What Is Art Really?

This past February, nineteen ten- and eleven-year-olds from my son’s fifth-grade class discussed the question: “Is art important?” One of them said it was a distraction from mathematics and the sciences because the United States of America ranked poorly when compared to the rest of the world in those categories. The child went on to say that math was more important because it taught you how to think logically rather than emotionally. My child said the arts were important because “it was about self-expression" and I immediately disagreed. I was more interested in who indoctrinated the first child with a hostile vision of the world than I was in disagreeing with them. It was more alarming that an eleven-year-old had such sterilized visions of the world. And until the conversation with my son, it had never occurred to me to challenge the widely accepted notion that art was important for self-expression. I didn’t have a satisfactory rebuttal even after several hours of discussing it with my opinionated preteen. As we discussed, the question evolved from “Is art important?” to “What is art if it isn’t self-expression?”

The “art” I am referring to here is anything shared publicly inside and outside museums and galleries. I am not interested in defining the art we make for ourselves in the privacy of our homes.

The scholastic definition of art, according to the Arts Council of England, is “a diverse range of human activities, creations, and expressions that convey emotions, ideas, or stories, typically characterized by creative imagination, technical skill, and aesthetic beauty.” Several reputable art councils and organizations around the world, such as the California Arts Council and the Arts Council of England, which advocate for free public art, defend their beliefs with claims that art is subjective, often defined by the viewer. They say its purpose is aesthetic value, emotional release, social commentary, or personal expression, and functions as a conduit for expressing emotions, advocating for causes, and creating beauty in a complex world. I have combined multiple definitions for art and paraphrased them here to cover its colloquial definitions. What is obvious is the passive and vague nature of these definitions. They raise questions I would consider antithetical to what a definition is supposed to do: provide exact meaning. I was alarmed that one of the definitions delineated the task of understanding and contextualizing public art to the individual witnessing it. How can we engage with art meaningfully if we are required to consider everyone’s individual opinions? Who benefits from such chaos?

Unsurprisingly, these definitions of art that center self-expression were of no use to me, which made me restless. I began reevaluating works of art I held dearly. I wondered whether memoirs should even exist. Should parents encourage skilled or “naturally gifted” children to monetize their “art?” These questions possessed me. It colored my perception of everything I read and watched. It soon became evident that clarifying this question was fundamental to everything else I thought I might write for tiny Pleasures. I began revisiting works by fine artists, writers, deceased and contemporary cultural critics I respected to formulate a definition that might support my ideas.

What is art if it isn’t self-expression?

The debate regarding art’s importance is a duplicitous one. These asinine dialectics foster other asinine dialectics, like whether we can separate the art from the artist or if only painful experiences can create art. The fact is, art has persisted through various civilizations and cultures. I do not think it is a coincidence that these fruitless discourses are what preoccupy our minds and dominate public discussions of various art forms. Coincidences involve chance or unplanned occurrences. If the sciences are more important, why are tech brothers lobbying to keep us out of the arts while pillaging their way into art institutions? Is it also a coincidence that our wealthiest and most affluent citizens have launched a mammoth-sized campaign promoting AI “art?” The arts have always been tools for inhumane propaganda. We are intolerably ignorant about how so-called democratic governments have orchestrated psychological operations using self-expressive art as their cannon. It is remarkable!

With these truths, I am more interested in using this newsletter to propose a line of more creative and critical questions: What is art, and why do we give it such precedence?

Although I am asking what art is, I am uninterested in specifying what it is because what is it really? I’m interested in establishing definitions of art that delineate how it ought to function to qualify as art. Questioning art’s function raises other crucial questions about how we decide what demands our attention. If we judge art by its beauty, which is subjective, and what it has to say, which is both subjective and objective, how do we agree on what the artist says it is?

The lack of exact definitions of art’s purpose and function has curtailed inventive public discourse and fostered a climate where the most “important” artists and inventors are the ones who sell the most albums, successfully convince us of their manufactured worth, and make the most salacious spectacle. In this society, mutilated intelligence thrives and nothing means everything.

