Starving Parasites
A proposal for the eradication of the middlebrow.
So you’ve become evil. No, you don’t remember ever doing so explicitly, let alone being given the option. But it must be, for A.O. Scott says so, right there in the New York Times Book Review. At least going by Scott’s criteria of evil—rudeness, defiance, anarchism—it does seem more compatible compared to his criteria of good: “obedience to the norms and regulations that govern the cosmos.” “I mean this not as a moral judgment,” Scott assures you, “but as the description of an aesthetic: a matter of style rather than content.” Yet, even as he references cultural ephemera that has nothing to do with you—comic book films, Broadway musicals, prestige TV, pro wrestling, Paradise Lost—you’re feeling pretty fucking morally judged. As if content is implied by the style. Wow!
Once you recover from the shock of liberalism’s sudden embrace of moral absolutism, it’s worth evaluating the merits of Scott’s “dialectic.” Not simply in its noncommittal flimsiness (Is this about art or about politics? Are people out there wanting to vote for Walter White? What?) or its narrow aesthetic palate, but just in its final vocabulary. Does it speak toward anything remotely resembling reality or a rich, self-affirming culture? Is it the language of a future development or of an immediate existential stasis? I don’t think I need to answer that for you. What you want is a different vocabulary. I don’t have that, per se. What I have is, for lack of a better term, something like a condition out of which any number of vocabularies may be discovered.
Let me tell you about public-access expressionism. It’s this thing I completely made up but which might already exist. And where it might already exist might be so with either partial awareness or total indifference among its practitioners. For what would it be but another happenstance hybrid of high-art ambition with mass-culture spontaneity? The kind of thing that never goes out of its way to happen without some kind of economic or aesthetic scarcity to push it along. Its artists live like silverfish and centipedes: in corners and crevices, dodging the light and the scrutiny of superior intelligence.
But fuck it, let’s assume that public-access expressionism doesn’t exist. Let’s say it’s a placeholder for something on the horizon, perhaps something that will get a more suitable descriptor with a deeper theoretical basis. It would, in spite of its spontaneity, be a logical outcome of prior conditions, conditions that pushed perfectionism and purity, but also self-consciousness and knowingness, above all else. It will be fostered in its wake with a situation where extremes will conjoin at the expense of the middle. High will align with low. Refinement will be smeared with filth. Delicate beauty will mutate into compelling monstrosity. Think of opera in a deserted sanitarium; noh theatre in a rented basement. It is a stupid idea for an era of liberated stupidity and submissive irony.
Some symptoms to look for in emergent public-access expressionism:
A sensitivity to culture’s degraded quality. That the prevailing culture has lost its imaginative vitality and moral purpose; embracing, on the one hand, “mid” tendencies of the passable and merely pleasing; and, on the other hand, the mindless and unceasing pursuit of sameness by way of reproducible formulae and tropes, or dazzlement by way of “AI”-generated shortcuts. This in turn generates a punishingly vicious cycle of laziness between artists and their audiences. More to the point, it is a cycle of feeding and excreting, a dependency on a rigid, slurry-like diet, risking indigestion with any exotic ingredients introduced; but more on that anon.
Style as something to fight for and, once attained, to fight on with. Style is drapery and soul; elegant surface and primordial chaos. It compels discipline and self-knowledge so that both may be given over to total expression of the singular aesthetic, however clumsy, however artificial, however cringe.
A cavalier attitude toward medium. A public-access expressionist is naturally multidisciplinary. They may commit wholeheartedly to one medium while keeping others as sidepieces. Each understands the artist and is understood by the artist in different ways, as if the same artist is a different person in each mode. The same idea will not be received in the same way. Think of it as giving them a bouquet of flowers, but the receptivity depends entirely on the floral selection. Moreover they are temperamental and compel experimentation. Failure is inevitable in one, but improvement in another is always possible. Will multidiscipline give way to lack of discipline, you wonder? Much in the same way that non-monogamy gives way to polyamory? It’s not impossible but perhaps far more tolerable in art than in romance.
