After Art

Part 2

Continuing from where we left off.

8.

Let’s resume with another excerpt of F. deBoer raging against the poptimism machine. As an older Millennial (like me), he is troubled as he watches his cohort “confronting the end of their youth by performatively embracing youth culture:”

Of course, this is all made a little bleaker by the fact that elder Millennials were once defined as the “hipster” generation, Williamsburg residents swilling PBR at backyard parties where they listened to the latest indie darling. In other words, they - we - have gone from being ostentatiously countercultural to ostentatiously mainstream, in the span of twenty years, which makes it hard not to conclude that they - we - never actually had aesthetic tastes at all and have instead lived like little reeds in the wind, terrified of ever appearing to not be The Right Kind of Person, which can only ever be defined through our capitalist consumption, since we think that all we are is our capitalist consumption…

[E]verything in music criticism and music culture has changed, except music poptimist perceptions of music criticism and music culture. That is what refuses to mutate. And I think it’s ugly and toxic and has left us in this bizarre place where people who write about music for large audiences think their sacred duty is to affirm the legitimacy of what the audience already likes, instead of championing something entirely new and totally different.

All relevant to what we’ve been talking about (read: what I’ve been sperging about) so far—but something else here is important, something deBoer says a little farther up:

This is, I’m told, “pop girl summer,” and it is genuinely difficult to find new music that gets any burn that isn’t some 18 to 28 year old photogenic woman, autotuning over shlocky overproduced midtempo backing tracks complete with beats stolen from mid-2010s EDM and muddy indistinct synth lines that all sound exactly the same…My friends: you get all the streams, you get all the good reviews, you get all the Grammys, you get all the magazine covers. There exist almost no mainstream publications that regularly cover any music other than the kind you like. If anyone uses words like “authenticity” in music criticism, they will be sent to the gulag; if anyone suggests that musicians who write their own songs possess some sort of intimate connection to them, that person receives the digital equivalent of being pressed to death like Giles Corey. What more adulation do you want for your stars? What additional level of respect is there for them to secure? What do you want?

It is appropriate that Deboer places “authenticity” in quotes, because I believe a lot of the ado about poptimism and the difference between Quality Content and Slop Content has to do with a cultural state of affairs much like what MacIntyre wrote about the contemporary moral landscape. He’s convinced that our ideas about morality are an incompatible amalgamation of concepts values we inherited from bygone eras and nonextant cultures; I’m becoming convinced that our notions about what constitutes deservingness of personal investment in our cultural artifacts are in a somewhat similar condition, although I feel we may not be so confused and conflicted for quite so long.

The short version is that older people like Deboer and myself still put stock in the idea of authenticity, while the dominant culture has moved on to practices involving what Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio call profilicity.

9.

Moeller & D’Ambrosio describe three historical programs of identity formation and expression: sincerity, authenticity, and profilicity. Some short explanations:

Sincerity: Here people know themselves by their social role(s). In Western Europe, the sincerity regime held through the medieval period and broke down amidst such historical developments as the ascent of print culture, the bourgeoisie revolution, and industrialization. Moeller & D’Ambrosio quote the philosopher Henry Rosemont Jr., who holds that under sincerity culture, the self is like an onion: after all the layers of self-definition in terms of one’s relations and obligations to persons, institutions, and traditions are peeled away, there’s nothing left over.

Authenticity: As per Rosemont, authenticity thinks of the self like a peach: one’s occupations, relations, and all the other social parts one plays are so much skin and pulp that can be shorn off to reveal the core self within. The life-project of the individual is to discover (or build) and assert that identity in the world, and to commune and share ideas in a good-faith dialogue with other individuals who are seeking or have discovered their own authentic selves. While nonconformity is anathema to sincerity culture, it is often regarded a virtue (at least in theory) in a milieu that values authenticity, as are originality, creativity, and independent thinking.

Now we’ve moved on to a culture of:

Profilicity. Call it the evolved form of Debord’s spectacle and of Baudrillard’s hyperreality. It is the conception of the self in a society where social media doesn’t merely hold a mirror to social relations, but forms the basis of how we understand ourselves, perceive others, make sense of the world, and enact our values through what former Facebook executive Sean Parker called “social validation feedback loops.”

