I’ve been thinking about artists vs. their audience a lot lately.
There’s this pervasive belief, in creative circles, that once you put something out into the world, it ceases being yours. The act of sharing it with other people by default makes you less of an authority on your own work. I do think this is true to some extent— you can’t control other people, and by sharing things to a wide audience you have to accept that, no matter how hard it might be. But what I’ve found myself having trouble with lately is the idea that we can remove the person who made something from the thing they made and forget that they, too, are a person.
This is where death of the author comes in, obviously. I don’t disagree with everything Barthes has to say in his essay, even. I think he’s right that a text must stand on its own before interpretation is applied using external factors. But more and more in the age of media we are currently in, I am finding myself struggling against the way people talk about art and the people who make it.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but it really came to a head recently, when the poet Richard Siken returned to Twitter (or, as we now know it, X) to announce his forthcoming book, I Do Know Some Things. Siken’s work has been incredibly influential to how I approach writing and to see him come back with a new book after a stroke and years-long recovery was truly a joy, even moreso when he started interacting with people and answering questions— that is, until things started getting weird.
Siken’s poetry, for better or for worse, has been a mainstay of internet fandom for years. People have applied his work to a plethora of fictional characters and relationships, titled fanfiction and poems using his lines, made countless edits of quotes superimposed onto their favorite characters.
If you aren’t familiar with him, I recommend reading this excellent interview, The Poet Laureate of Fanfiction, conducted in 2015.
What has been happening in 2023 on Siken’s Twitter page is an extension of all of this, but it also brought a new generation of people to realise that he was alive and well. An apparently well-spread belief online is that he died years ago— you wouldn’t be out of pocket to assume that maybe people heard about his stroke and assumed the worst, but it’s actually weirder than that, in that many people weren’t aware that he was a contemporary poet at all. This is odd, given the fact that his most famous poem is about being in a car, and many people were quick to tweet him about their assumption and apologise. Siken’s response? That people must not have read his work or googled him, and they should be more curious about the things they claim to be interested in.
The last part is something I wholeheartedly agree with, and probably have enough thoughts on for another essay. But really, the crux of what I’ve been thinking about goes hand in hand with this new generation of people who are just now discovering that he’s a person they can interact with online: immediately questions started pouring in about whether or not he liked certain fandoms, if he’d ever consider writing more fanfiction, etc. Siken’s stance on it was that people can write whatever they want and that policing what other people do in fandom isn’t a productive use of your time, but people were quick to twist his words and call him all sorts of names because he committed the cardinal sin of having, in the past, enjoyed things that didn’t gel with people’s image of him as a sad poet.
I found this incredibly disturbing because it’s a symptom of the way people treat artists these days, not as people but as crystallised versions of themselves that only exist in the art they made, never to be tangible outside of it. As if there’s a point where someone becomes a Serious Artist and therefore ceases to be a person who enjoys things and participates in culture both online and off; as if you cross a certain point of no return when anything you make gains a modicum of success and must, from that point on, relinquish your personhood.
I think more people could stand to hear the chorus in Local Man Ruins Everything by The Wonder Years, which goes "I'm not a self-help book, I'm just a fucked up kid" as a response to the way audiences will idolise artists who write about their experience with mental illness and how said idolisation effectively removes personhood from the artist who wrote the words in the first place.
This isn’t the only line on the album this song is from that deals with the topic of artist vs. audience; on My Life as a Pigeon, Daniel “Soupy” Campbell muses about “an army of self-righteous kids that only liked the 7-inch”, referring to people listening to his band’s early material and refusing to give anything that came after a shot, choosing instead to act entitled to more records that sound exactly like The Wonder Years’ early output.
There’s this belief I see more and more that audiences and artists are fundamentally different classes of people. And on some level, this is true, but it’s been pushed to an uncomfortable extreme where one side completely refuses to see that the other is also a person.
One of my favorite artists, Mitski, dealt with this as well when she asked people to please refrain from filming entire songs at her shows and remaining stock still without really engaging with the music. She was met with backlash and excruciating discourse. “To some, I’m a dancing monkey,” she told HUCK Magazine after the fact. “And I better start dancing quick so they can get the content they paid for.”