It would be a waste to establish a rational definition of art that encapsulates its creative, civil, ethical, and humane functions and purpose when so many others with better words have defined it ad nauseam. I resonated with the definitions proposed by writers. The following definitions struck me as both sober and passionate:

In an interview with Claudia Tate for Black Women Writers at Work, Toni Morrison referred to writing as “discovery.” She said, “It's talking deep within myself.”
In the same book, Audre Lorde proclaimed that “Art is not living. It is the use of the living. The artist can take the living and use it in a certain way to produce art.” She also encourages writers to write what is unresolved, not what is understood.
Also, in Black Women Writers at Work, when talking about writing, Gayl Jones claimed that “perhaps brutality enables one to recognize what tenderness is.”
When asked why she wrote in the Fall 1990 issue of The Paris Review, Maya Angelou said her writing was about documenting what it cost to grow up, which is telling the truth about “what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.” In the same interview, she explained how writing about one’s life isn’t merely about telling the facts of what happened, but rather an honest account of how it felt.
In his 1981 Art Forum essay “Radiant Child,” which cemented Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artistic influence and historical relevance in the world, René Ricard defines art as information, not about information.
Poet Mary Ruefle asserts in Madness, Rack, and Honey that “Poetry is subversive for good reason, but for me it should never be rapacious, living on prey.”
In a 1984 interview with The Paris Review, James Baldwin said, “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.” I will include this snippet from his 1979 interview with the New York Times: “I find much of so‐called avant‐garde writing utterly trivial. If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write. I’m an old‐fashioned writer and, despite the odds, I want to change the world. What I hope to convey? Well, joy, love, the passion to feel how our choices affect the world . . . that’s all.”

The problem with art as self-expression

The definitions above are specific; they leave minimal space for misinterpretations — thus is the very function of definitions: exact meaning. Morrison’s description of writing as discovery directly supports Lorde and Baldwin’s advice to write what is unresolved. They all say that the writing has to begin with a question, an overlooked phenomenon, or a vision that you cannot let go of. Ricard’s definition also supports theirs by emphasizing that, no matter the form, art has to be informative. Writing what is unresolved is informative. Angelou’s assertion that it isn’t enough to simply tell the facts of what happened illuminates what kind of information art must possess. They all agree that if the writing is about oneself, it ought to be confronted with wonder and dignity and not merely vague references to the facts: who did what or what happened. Angelou says, “The facts can obstruct the truth, what it really felt like.”

I want to introduce several examples of popular artworks and “artists” that illustrate my arguments against art as self-expression.

Entertainers such as Taylor Swift come to mind when I think about the dangers of art as self-expression in a consumer-driven economy. Swift treats her experiences with little to no dignity. Swift’s inclusion of salacious relationship details without ever using the men’s names in her music is to be melodramatic—to provoke a response that inadvertently distracts audiences, to show her knowledge of figures of speech, and to be the wealthiest pop star in the world. No one has proposed sound arguments for why we should pay attention to yet another twelve-track album about the same theme Swift has nauseatingly exhausted for two decades: romantic love. Before album releases, she notoriously drops clues for rabid, sycophantic fans (and critics) to concoct delusions about the contents of her pedestrian lyrics.

Swift’s most recent album, The Life of a Showgirl, is her most heinous production. Like the rest of her body of work, it is riddled with the other holy trinity: elementary figures of speech, outdated and unintelligent internet lingo, and melodrama. She announced the album eight months after the end of her retrospective tribute Eras tour. The twenty-one-month-long, 149-show tour grossed over one billion dollars in ticket sales and two billion in merchandise revenue, making it the highest-grossing tour of all time. She even had the effrontery to orchestrate a cash-grabbing theatrical release for the album. One month before the album’s premiere, she had released over 40 vinyls, digital album and single editions, CDs and more. In this spreadsheet generously created by a “Swiftie,” you can see that the average fan spends almost $800 before they even hear a lyric.

The album opens with “Fate of Ophelia,” which is a Disney Channel-sponsored Shakespearean revisionist nightmare. She reimagines a less tragic fate for Ophelia similar to how she “reimagined” Romeo and Juliet’s fate in her 2008 single “Love Story.” Devout fans and Shakespearean purists have debated whether Swift has actually read Hamlet because the damsel in distress (herself) Swift describes in “Fate of Ophelia” is rescued by Prince Charming, which is a far cry from Ophelia’s tragic fate in the book. She fumbles through the entire album with one poorly crafted simile after another. She closes the calamitous album with “CANCELLED.” Here are some of the unforgettable lyrics:

Did you girl-boss too close to the sun?