Moeller & D’Ambrosio:

Profiles are addressed to a larger, personally unknown public—to the “general peer.” Unlike in sincerity, where those whom one knows best are in the privileged position to confirm one’s identity, in profilicity those whom one does not know personally count the most. Reviews of an Airbnb host by her family members or friends have little legitimacy, and the academic peer review process is supposed to be “double blind” (author and reviewer are not supposed to know each other). The general peer is anonymous and in this sense supposedly objective, in a way. This peer does not consist of idiosyncratic views of individuals, and especially not the biased views of close relations. Public opinion is not the sum of the genuine opinions of each and every person; it is what everyone knows to be the opinion that is generally regarded as right. In this we find a crucial difference between authenticity and profilicity and their respective ethics: authentic morality appeals to the inner conviction of individuals, whereas prolific morality appeals to the judgements of second-order observation.¹ It rewards cleverness in assessing what is seen to be seen as good—and the ability to express oneself in accordance with it. Unlike sincerity, however, what is good cannot be derived from the expectations attached to fixed social roles. Traditional roles (such as the “dutiful wife”) seem to have lost much of their moral force, insofar as they continue to exist at all. Instead, the good is subject to ever-shifting moral trends that vary greatly from scene to scene.

Moeller & D’Ambrosio’s description of a cultural progression from sincerity to authenticity to profilicity provides a useful framework for streamlining talk about prevailing conceptions of art and taste because the concepts of “identity” and “values” reciprocally imply one another. In other words, you can’t talk about who you are without talking about what you’re about and what you’re into, and vice versa. Moreover, we can roughly situate each identity regime in a historical period and media environment.

Sincerity held sway over the West for most of its history. Authenticity coincides with the printing press, the bourgeoise revolution, and industrialization, reaching the peak of its influence between the Romantic and Modernist periods. Profilicity, dominant today, is integral to the so-called “postmodern” condition, and exists downstream from electric media—and social media in particular.

These identity regimes overlap for decades, if not centuries, but for our purposes here it is unnecessary to clearly delineate them. Some of our confused talk about Beauty, Good Art, and/or Quality Content is the outcome of these identity regimes’ measures of value leeching into and alloying their successors.

10.

Two quick notes on sincerity.

First: it’s not entirely dead. Moeller & D’Ambrosio:

Under conditions of role-based sincerity, identity is achieved by “conforming to external powers” as manifested in pre-established relationships, norms, and customs…

Sincerity was a prime method of achieving identity in premodern times, and it is still applied today—for instance in the family, in religious communities, and in sports. In professional contexts too, role commitment and identification with one’s job, or position in a group or team, is often celebrated. These can ground a person’s sense of selfhood and become a major source of meaning and significance. Sincerity provides normative frameworks.

Second: if we’re talking about appraisals of aesthetic or cultural value vis-à-vis sincerity, we need to go past role-based identity per se and look to the assumptions subtending it.

Any social order where everyone understands there are unambiguously good and unambiguously poor ways of being in their roles must rely on so-called “grand narratives” and some form of moral realism. Conformity does not come comfortably to everyone, and the subtle and overt ways in which it is enforced may be perceived as oppressive or unjust. It is imposed more easily when the people have it impressed upon them that the demands to faithfully act out their assigned parts are prescribed by some overarching virtue-based or deontological ethic whose premises everyone accepts.

For some, a roles-based identity grounded in the conviction that there are natural, objective oughts pertaining to behavior must be very appealing. Perhaps it accounts for the purported uptick in younger Millennials and Zoomers getting interested in Catholicism: after spending most of their lives whirling through a vortex of ephemeral cultural crazes, moral panics, and specious promises of satisfaction through the impersonal consumption of new objects and experiences, they might be wondering what it would be like to try standing on solid ground for a while.

A similar yearning probably informs the curmudgeon who wants to forthrightly rank all types of cultural artifact in a hierarchy of intrinsic value, and judges the members of each category by a common criterion in which the word “fun” does not occur once. Insisting on a principled order of aesthetic virtue predicated on oughts referring back to a lucid notion of an ultimate good (ie., “taking calm intellectual satisfaction from a symphony unquestionably shows more character and is a more valuable use of one’s time than shaking one’s booty to trap”) might not make him popular in the break room or much fun at parties—but imagine how gratifying it must be to believe that you know exactly what’s what (and that it is and will always be what’s what), and can justify your tastes without becoming defensive and shrill for a longer time than most of the rest of us.