Idle Worship, the Paramore song this essay is named after, grapples with this too: “Don’t let me let you down,” Hayley Williams pleads with the listener after detailing the hazards that come with “this pedestal that you keep putting me on”.
This has always been a problem but I think it’s been exacerbated in the digital age; in a time where everything is #Content and artists are being called “content creators” online, artists more than ever are encouraged to interact with their audience in ways that aren’t in person. This means that by the time an audience member encounters an artist in person, they have already consumed so much of the artist’s online presence that the online presence has now superseded the real person in their mind. And because an online presence is immaterial, the very real human behind it gets forgotten.
It isn’t a coincidence that artists like Mitski and Hayley Williams of Paramore are people who don’t handle their own social media anymore, either.
This is something I understand on a (very) much smaller scale— a few years ago I made a fiction podcast that became way more popular than I thought it would. I made it in my living room and in a university studio with 3 other people and a budget of absolutely no money, and to my surprise, it blew up, which was flattering. I was really glad that people liked it. But as I went through a lot of trauma in my life that affected the release of the podcast, which I didn’t share with listeners because it was deeply private, people kept reaching out to me. “Love your show, when is the next season coming out?” became a mainstay of my Twitter inbox. I still get asked this on the show’s Tumblr at least once a month.
While I started work on the second season, I stopped using most forms of public social media because of the aforementioned trauma; in retrospect that was the best thing I could have done for myself at the time. Three years on, I’m doing much better, and I’m finding that I have absolutely zero interest in returning to how public I used to be.
I have publicly alluded vaguely to the show’s production being hindered by it coming out during a bad part of my life and left it at that, and yet the messages still keep coming, and part of me feels awful. We’re taught, as creative people, that to share something and have other people respond to it is the goal. It’s what we should want. And I am, on some level, truly delighted that something I made in my early twenties resonated with people so much that they still ask about it years later. But the expectation that comes with having an audience, the knowledge that to many people I am not a person but a creator who made something and disappeared behind it, is something that I don’t know how to deal with, in part because of how ungrateful it makes me sound.
On a later release by The Wonder Years, Campbell returned to the theme of struggling with having an audience; in An American Religion (FSF), he recounts how “the limelight started burning”. The song chronicles Campbell’s awareness that he will always be known for his public fuckups and misspeaking in interviews rather than for the small stuff that makes him a person, like living in a friend’s basement and talking about nothing over coffee.
Is this the price we pay for making something that resonates with other people? I watch other people I know be successful and have to deal with everything that comes with it and it makes me think of how little I could deal with it.
The Internet doesn’t help this at all. Of course it’s invaluable for promoting your work and finding an audience, but at what cost, if it means we’re fostering parasocial relationships that dehumanise us? Now that I’m working on my show in earnest again I’ve been thinking about how I want to engage with the people who love it, and I’ve come to realise that the only solution is for me to hand off the promoting duties to someone else and dip in and out periodically. Because this is the problem, to me: making something used to be enough. Promoting it was someone else’s job. But now, in the age of #Content, we have to not only make the thing but also be salespeople, on the same platform that we’re also, you know, just plain old people. And frankly, people following me because they like a piece of art I made and then saying they can’t take it seriously anymore because they saw me be a person is my worst fucking nightmare.
On the other hand, does this mean all artists should be hermits forever and never interact with their audience? I think that’s another extreme, and probably not a very good one in the long run, especially when it comes to sustaining any sort of interest in the thing you’re making. But I resent the fact that interaction is mandatory— like your art isn’t worthy of attention if you don’t also take on the cool camp counsellor-like hat of interacting with everyone else. Artists with bigger followings have more options to have other people handle the interaction side, but when you make something more independent, you’re on your own unless you’re a “content creator” as well.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that whatever I make next will probably not be that popular, because it won’t be as heavily promoted by audience interaction. But when I think about the art I love most, I didn’t find any of it because the person who made it posted a lot on social media. I found it because it was personally recommended to me by someone else, or through general word of mouth. And I have to trust that the audience will do their thing, and I’ll do mine.
Turns out I agree with Barthes on more stuff than I thought.