It is immunized from self-consciousness. It is thought-out to the extent that the idea itself can be most ably completed. In so doing it may sacrifice optics, dignity, audience pleasure, any emotional reflex of the viewer. Agency is a contingent notion when creating public-access expressionism. Reason and instinct are under the therapeutic care of the work in progress. Reason will have its say even if it never gets its way. Put more concretely, the spirit of public-access expressionism follows the unnervingly naïve sensibility of “lost media” rather than the YouTuber commenting over it, imposing context, ironic distance, knee-jerk moralism, and any other affectation a self-respecting public-access expressionist will abjure.
It is unstable. It is not that public-access expressionism borrows from the public-access manner and style, as analog horror does, or that it engages in cheap but highly aestheticized thrills, as Creepypasta creations do. It more pointedly refuses the comforts of coherence and the rigid frameworks of theme and narrative out of hand. Coherence is a harbinger of failure, a surrender to the enemy. It is not enough to be awkward or off-putting or deranged, but to be willfully distorted and unfinished. Public-access expressionism traffics in an aggressive yet immersive immediacy. The immediacy, for instance, of the screen-cap, or the sentence severed not just from its context but from the niceties of clear, inviting diction altogether. For the public-access expressionist is not helpful. They do not do a service as priests, social workers, or teachers do. Gratitude, prestige, and other validating temptations are beyond them, and they deny them in turn from their never-willing audience. The public-access expressionist is harsh but fair.
It is not the one with the “cult” problem, actually. Immunity from self-consciousness entails immunity from its dependencies: devotion, peer collegiality, institutional respect, and mindfulness toward best practices. Acceptance of any one of these necessarily risks contaminating public-access expressionism’s core imperatives. Rather, it is the mainstream middlebrow that is the cult, for which public-access expressionism may well serve as a deprogrammer—though not by its own choice. It will deprogram on its own terms if it must; and with no concessions or bargaining or patience it may not take completely, if at all. The mutual antagonism will just intensify and the mainstream middlebrow will be left to collapse freely at its own pace.
It knows what it is doing. Even if we grant that Scott’s argument is merely an aesthetic one, his jealous cordoning off of responsibility to the “good” aesthetic is no less egregious. In what sense is the “Devil’s party” irresponsible? Because by all appearances it seeks only momentary impact? Where did they get that idea? In spite of its purpose-driven pursuit of fragmentary dissonance, public-access expressionism is here for the duration. It wants to leave an imprint, even if that imprint is a scar, a defacement, or a feeling of vertigo. It is “evil” only insofar as it declines to judge any of these imprints as improvements, rather than necessary responses to conditions imposed by people who, at best, failed to know better and who were not, as it happens, very responsible.
It is not evil, it is a nightmare. And have you considered that nightmares are good? That a nightmare offers clarity and corrective when reality comes undone and its norms enforce dull complacency? In this sense, public-access expressionism is less a condition than a good, hard threat. And even if threats are unhelpful, they are not without value or mutual benefits. The tragedy of the middlebrow is not that it is mediocre out of the gate, but that it has an ancestry in high-art. Diane Arbus did not set out to build a wall between her safely framed “freak” subjects and the respectable spectators in the gallery. But that is what happened, and it proved easily replicable into popular media—in David Lynch, in Big Black, in Tim and Eric, and reaching its nadir in Breaking Bad and other prestige dramas. It became tepid once it stopped occurring to the consumer, if it ever occurred to them at all, that the subjects would not sit still in their frames, would want to break through it, and would want to reach out. But rather than lash out mindlessly, the “freak,” having their own notions of beauty and their own standards of judgment, seeks only to take control of the viewfinder, to look wherever they want to look, at not necessarily at the consumer in some kind of retribution.
With that said, the limitations of public-access expressionism are clear enough. Its own impressions are soon overshadowed by the variety of impressions that it enables thereafter, impressions far beyond what was once thought reasonable. Like all cultural buzzwords, it can mean anything while in truth meaning almost nothing. Nor does it truly eradicate the effects of the middlebrow, it only denies its consumers their sustenance. Like parasites, middlebrow consumers can only sustain themselves on their own slop, anything else just sickening them. So like parasites, their nuisance is reduced simply by starvation. The ecosystem corrects itself accordingly.