Among the people living out a nostalgia for the time when one could firmly state that War and Peace and Brahms are objectively more deserving of people’s time and attention than Harry Potter and Beyoncé, we might expect to find a lot of aging Boomers who habitually post comments to Washington Post and New York Times articles, homeschooled Zoomers, a subset of those men who take Jordan Peterson very seriously, young violin prodigies whose parents don’t let them go out much, and so on. They are a minority, and there is little reason to believe they will be restored to relevance any time soon—yet traditionalist, hierarchical ideas about art, aesthetics, and value lurk in the cultural background. You can hear an echo of them whenever someone with an appreciation for alternative or indie rock from the 1990s and 2000s lodges a complaint about the simplicity or predictability of contemporary pop, or even when hardcore gamers inveigh against dumbed-down “casual” games.

(Side note: Moeller & D’Ambrosio also point out that a type of sincerity ethos persists in modern identity politics—albeit in a more fragmented and transparently contingent form that cannot seek its ground in any universally acknowledged “grand narratives” such as those which loomed over relatively isolated, homogenous, and illiterate premodern societies.)

11.

As the literate Western middle class increased its numbers and grew in power, and as its members became conscious of themselves as a distinct cohort, it became incumbent upon them to define (and justify) their existence as a people apart from the banausic masses, the clergy, and the nobility. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ preoccupation with “taste” was a manifestation of this search for identity, as was European romanticism, American transcendentalism, Paris bohemianism, and so on.

Print culture promotes consciousness of the individual as such; Enlightenment thinkers held that mature persons ought to think for themselves and question authority; liberalism took as one of its central tenets that the reasoning man best serves society through the rational pursuit of his own interests. Authenticity represents the blossoming of individual virtue through a process of self-discovery and self-construction in the context of a culture that has grown suspicious of orthodoxy—and which is indeed locked in a process of perpetual material reinvention.

Moeller & D’Ambrosio:

[W]hen widely applied as an identity-shaping method, [authenticity] becomes convincing, credible, and powerful. It has been supported by a vocabulary, a rhetoric, an ethics, a politics, and an economy of individualism that made people believe that identity springs from personal originality, creativity, and autonomy. The protection of the assumed inalienable dignity of the authentic individual became almost a first commandment in (post-)Christian societies. Being tied to identity formation, authenticity was widely internalized. True identity value, it was assumed, could only come from being authentic…

In the creative world, authenticity places a premium on the individual voice and perspective. We want originals. We want bold freethinkers. We want to see passion. We want poets who slough off the constraints of meter and rhyme when it inhibits their self-expression, and artists who paint the world as only they can see it. We want them to be honest with themselves and with us. If their work is good, our “inner conviction” will assure us of it.

Of course—the whole scheme doesn’t make any sense, and forces us to paper over insoluble contradictions.

Three fairly obvious examples:

1. The fundamental problem of authenticity: how is the idea of autonomy and the cult of originality to be sustained when nobody exists but in relation to others, and when the very notion of independence from one’s influences (or tradition) is absurd? (To react against tradition or against “the mainstream” is to confess indebtedness to it.)

2. What do we make of authenticity in a mass media environment? If I don’t know Thoreau personally, how can I be certain the man addressing me (as an anonymous reader unknown to him) via Walden is genuine?

3. Is it ever possible to guarantee that a writer, musician, painter, etc. is expressing himself authentically if he makes his living selling books, records, and canvases, and will suffer financial hardship if he doesn’t ingratiate himself to a sufficiently large number of consumers (or to the right wealthy patrons and well-positioned brokers)?²

Nevertheless: in a society that was growing progressively more atomized, and where alienation from one’s peers, work, and locale was a dismal norm by the late twentieth century, one could feel less alone by identifying with “authentic” popular artists. Sure, everyone else in my bland little suburb are mediocre drones, but these people speak to me. When I engage with their work, I recognize kindred spirits…

For an encapsulation of how strong authenticity culture held in the late twentieth century, in spite of its problems, I recommend Bill Hicks’ glorious play from your fucking heart rant.³

Many Gen Xers and Xennials revered Bill Hicks, and one of the reasons we loved him is because he died young and underappreciated. Authenticity culture reserves its greatest respect for creatives who weren’t widely known until after they were dead, who toiled away for decades in service to their own genius, convinced of the value of their work and refusing to calibrate it to suit the tastes of a public that hadn’t caught up to them yet. We also appreciate the tortured artist who commits suicide because we know he gave his whole heart to his work, and we like the artist who lived fast and died young at the height of his fame and powers because surely he was one passionate motherfucker.⁴

In this view, the happy authentic artist is the one for whom the stars seemed to align when it just so happened that the private song that germinated in the cockles of her heart was coincidentally the song everyone was craving to hear.

