I hate your art
But I still want to be friends.
I have beautiful people in my life: Those I trust, love, and enjoy spending time with. Some of them have been bold enough to dedicate their lives to an artistic practice that requires an ‘all or nothing’ attitude. To sustain yourself with a creative pursuit is difficult—foolish, really—so I’m proud of all of them for finding ways to do it. But I can’t say that I love all the fruits of their labor. Does that make me a bad person?
This feeling is not unique—in fact I imagine most people who know more than one artist always have some kind of reservation about their output. There’s surely someone who comes to mind for you too. I spoke to a bunch of people who describe being caught up in this dilemma—their names are changed below to protect their friendships—unsure about whether anything productive comes from being honest about it. When someone you like makes art you don’t, how do you navigate that?
Recently Jennifer realized that her friend is a “god awful” poet. “She’s really having a go at it,” she tells me. “She does poetry readings and has self-published an anthology collection. By all standard markers, she is a poet.” But the work isn’t hitting in a way she can fully stand behind. Jennifer’s been invited to many uncomfortable poetry nights.“ It was all too fussy and read like AI. I can’t think of any more excuses to miss her poetry nights and it’s getting awkward.”
How long can you keep up the act before you crash out and tell them how you really feel? I find that lacklustre artists happen to be the loudest, letting you know everything they’re up to, keen to show off their work. At art school, those friends are (for the duration of your course) inescapable. An art history student, Emma has been holed up with the worst of them for a while. She can sniff them a mile off and put a smile on for the sake of staying civil. They are perfectly nice people but, fuck me, she can’t stand what they make. She tells me there are three dominant types:
The so-parodied-it’s-serious white man doing Basquiat art
“Ripping off one of the most famous artists is going to get you nowhere, unless your plan is to get clicks from rage-baiting.”
The nepo baby artist
“Yawn. Sometimes talented, generally not. Mommy and daddy just happen to do late-summer weekends away with an art director. The only reason you’re getting noticed.”
The faux provocateur
“The growing-up-in-Surrey-to-thinking-you’re-Marina Abramović pipeline is by far my favorite.”
She has been to parties, asked that harrowing question: What do you think? All along she’s managed to keep it cool. The nice thing about art school is that there’s an end in sight. That’s all good for Emma, but Jennifer is stuck in her bad poet situation. Has she managed to muster up the courage to lie? “I won’t betray my opinions and say ‘Oh wow that was amazing!’,” she admits. “I will try to say, ‘Oh wow, how exciting!’ instead.”
I’ve found myself doing versions of this out of politeness. If an actor friend is in a play or film I don’t like, but I genuinely think they’ve saved it, I’ll skirt around the quality of the text and hone in on their performance. I have vivid memories of running into a filmmaker whose film I had just seen and hated, and responding with: “You must be busy!”. Ben, a photographer, told me he’d recently been gifted a work by a friend of his that he hated. “I have to hang it up in my flat or they’ll notice!” he says.
I don’t think lying is good for anyone, even if it’s designed to protect the peace of a clearly passionate person. But “telling our loved one that their art isn’t to our taste would hurt and injure them,” says Harry Rawson, an Integrative Humanistic Counsellor I turned to to solve this problem. “The conundrum here is that the lie injures the relationship also. You could even argue that the sustained lie does more damage to the relationship than confessing.”
Rawson suggests that we could look at ourselves in this scenario. What does our hatred of our friend’s art, and our reticence to express it, say about us? Personally I think it’s a symptom of my unshakeable bitchiness that undergirds so much of what I do, but it’s probably a little bit of insecurity too. Rawson also cites Freud, specifically the quote: “Unexpressed emotions never die.” Rawson explains, “It could be argued that the feelings we may have about our loved one’s art, or our loved ones in general, have to come out.”
He added, “if we shifted our lens slightly, we could learn to celebrate the art, not in and of itself, but something deeply personal and a reflection of our loved one? We might say, ‘This painting isn’t to my taste, but I’m so proud of you for painting it’ or ‘I wouldn’t personally listen to it, but I’ve seen how hard you’ve worked on it and you should be really proud of yourself.’”
I started to think about it: What if I was that girl to some other person? The amateur DJ? The Bitcoin entrepreneur who developed a Diet Jackson Pollock artistic aesthetic? Would I want to know if those I loved were cringing a little at my new creative pursuit? Maybe they are! I never know what’s happening in the group chat—someone screenshotting my sentences and posting them with eyeroll emojis attached. Then I started to think: Maybe it’s healthy to keep some things to yourself. There’s something really lovely in that ignorance of not knowing.
Despite the annoyance it causes her, Jennifer is with me: She knows that her poet bestie won’t learn her opinion of her work. “At the end of the day that is my pal,” she says. “It’s not worth the hurt feelings.” But there’s a niggling feeling at the back of Jennifer’s mind that this secret beef might one day come in handy. “Some things are better left unsaid,” she says, “but if we have some kind of evil falling out—then I would reconsider.”
It’s quite nice when you see a show and you don’t have to lie about the thing to the person involved afterwards. Such is the case with Calam Lynch, who’s currently playing The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein in the cool and deeply homoerotic Please Please Me at London’s Kiln Theatre. I saw it and told him it, and he, were both great—and that wasn’t a lie! We last spoke to him for his performance in What It Feels Like for a Girl, which is nominated a bunch at the TV BAFTAs tomorrow.
I asked him: What makes you think of 2007?
He said: “2007 reminds me of Putney Leisure Centre. Sure, on the one hand, it was just a leisure centre… it had a pool (Olympic size I think?) and a shit gym. But in 2007, Putney Leisure Centre was where I had my first kiss, soundtracked by none other than Fall Out Boy’s “Thnks Fr the Mmrs”. It’s therefore a site of some spiritual significance.”
Someone asked me what I was listening to the other day and I said old showtunes and Adéla.
Which is to say, after our big Rachel Zegler digital cover story last year, her award-winning performance in Evita is coming to New York! One for people who like their plays like pop shows.
The Cannes Film Festival kicks off next week. The next one of these will be dedicated to the good stuff I’ve seen.
The muscle in the back of my armpit keeps twitching. I think it’s connected to me being on my phone too much.
Blue Film is in US theaters this weekend. It’s so fucked up it would make Gasper Noé flinch. Read my review here, and my chat with its lead star Kieron Moore (<3) here.
