Art has always been a performance

And other links for your Sunday

As I head into book launch I am self-promoting the crap out of myself and feeling a little weary of it. I understand that we have all always been our own best marketers, but also, wouldn’t it be nice to just write? Wouldn’t it be nice to just focus on the craft? The work? To this end, Rebecca Jennings wrote a great piece for Vox about the exhaustion of it all.

Jennings’s lament isn’t new. Ever since the early 2000s, writers have been bemoaning a culture that makes us more marketers than writers. A culture that asks us to be avatars, creations, and personalities in order to be successful.

But the complaint is being resurrected now as the media industry, yet again, goes through rounds of layoffs. As yet again, the bosses and moneymen we relied on to keep our jobs, reveal that they are very terrible at their own jobs. But they are blaming it on the economy.

I don’t think writers or artists or journalists are in a rarefied world here. I think every industry expands and contracts.