People who prize authenticity in cultural product believe that one’s time and attention are best given to material coming from authentic persons whom we can be reasonably certain are intentionally reaching out to other authentic people (like us!) through their work, and are not motivated by mercenary calculations or a gross craving for approval. This was why virtually everyone I was friends with in high school used to disdain pop acts that didn’t write their own songs; it was also why fans of indie comics used to trash “cape” serials, and why readers of heady “literary” fiction waved off genre paperbacks. If it’s commercial, it ain’t authentic.

…Of course, if you’re buying your albums, comics, and novels at the mall, all of those albums and comics and novels are intrinsically commercial (not to mention completely impersonal), regardless of what grade of product you’re purchasing, and nobody signs up to make this stuff unless they’re keen on being in the spotlight and admired by strangers.

Right?

…Right.

Hmmmm.

From Our Dumb Century (1999)

The informal metric for authenticity in media products and personas was something like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s infamous heuristic for identifying the pornographic: “I know it when I see it.”

We imagined it was obvious who was authentic and who was a phony and a sellout. The joke in the clip from the Onion’s Our Dumb Century up above works on an assumed understanding that Bob Dylan might have been one of the most successful popular musicians of the 1960s, but he wasn’t a sellout. It was widely accepted that Dylan’s music and public persona (read: personal brand) were expressions of his authenticity, and were not informed by a disproportionate or pathological desire for fame. As long as a recording artist who sold a million records could give the impression that they put out an album without giving a damn how well it sold or how much it boosted their profile, well then for sure they were authentic.

A good way of knowing which musicians were authentic was to pay attention to what your friends like. You could be certain your friends were original and authentic because you were original and authentic, and if your original and authentic friends found Bob Dylan inspiring—well then he basically had to be authentic.

The indie craze which deBoer mentioned up top was to some degree the perpetual search for and celebration of pockets of authenticity in commercial music. You knew a Brooklyn rock trio with a new album was authentic because they were doing something kind of different, kind of more interesting than what the other bands were doing. And the next year you celebrated a new indie artist because he was doing something kind of different, kind of more interesting now than what last years’ artists were doing. The allure of authenticity kept the commercial treadmill of “indie” art running, because everyone consuming that content was always looking for original and underappreciated artists, and they relished signaling their own authenticity, their differentiation from the commercial slop-devouring masses, by belonging to an exclusive little club of fans who “got it.”

And when the Brooklyn rock trio’s sophomore album had a single that got mainstream FM play and its T-shirts appeared in Hot Topic, the search began anew.

Subtending the indie craze was an awareness of how The Industry exploded and trivialized punk, alt-rock, grunge, etc., and a quixotic notion that it might be possible for the scene to outrun the treadmill. Obviously this was not tenable: in addition to everything else, indie-anything tacitly suggests that one can only preserve her integrity as a career creative if she’s either willing to be forty years old and still living in a shitty studio apartment, or quietly bow out of the authenticity-projection game and get a real job when she thinks she might want to have things like children, health insurance, and a retirement plan.

But for all of this, people born towards the end of the twentieth century still had the belief in authenticity tattooed on their hearts. We stood in the shadows of Beat culture, abstract expressionism, the hippie movement, punk, film noir, cowboy and mafioso antiheroes, Paris in the Twenties, subversive underground comics, bad-boy Gen X novelists, the stand-up comedy craze, outlaw journalism, Bart Simpson as an avatar of youthful cheekiness and nonconformity… This was all convincing and powerful stuff, and its ambiance was pervasive indeed.⁵

The doublethink which authenticity demands of us has only grown more strenuous. “Personal brand” is part of our common vocabulary today. Maintaining social media profiles has acquainted the masses with the work of image curation, which was once the exclusive concern of public figures. We know that every creative is basically doing a shtick for a paycheck rather than addressing their complete person to our complete persons.