Good thing I like my friends cancelled
I like 'em cloaked in Gucci and in scandal

Welcome to my underworld
Where it gets quite dark

The last lyric is a brain teaser. Is it ever not “quite dark” in the underworld?

Her playground-level lyricism and illiterate figures of speech are overlooked because we can relate to being broken up with (again) or falling in love (again). Even the supposedly prestigious Harvard University created a course analyzing her lyrics alongside the works of William Wordsworth and Shakespeare. But is songwriting or poetry about relatability?

Ricard addresses this phenomenon of relatability while defending Basquiat’s works. He says, “We need to see ourselves now but not this literally. For some reason we need recognizable evidence of our existence. Something has happened and we need, if not advice, at least a demonstration of the situation…” Ricard argues that we do not need to create language to describe emotions like fear, which are hardwired biological functions of the nervous system. Emotions are evident. Instead, he urges us to write, paint, and sing about the feelings which, as Mary Ruefle put it in her lecture “On Fear,” “are more complicated and involve emotion, memories, experience, and intelligence.”

The responses from gay men after Heated Rivalry’s release on HBOMAX last year highlight the “relatable art” phenomenon. Many gay men and even gay male celebrities chimed in to share how unrelatable the sex on Heated Rivalry was. Jordan Firstman, the resident gay in charge of homosexual sex, told Vulture that it was not an accurate representation of “how gay men fuck.” These asinine conclusions only arise when we think that our subjective interpretations of art are of utmost importance. We should, of course, think of what the artist and the art are trying to say. However, it is paramount to include the subject matter’s context and history. But if our intelligence, experiences, memories, or emotions are tainted, we are unable to draw educated conclusions. Art as self-expression inadvertently communicates that art should represent our personal realities, which would explain the catastrophic state of the arts: everything mirrors our reality, nothing reflects it. Reflection requires deep consideration; mirroring is less interesting; it emulates and reproduces our reality. Taylor Swift has not lived a life worthy of meaningful reflection, which explains her reliance on recycled melodrama to sell records. Her life is a premeditated anomaly—she has nothing of substance to teach us.

I want to be clear that I am not defending removing enjoyment or personal details from songwriting or any kind of writing. In fact, some of our most popular bops combine an upbeat groove with deeply personal lyrics that express feelings. For example, Candi Staton’s “Young Hearts Run Free” is a record about the consequences of prioritizing a romantic relationship over one’s well-being. You will not feel its eeriness until you sit with the lyrics. I once heard someone describe the song as the kind of music used in horror movie trailers, slowly drifting into an echo. The song was written and produced by David Crawford after Staton confided in him about her abusive marriage. Although Staton did not write the lyrics, she sang them in one take with haunting exhaustion and anguish. Without fail, I choke up during the second verse when she says:

It’s high time now just one crack at life
Who wants to live in, in trouble and strife?
My mind must be free
To learn all I can about me, uh-huh
I’m gonna love me, for the rest of my days
Encourage the babies every time they say
Self-preservation is what’s really going on today

We have evidence that it is not impossible to invent that which is both achingly beautiful and useful. Staton’s song is about her life and she is singing to herself, but “Young Hearts Run Free” is also for everyone who might fall under any delusions of romantic love. Ricard’s description of art as information emphasizes the point I am making here: Staton’s lyrics are useful because they give us information about what she has endured —skipping the scandalous innuendos and encouraging self-preservative love. Swift’s lyrics are also about who hurt her, which isn’t useful beyond gossip. Staton isn’t merely centering her pain in this record—she lets us know that she is committed to spreading the message of self-preservation over sacrificing oneself for a romantic love that will only hollow you out. This isn’t the story of a woman scorned. Staton’s song is one of a woman who owns herself because she has liberated herself, using her life lessons to hopefully liberate others. On the other hand, Swift reproduces emotion as art.

I will introduce Swift’s critically acclaimed 2020 release Folklore as an example of how she reproduces emotion as art. Folklore is Swift’s only non-biographical album and even then, fans have speculated that some of the songs are about her romantic entanglement with sewer rat Matt Healy. While she attempts to steer clear of her personal life, she does not hesitate to tackle the same subjects: heartbreak, loss, and rage with an astounding absence of perception. “Cardigan,” the lead single, is heralded as her Magnum Opus by fans because of its supposedly strong lyrics:

Cause I knew you
Steppin' on the last train
Marked me like a bloodstain, I
I knew you
Tried to change the ending
Peter losing Wendy, I
I knew you
Leavin' like a father
Running like water, I
And when you are young, they assume you know nothing

These lyrics are from the point of view of a young woman remembering why she left her first love. She leaves him because he lacks maturity like Peter Pan, hence the “Peter losing Wendy” line. (These pedestrian similes are heavy-handed and obvious: “marked me like a bloodstain,” “leavin’ like a father,” and “when you are young, they assume you know nothing” are tales as old as time.

“Cardigan” is supposed to be a song about overcoming losing one’s first love to betrayal and yet, Swift did not hesitate to maximize profits on the single. For a low price of $49, fans could own the cardigan similar to the one Swift wore in the single’s music video. You can read the dreadful Vogue press release that’s pretending not to be an advertisement. Her rapacious greed exposes her: she has little to no regard for the characters she invents and is incurious about them, belaboring them with her stunted prepubescent romantic fantasies. Even in the fictive world, Swift is omnipresent in every narrative.

Let me remind you of Mary Ruefle’s lecture on fear, in which she distinguishes between emotion and feelings. She says that emotions are hardwired biological functions such as fear, terror, sexual attraction, hunger, etc, which means that you have no control over your emotions. On the other hand, “feelings seem to represent a place where emotions combine with intelligence and experience to create a highly personal thought process that results in an individual’s worldview.” All this to say, Taylor Swift is a deeply emotional person as her lyrics reveal, but she lacks a sophisticated cognitive system, freezing her in a prepubescent state, which is on display in every song lyric she has ever written. She has never cast a spell on language; she has never “put language in extenuating circumstances with dangerous limits until an acute physical sensation results.”* Instead, she is calculating and conniving with every secret she reveals. She never leans into obscurity, nor does she reveal and hide the secret, which are the very tenets of poetry and songwriting. Her lyrics are prose-like exposés to humiliate whoever is on the receiving end of her rabid emotions. She is unable to write about anything outside herself. Her worldview and the feelings she expresses in her lyrics are corrupt because her intelligence, emotions, memories, and experiences are underdeveloped.

You got that James Dean daydream look in your eye
And I got that red lip classic thing that you like
And when we go crashing down, we come back every time
Cause we never go out of style, we never go out of style
You got that long hair, slicked back, white T-shirt
And I got that good girl faith and a tight little skirt
And when we go crashing down, we come back every time
'Cause we never go out of style, we never go out of style

These lyrics above are from her song “Style” from her 2014 album, 1989. The song is about her intermittent romantic relationship with Harry Styles. She wants you to know who the song is about, hence his name in the title. She then goes on to describe him so you know for sure who the song is about. But the entire song is a big secret that also isn’t one. She never tells you anything of substance about what makes this romance worthy of a song—there are no noteworthy insights. The listener walks away feeling like they are in on a secret while knowing nothing at all. This isn’t art; this is pageantry.

(Mr. Styles also employs these tactics in his songwriting, so this example is not in defense of his privacy. Instead, it is to illuminate that what we call art is nothing short of a spectacle.)

Yet Swift is a cheap example. To truly understand what it costs us to prioritize art as self-expression, we have to look at Beyoncé. At first glance, we can unequivocally agree that Beyoncé is a better performer and entertainer than Swift, but, upon further examination, we find that she is similarly tactical, even though it isn’t exactly in the same way as Ms. Swift. They both rely on leaving a trail of clues for fanatics to piece together before every album release. At Beyoncé’s 2023 sold-out Renaissance tour, nosebleed seats cost between $60–$150, with highly coveted seats in “Club Renaissance” going for up to $1000. The tour grossed over half a billion dollars and was the highest-grossing tour of all time until Swift’s Eras Tour.

