THE UNDERRATED ART OF GIVING A CRAP
HERE’S HOPING, ten years from publication, you’re reading this book and haven’t a clue what I’m talking about when I say, it has been a monstrous year for art.
Making any art at all is a scream into the void; making weird, disturbing, unconventional art is using the void as a test audience for a stand-up routine on murder in an ancient French dialect. First, you’ve got to focus on amusing yourself. Then, you’ve got to have no fear of the void whatsoever. You’ve got to be ready to confess dark things about yourself. It’s actually best if you don’t speak any French.
But what’s most impressive is that, during a year where machine-generation software—if I have to call that thing AI, you have to call my blender Gordon Ramsay—seemed to take over our collective consciousness, as well as many of our commissions, artists of every kind stood their ground and kept screaming. If anything, the added adversity just pissed them off straight into writing their most wild and raw material yet.
Even the void has to appreciate the triumph in that.
So what I’ve really learned to admire this year is the underrated art of giving a crap. Art is our way of mainlining human beings and their inner worlds. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without their stories, and the one great barrier between us and that reality is people who give a sometimes inconvenient, usually embarrassing, emotional, likely exhausting, overwhelming crap. Writers who put themselves out there, often despite the fact that every part of their lives is screaming at them not to write. Publishers whose commitment to ethics, equity, creativity, and humanity, far overshadows their desire for profit and power. And readers who care about where their money and time is invested.
This book is celebrating some of those writers and publishers, and it’s dedicated to everyone who made and enjoyed art this year. Every individual contributes to the ecosystem as a whole, and none of this would exist without every single one of you, whether you’re an award-winner, hiding your doodles under the bed, or deciding to spend five minutes with a real human’s story.
It’s been a monstrous year for art. Thank you for giving a crap.