But that’s how it always was. If we could live with it in the 1960s, we can live with it in the 2020s—and our feelings about Bob Dylan and the Beatles then were just as earnest and meaningful as the youths’ feelings about Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter are today.

Right?

12.

Even after punk had been thoroughly broken in and commercialized, people who bought into the genre and its fashions could still imagine they were participating in the same sui generis brand of raucous nonconformity that once animated miniature urban scenes gathering in smoky clubs. Obviously this is silly: they were getting their tunes and swag from the same corporate mechanism that put the Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys on MTV and every radio station.

The genius of poptimism consisted in confidently calling their bluff. “We’re finding our authentic selves through identification with Katy Perry and Carly Rae Jepsen. Where you get off saying they’re any less authentic than Anti-Flag or Rancid, and we’re any less authentic than you for identifying with them?”

To be sure, we could substitute the punk bands mentioned in the question with musicians working in whatever genre we please, and giving a satisfactory answer would in every case require an Olympics-grade exercise of mental gymnastic.

If the only music we listened to were church hymns, and if we only listened to them when attending mass, we might be able to make an intellectually honest case for ourselves. But our secular interlocutors probably wouldn’t find that any more acceptable than us telling them that we’re a more rarefied class of consumer whore that’s at least a little more discriminating about what commodified audio content we allow to have its way with our ears and brains.

13.

As long as I’m dragging my feet down memory lane, let’s talk once again about webcomics.

For me the Day the Webcomic Died was when The Oatmeal first appeared on my Facebook feed in 2009. Retrospectively, of course: I don’t remember when it happened or what strip it was. But it was the clearest signal that the original webcomic scene—populated at its inception by younger Gen Xers and older Millennials who were by and large under the spell of authenticity culture—was over and done for good.

The Oatmeal wasn’t just a webcomic sensation, it was a social media sensation.

Creator Matthew Inman had his own website, as most webcomics did, but I have a hard time believing that even half of the millions of people who saw his strips ever navigated to it. The Oatmeal lived on Facebook and Reddit.

I remember thinking it wasn’t my cup of tea, but that it was clever and funny enough. But I couldn’t get away from it. Every time it updated, someone I followed on Facebook inevitably shared the latest strip.

Even before the comic launched, Inman had already found fame as an effective but not entirely scrupulous online marketer who used unorthodox tactics to get a URL to the top of Google’s search results. “With The Oatmeal,” Inman told Buzzfeed in 2010, “I wanted to create something where the viral marketing itself was the product.”

A lot of writers have a hard time explaining where they get their ideas. Not Inman. His strategy was to basically see what kind of chatter was getting circulated and upvoted on social media, and then do comics about that. He turned out strips like a human Spotify algorithm popping out the next song on a playlist based on what the listener seemed to be into lately.

“Authentic” is probably the last word I’d use to describe The Oatmeal. But why should anyone have cared? The product spoke for itself: smart, quality content that seemed, somehow, to always perfectly read the room. And under profilicity, knowing how to read the room is a cardinal virtue.

14.

Under the conditions of profilicity, we have been made hypersensitive to “the vibe” of common opinion, and seem to intuit moments where it has “shifted” or might be about to shift.

We know what is topical and what is irrelevant because we have the numbers that grade relevance right up in our faces, all of the time. We know what opinions are good and what opinions are bad from the performance metrics of the people who espouse them—and from the cleverness and the commanding air of contempt with which an opponent may attempt to “destroy” an odious profile.

If someone succeeds in “ratioing” the original poster (a humiliation, to be sure), we are to infer that the original poster is wrong and rotten and weird. If we happened to sympathize with the ratioee’s view up until then, we will reevaluate our own position—if we are sensible.

We know how good it feels to be seen as one proverbial bee out of a hundred or a hundred thousand swarming a repugnant figure who deserves to be stung. We exalt in being part of and being seen by a virtual crowd elevating a beloved hero (or quantum of content) on our shoulders. We have an ingrained sense of when it is appropriate to be seen participating in such spasms of collective enthusiasm.

Social validation feedback loops are intoxicating, and we’re all wired into them. Anyone who submits content wants to receive warm notes, head pats, and a boosted signal (provided it’s for the right reasons). Nobody wants to be told “this ain’t it” or (god forbid) called “cringe.” Nobody wants to be that person whom everyone else in the room is quietly glaring at like the guy who cracks a bussy joke at the wrong house party.