Before Renaissance, Beyoncé’s 2016 album Lemonade was a cultural reset. Fans, critics, and those straddling the fence (including myself) celebrated that for the first time we were finally getting clued into Beyoncé’s personal life. At this time, the entertainer had all but withdrawn from public appearances, refusing to share aspects of her personal life, and foregoing press tours to promote her albums. This withdrawal from society came after several malicious comments speculating a feigned pregnancy with the musician’s first child. Even when TMZ published a video of her sister Solange hitting her husband Jay Z in an elevator following the 2014 Met Gala after-party, the musician did not rush to set the record straight. For two years, the public wondered about the incident. Lemonade is an indirect explanation of that incident and the events that surrounded it. With this album, she galvanized fans who had long criticized her for seeming too perfect and having it all together. Audiences pored over the lyrics in hopes of deciphering “Becky with the good hair’s” identity. Beyoncé’s painstakingly emotional descriptions of her one-sided relationship with her adulterous husband clash with the first six songs that emphasize his disposability. She alludes to miscarriages, documents her rage, and even exposes the reproduction of violence throughout her family and the trauma it also reproduces. Then she abruptly changes her tune at the end of “Love Drought.” “Love Drought” is difficult to listen to. She sings, “You’re my lifeline but you’re trying to kill me,” and then moves on to:

I’ll always been committed, I been focused
I always paid attention, been devoted
Tell me, what did I do wrong?

None of these painful lyrics amount to anything because the song is ultimately about how powerful their love is and how it has been strengthened by her endurance of his cruelty. But what is love if it is riddled with so much cruelty?

The late writer and critic bell hooks wrote an appropriate and loving review of Lemonade for The Guardian, in which she praises Beyoncé’s undertaking while succinctly outlining its fictitious politics. She points out that we miss the whole picture when we view Lemonade as a radical project for and by Black women. Instead, she urges us to notice its marketing brilliance: it is no coincidence that Beyoncé began the visual album in an Ivy Park hoodie. (Ivy Park, the musician’s athleisure brand, was launched one week before the album’s release.) Even when we take them seriously, our most “important” artists cannot resist the urge to sell us one more thing. hooks criticizes Lemonade’s romanticized message about an emotionally volatile relationship as a tale as old as time of the scorned woman’s rage. She says:

“Even though Beyoncé and her creative collaborators make use of the powerful voice and words of Malcolm X to emphasize the lack of respect for black womanhood, simply showcasing beautiful black bodies does not create a just culture of optimal wellbeing where black women can become fully self-actualized and be truly respected… All the references to honoring our ancestors and elders in Lemonade inspire. However, concluding this narrative of hurt and betrayal with caring images of family and home do not serve as adequate ways to reconcile and heal trauma.”

Lemonade’s conclusion is the equivalent of the United Colors of Benetton 90s ads. Benetton’s ads communicate “We are the World,” while Lemonade communicates “After all, we are a family.” Beyoncé is aware of the high market value of images in a consumer-driven economy. She uses this visual album to do multiple things: she is showcasing how human she is, which is in direct response to widespread criticisms and even critique from bell hooks after the release of her 2013 self-titled album. Secondly, she showcases black women's pain whilst insisting on its universality. She’s saying, “I am just like you.” And finally, she wants you to know her love with Jay Z is exceptional as an explanation for why she has forgiven his violence. In her own words, their love is “generational.” In every love story, “love conquers all,” but her love for and with Jay Z “can move mountains” and “end love droughts,” even if, in her words, he is “trying to kill her.” What a feat!

After the first-of-its-kind surprise release of Beyoncé’s self-titled album in 2013, hooks infamously referred to Beyoncé as a “terrorist.” I remember the vitriol directed at hooks from the “beyhive.” I was unfamiliar with hooks at the time, but I never forgot her critique, although it did not affect me as it should have. I recently watched the scholar discussion at The New School where hooks uttered this statement. I was flabbergasted that, even with proper context for how she made this conclusion, fanatics and critics completely took hooks’ critique out of context. We have suffered for this misreading. hooks said that she sees “a part of Beyoncé that is, in fact, anti-feminist — that is a terrorist, especially in terms of the impact on young girls.” This critique was aimed at both Beyoncé and her husband Jay-Z, who had previously belittled the often imbalanced and turbulent romantic dynamics women face in heterosexual partnerships. For example, on the album’s bestselling single, “Drunk in Love,” Jay Z mocks the physical and emotional abuse Tina Turner endured during her marriage to Ike. The rapper’s repetition of the lyric, “eat the cake, Anna Mae,” continues the trivialization of Turner’s abuse also by other prominent rappers and musicians. Two years later, Beyoncé’s Lemonade responded to hooks’ critique with Anglo-American feminist imagery.

To conclude this thought, let us examine hooks’ critique of Lemonade’s fictive feminist politics:

“Concurrently, in the world of art-making, a black female creator as powerfully placed as Beyoncé can both create images and present viewers with her own interpretation of what those images mean. However, her interpretation cannot stand as truth. For example, Beyoncé uses her nonfictional voice and persona to claim feminism, even to claim, as she does in a recent issue of Elle magazine, “to give clarity to the true meaning” of the term, but her construction of feminism cannot be trusted. Her vision of feminism does not call for an end to patriarchal domination. It’s all about insisting on equal rights for men and women.”

hooks states that we cannot trust what Beyoncé has to say about women's liberation given her track record. Her worldview is tainted because her emotions, intelligence, and experiences—and how she remembers them—are corrupt. Furthermore, the scholar highlights how Lemonade’s visuals refuse to challenge “systems of domination,” exalting female empowerment that amounts to having the same access to systems of domination as men. Beyoncé is fighting for a society where women are equal opportunity exploiters. While bell hooks agrees Beyoncé’s narration of heartbreak is a crucial aspect of self liberation, she insists that merely doing so does not lead to an end of patriarchal domination because even when women do the work to forgive and reconcile, like Beyoncé says she had in the second half of the album, men are yet to begin the work of emotional transformation necessary to end intracommunal patriarchal violence inflicted on black women. hooks concludes with, “If change is not mutual, then black female emotional hurt can be voiced, but the reality of men inflicting emotional pain will still continue (can we really trust the caring images of Jay Z which conclude this narrative?).”

hooks ends the review eloquently:

“It is only as black women and all women resist patriarchal romanticization of domination in relationships can a healthy self-love emerge that allows every black female, and all females, to refuse to be a victim. Ultimately, Lemonade glamorizes a world of gendered cultural paradox and contradiction. It does not resolve.

As Beyoncé proudly proclaims in the powerful anthem “Freedom,” “I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up.” To truly be free, we must choose beyond simply surviving adversity; we must dare to create lives of sustained optimal wellbeing and joy. In that world, the making and drinking of lemonade will be a fresh and zestful delight, a real-life mixture of the bitter and the sweet, and not a measure of our capacity to endure pain, but rather a celebration of our moving beyond pain.”

With this exploration of Lemonade, we can understand how Beyoncé and Taylor Swift operate similarly. Both are skilled businesswomen who have successfully convinced the masses of their artistic genius, but not without the help of cultural critics, fanatics, and other systems of domination. Beyoncé and Swift come from middle-class families equipped with disposable income and time to pursue careers in the entertainment industry for their children, but their fans believe the myth that they were random, uniquely talented individuals who “made it big.” With perfectly timed tragedies, they have galvanized an army of fanatics who shield them from any kind of criticism. They have successfully centered their careers (in varying ways) around their romantic lives with liberal white feminist aesthetics of equality in their heterosexual dynamics. The myth of their “rags to riches” positions them as “just like us,” which deludes fans into thinking that they are protecting “one of us.”

A decade later, many will agree that Lemonade cemented in history a diabolical wave of the celebritization of capitalist feminism with black American caricatural aesthetics. I will remind you that in 2016, the Kardashians were at the height of their fame, every industry was inundated with heavily venture-capital-funded millennial women-owned businesses like The Wing, Glossier, and Outdoor Voices, everyone wanted you to know they had hot sauce in their bags, and girl bosses peaked.

