You Don’t Need To Know Everything

Great artists tell us their cultural blind spots.

When I was 21, I took a flight from London to Toronto for the film festival. It was the longest I had traveled by myself, and I felt juvenile and underprepared. I was attending as a film critic— writing for my own made-up magazine—but had never seen The Godfather.

So I downloaded a dodgy DVD rip onto my laptop and watched it on the flight. Why? Not because I wanted to, but because I felt like I had to. I was worried, for some reason, that in 2016, someone would ask me my thoughts on Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 classic. To be at a film festival not having seen what many consider the best movie ever made would make me an imposter.

My job revolves around keeping on top of these things, but there’s plenty I have to let slip through the cracks—if not for reasons of practicality, then for my sanity. I’ve made peace with this.

You can be smart and also not know things. I don’t think this is a new development. I’m sure, back in the day, there was a similar sense of FOMO and self-described failure amongst people who didn’t see Jaws or whatever. But of course the monoculture doesn’t exist in the way it did then. It’s become its own unique bog water. The internet forced it to disperse. Take musicians for example: while arena-selling stars are still made big by radio play and late night TV appearances, our favorite artists, who seem like they’re everywhere on TikTok, are nobodies to our parents. Both are relevant. That’s twice as many trails to keep on top of.

The pressure to be able to launch into a spiel about every subject in contemporary culture has made us approach art with the scorn with which we tackle homework. TV shows, books, movies become tasks—the reward being that we have something to talk about in bars, at work, around the dinner table.

I struggle to make it through fiction novels. My friends tease me because I “don’t do TV.” I haven’t listened, top to bottom, to a single record by The Beatles. (It turns out I’m not alone in this.) I’m freeing myself from this pressure to take the blinkers off and rectify my blind spots immediately. Sometimes it’s smarter to just admit your cultural shortcomings.

I remind myself that our truly brilliant minds experience the same thought process. Our cultural leaders, tastemakers, artists of their generation, have their own thing that niggles on the brain. So I asked a lot of artists that I respect the following question:

Is there something in our cultural landscape you don’t know much about that you’d like to know more about? Or a part of it you’re proudly ignorant of?

Many brilliant people responded. There was new blood, like Nelio Biedermann, the 22-year-old novelist behind the year’s most talked about best-seller, filmmaker Sophy Romvari, who made one of my favorite movies of the year Blue Heron, and Dylan Brady, the young actor-screenwriter who just nabbed a history-making deal with A24 for his erotic thriller. There are ballet dancers, magazine editors, filmmakers, and musicians who walk among us—excellence on show—who are comfortable admitting that there are some things they know very little, or nothing, about. Let their responses be a reminder that you can have shit to learn and still be awesome.

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Jordan Firstman (Actor, Writer-Director of Club Kid)

“I’ve never seen anything from the entire filmography of Paul Mazursky.”

Thom Bettridge (Editor-in-Chief, i-D)

“Prestige television is my biggest cultural blindspot. I just don’t have the attention span to follow a multi-episode story arc. And whenever I actually watch the show that everyone is ‘obsessed’ with, I find that it’s a bit like doing homework. The lobby of my building is featured prominently in the new JFK Jr show, and I still haven’t bothered watching it.”

Ellie O’Neill (Songwriter)

“I don’t really know anything about The Beatles. I think when I was a kid I decided I didn’t like them, because I had a guitar teacher who said everyone would have their Beatles phase, but it sounded tinny and cold and boyish to me. I couldn’t find it beautiful. I only recently learned they were from Liverpool because I was going to Anfield with my girlfriend, which has obviously made me think I could like them. I’m sure they have some perfect songs - I’ve just never been in a rush to listen to or get into art that is deemed essential or ‘the best’, I just feel it will be waiting for me when I’m actually ready to receive it. I also find it easier to get into things if someone I love shows it to me. I just started watching The Sopranos recently because the timing was perfect.

Nelio Biedermann (Author, Lázár)

“I have never read Harry Potter, which fortunately gets less important the older I get. I have never seen a single Star Wars movie nor a Marvel film, and I’m a stranger to all the famous fantasy books and films.“

Dylan Brady (Screenwriter, Actor)

“I never went to museums when I was growing up. It wasn’t part of my childhood. So when I went on school trips or, in later life, found myself on a date at the V&A or meeting friends at an exhibition, I often felt out of place. Like I was pretending to know what it was to observe and appreciate art. It felt like I didn’t have the right eyes to understand it, but as I’ve gotten older, I think it’s important to sit with the unclear, the uncomfortable, the things that feel out of reach of our understanding. Even if you don’t have the language to express how something makes you feel, to interrogate what something might mean, it doesn’t matter. To have experienced it is the point.”

Charlotte Regan (Writer-Director of Mint, Scrapper)

“I’ve started Severance about 12 times and never got through more than 5 minutes. Not because it looks dodgy, just because everyone is always banging on about it and that somehow makes me feel like I’m under mad pressure whenever I turn it on. Like if I don’t bloody love it something is wrong with me. Can’t cope with that pressure, I used to cry when I was subbed onto football games as a kid — don’t rehash my childhood trauma please.”

Oliver Zeffman (Conductor, