Too Much Art

We are fortunate in that we live now in an era where there is too much art to experience. Oh, that sounds like a bad thing, where we can imagine the glory and wonder of the works we have never indulged but first and foremost, you weren’t going to experience it even if there wasn’t that much. C’mon, you just weren’t.

The true gift of this saturated environment is that it gives us a task we must do that lets us decide things like what matters to us. When we acknowledge that we have no way to partake of all art, we can then simply set aside any art we like for other art.

For this reason I’m quite happy to say that I don’t plan on buying Penny Arcade’s books, or watching Ender’s Game, or checking out Batman vs Superman, because, when confronted with the work of millions, when presented with no better reason, I can look at those works in light of the people who make them, and say: “Y’know, that guy’s a real asshole.”

I say guy because in this context, Orson Scott Card, Mike Krahulik and Frank Miller are all male. I don’t know many female authors who are massively horrible human beings, but if that comes up, I’ll deal with it then.