Amateurs take the temperature of the room and keep their opinions to themselves. Professionals get better opinions: “profilific identity has to be reshaped and re-presented continuously in accordance with the increasingly multifarious and incongruous expectations on how one needs to be seen as being seen,” say Moeller & D’Ambrosio.

Does this reduce them to “little reeds in the wind,” as deBoer says? Or should we remember how liberal pundits used to bash George W. Bush for refusing to change his mind once it was made up, and lauded Obama for reevaluating his views on gay marriage? Don’t we believe that when society is changing, we ought to change with it?

Do any of us really want to be seen as the only person in the room laughing at a stand-up routine? Do we want the camera to zoom in deep on our scowl when we’re the only judge on a TV talent show panel who isn’t bright-eyed and grinning at a crowd-pleasing singer dressed in a progress flag gown and belting out “Born this Way?” Do we want to be on record as standing on the wrong side of history, like those stodgy critics who vociferated against cubism and jazz?

The conditions of profilicity subject culture to a kind of radical democracy in which evaluating the worth of a given artwork, quantum of content, or creative figure becomes not just a numbers game, but a room-reading game.

We saw this happen with video games: gamers got past their diffidence about being seen as devourers of adolescent escapist swill instead of savvy aesthetes after it came to be seen that they massively outnumbered the “games are not art” voices on the web, and could make a spectacle of dominating them whenever one spoke up loud enough to be noticed. Drag is another good example: in the nineties or aughts, a liberal thirty-something white woman might find the whole thing lewd and off-putting, and feel perfectly comfortable saying it held no appeal for her. Today she’d probably be well-advised to find a reason to speak kindly of it.

People read the room, and the conversations changed. So did our standards—which were for the most part contingent and vibes-based to begin with.

If content is seen being seen to be popular, then it cannot be slop—at least not for long. Once the fait accompli is accepted, a polished rationale for the time spent and emotion invested in what may appear to the outsider as an intellectually and aesthetically impoverished vector for brain rot will follow. Just as it was with rock n’ roll, Super Mario Bros, and drag. In this sense, profilicity is a mere accelerant.

Part three to follow.

1. Moeller and & Ambrosio borrow and adapt twentieth-century sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s concept of second-order observation to explain profilicity:

The observation of the observers—that is a shift from a consciousness of reality to a description of descriptions, or the perceptions of what others say or do not say—has become the advanced mode of perceiving the world in modern society.

Moeller & D’Ambrosio clarify: “You get your information on the facts merely on what others have to say about it.”

A clunky example here would be someone who’s got a hate-boner for Star Wars: The Acolyte despite never watching an episode. A better one would be the “doom loop” in the aftermath of Biden’s debate performance. Liberals saw it and freaked out about how bad it was. Liberals saw liberals freaking out about how bad it was and freaked out. Liberals saw how badly liberals freaking out about liberals freaking out about how bad it was were freaking out and they freaked out…

2. In the case of the painter, it’s more a question of us not ever being sure that he isn’t attuning his output to Art World trends. (We can suppose there was some number of cubist painters who would have liked to continue in that vein, but were dissuaded from it by the art dealers in their circle who told them it had become passé.)

3. If you’re unfamiliar with the routine, those awful noises he makes around 1:57 are a callback to an earlier bit about “sellout” artists sucking Satan’s cock. Hicks is doing the sound effect of fellating the devil.

4. Moeller & D’Ambrosio also point out that for failing creatives, the special place of the unrecognized genius within the authenticity myth can be a source of solace as bracing as the Christian’s faith in an afterlife.

5. As a footnote—a consumer who valued authenticity was still capable of consuming big-budget cinema, network television, or video games with a squinting application of the same criteria by which products issued by a single artist or a small number of creatives were judged. Batman: The Animated Series was greenlit in order to sell toys, sure, but it was doing something completely different from other American TV cartoons. Seinfeld was clearly a manifestation of a single comedian’s brilliance—right? Similarly, if a film or video game that cost millions of dollars to make could be critically interpreted in terms of a guiding genius—or better yet, as the execution of an auteur’s vision—then they could get an authenticity pass, too.