With Lemonade, Beyoncé has transformed her husband’s cruelty into a love story, while manipulating hers and the public’s reality similar to Ms. Swift, aka Mrs. Kelce, god help us all! But of course Beyoncé’s worldview and conclusions are corrupt. She thought it clever to sing and dance to rhymes and innuendos about Tina Turner’s abuse. By the way, she also refers to Turner as an inspiration for her music.

Why would Beyoncé care to correct her politics when she can distract and manipulate her audience with superficial political views with bone-in details of her personal life? By prioritizing art as self-expression, we have curtailed criticisms of popular music. We’re unable to judge the body of work with equal measures of aesthetic and political criticism because it is impossible to make these kinds of judgments on a body of work containing the personal details of a person’s life without seeming callous! Even when critics offer meaningful political judgments, the discourse is snuffed out by vitriolic fanatics. Long-time fans are only just realizing that the person they exalted as politically radical is the anti feminist terrorist capitalist bell hooks described her to be after the release of her most recent album Cowboy Carter and its dangerously nationalistic visuals.

Most of the damage has already been done—the Lemonade era cemented neoliberal, corporate definitions of feminism and political radicalism, while limiting a generation of young people with mutilated intelligence and a laughable praxis regarding social and class politics. This generation, like the ones who raised them, learned to use politics as a way to establish an identity rather than viewing politics as a vehicle for assimilating in a larger cause. They’re convinced of the viability of online fandoms as a substitute for real-life communities. They are unable to adequately criticize, much less divest from their favorite pop stars and celebrities, because their political endeavors are rooted in what is popular. Politics for them is a social club. They view any critique of their favorite pop star as a critique of themselves and they are overly self-conscious while lacking an understanding of the inner workings of society because they have not explored anything outside their algorithmic feeds. They have been indoctrinated into thinking it is possible to hoard wealth like their most awarded “artists” and yet still be trusted as a moral compass. In this society, we are unable to see that art as self-expression commodifies our lives, emotions, and experiences with others. It incentivizes melodrama. It ensures that your favorite artist can convince you of their revolutionary persona, while selling you $15 keychains that say “fuck the patriarchy.”

If we combine Gayl Jones’ clarification that art needn’t be aesthetically beautiful to help us recognize beauty with Mary Ruefle's assertion that whatever brutality the art depicted, it could not be predatory or for the sake of brutality, we would unanimously agree that art needed to serve a humane purpose. With these truths, we can comprehend the current cultural malaise where every song is either another heartbreak song or one with worthless lyrics hoping for virality and cheap fame. Modern “literature” is riddled with self-help and indulgence where facts have replaced statements that sound authoritative without giving any authoritative information. We can then conclude that art cannot be diaristic even when the lyrics are beautiful, like in Lemonade; it must decenter the self to tell the truth about what it means to be human. It must reflect society, not mirror or replicate it. Even when the material is personal, like all of the examples I have shown here, it must reveal more than the salacious details of one’s personal life and psyche.

With this distinction, we can better understand Lorde’s definition of art as the use of living in a certain way. I am emphasizing “a certain way” because Beyoncé and Staton document domestic partner abuse in their albums. However, Staton never uses innuendos or melodrama to get her message across. She never addresses the abusive husband. There are no “fuck you” lyrics like in Swift’s and Beyoncé’s fictive feminist anthems. She never even swears off men or romantic love. Instead, she instructs all young hearts (including her own) as follows “To yourself be true. Don't be no fool when love really don't love you.” We can now understand that Lorde and hooks are essentially saying that your personal experience of pain is not art.

Beauty for its own sake does not interest me and it should not impress us, especially when our favorite cultural pastime is suspending belief. I can assure you that the truth reads beautifully even if it is painful or uncomfortable. Art must make it difficult for us to “remain just one person.”** Clear definitions for how art functions in our society shift the standard for “good” art and eliminate a climate where self-confessional albums, written and performed by emotionally stunted and corrupt adults, are what top the charts. Art for the sake of beauty is uninteresting._{* quote from Mary Ruefle’s lecture Madness, Rack, and Honey, p. 135
** quote from Mary Ruefle’s lecture Madness, Rack, and Honey, p. 140}

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