about how life changes. It’s about how you experience both good and bad things, and how they shape you. This is an important lesson for children because we do need to eventually evolve from the constant summer of now and accept the turning of seasons. We are not who we were yesterday. We are not who we will be tomorrow.
Why It’s Unhinged: Billy Coleman spends TWO YEARS saving money to buy his dogs, Old Dan and Little Ann. He works. He saves. He earns them himself. These are not just pets. These are his entire world. He trains them. He sleeps with them. He hunts with them every day. They win competitions. They’re extraordinary dogs. Everything is right. Then: Mountain lion attack. Old Dan throws himself between the mountain lion and Billy. He fights it off. He saves Billy’s life. Old Dan is eviscerated in the process. His intestines are hanging out. He drags himself home that night and dies. Little Ann survives the attack. She’s physically fine. But she won’t eat. She goes to Old Dan’s grave. She lies down on it. She dies. Of grief. Billy buries her next to Old Dan. He finds a red fern growing over their graves—according to Cherokee legend, only an angel can plant a red fern. He leaves the Ozarks. He never hunts again.
And? That’s life in the Ozarks. That’s especially life in the Ozarks which even with modern conveniences can feel like a snapshot of a far distant era in the past. Like Charlotte’s Web above we’re talking about farm children in rural America. I’m a suburbanite and as a child I have outlived two dogs, three cats, one turtle, and a veritable army of fish.
The Line That Gives It Away: “I had learned something of importance that night, something about life, and death, and love.” Translation: A child processed the death of everything he loved and came out the other side. We assigned this in fourth grade without warning anyone what was coming.
And? Another personal note. I had a sister die of SIDS when I was seven. I had to ‘process death’ because everyone has to process death sometime. We’re right back to the question: what is Trauma and who declares we are Traumatized?
Why You Were Told It’s Wholesome: Because it’s framed as “a boy and his dogs” and “coming of age.” It is those things. It’s also systematic emotional devastation. Rawls apparently cried every time he read from this book. He KNEW what he’d written. And we kept putting it on fourth grade reading lists. This was SO hard to read aloud to my kids, I cried like a baby!
The author had nothing to do with where his novel was assigned. That’s the publisher selling it as Young Adult or Children’s fiction and then schools selecting for a given grade year. You might have been traumatized, over time and across situations, reading it to multiple children Mrs. Rodriquez, but “we” weren’t anything. Please put your opinions in the round receptacle where trash belongs.
The rest of the article is much the same. Bridge to Terabithia, which I haven’t read but I do recall a Nickelodeon film and that it wasn’t very book accurate, Old Yeller - another classic more well known for its Disney adaptation than for its literary content - The Little Match Girl, which to my knowledge has never been commonly popular or on academic lists as required reading.
At last we come to the Summation.
What These Five Have in Common
Same pattern—different generation: They all present darkness as life lessons instead of trauma:
Death without warning (Bridge to Terabithia)
Death as consequence of love (Charlotte’s Web, Where the Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller)
Death as the only escape from suffering (The Little Match Girl)
And in every case, adults told children to feel the grief and then move on. No processing. No therapy. No “this is really hard and it’s okay to be devastated.” Just: “Life is like that.” The unhinged part isn’t the darkness. Classic literature for adults is full of darkness too. The unhinged part is that we deliberately gave these books to children who weren’t ready and watched them learn about mortality, grief, and loss in real time, and called it education. Your English teacher wasn’t wrong that these are important books. But maybe someone should have warned us first.
So lets dig into this using the books I have read or am familiar with:
Death as consequence of love. Pathos masquerading as Logos. Thanatos is not the result of Eros. Eros and Thantos are equal and opposite forces of existence and love did not specifically result in the death of Charlotte, who lived a full life as a spider, produced children, and died of old age, nor did it result in the specific death of Old Yeller and the dogs in Where the Red Fern Grows. In particular since these pieces deal with the death as being a natural extension of life, but also with the idea of life beyond death. The animals live in the memory of the characters, they are emotionally changed by their exposure to them, and expressly in Red Fern effort is made to honor the life and sacrifice of the lost. It is not wrong to tell children death exists. They will have to learn it one day, and it is important to know that death can have meaning and value beyond death.
Death as the only escape from suffering. Context matters. Hans Christian Anderson famously wrote The Little Mermaid, and while The Little Match Girl is a quote unquote new fairy tale Anderson was well known for the heavy dose of sour he put in the sweetness of his works. The Little Match Girl was published in 1845 and in that context is in the dead middle of the rule of Queen Victoria of England, which would shape European culture and politics until her death in 1901. The Little Match Girl doesn’t just suffer and die in the snow because death is the deliverer and she would have suffered regardless forever. She dies in the snow because the world, and the people in it, suck. Her father the abusive drunk should have protected her. The people in the city who subsequently find her frozen body the following morning are helpless in the face of death because they not only didn’t know the Little Match Girl existed, most wouldn’t have cared. Christian charity, a widely held rallying cry at the time, often fell flat when it had to address issues of wealth disparity and class in the urban environment. This was a time when children were still sent to work houses to labor in machine factories and lose limbs.
Of course its not a story for children.
Who decided Fairy Tales were only for children?
Oh, that’s right.
“Maybe someone should have warned us first.”
That’s you. If you’re the reader and you’re reading it to children, a literal audience, you should consider what you’re reading and what it means. If educators aren’t doing that and are just assigning reading because they have to, then they are not doing their jobs and something should be done accordingly.
But that brings us back around to where we started. If my opinion on Mrs. Rodriguez opinion doesn’t matter then why does her opinion matter? She clearly wants it to matter. If it does, then does she not as someone acting in the role of an educator have a duty to the audience?
Yes, she does.
You cannot present information and then abdicate or abrogate your responsibility for that information because the audience will “figure it out for themselves,” when as the primary creator and influencer you are the one presenting the information. To claim otherwise is the highest form of academic dishonesty and intrinsically dangerous to a wider conversation about how we engage with material.
If you want to be an author, and especially if you want to be a paid professional, you must always remember your audience because they depend on you. Without the audience, you are nothing, and you never will be.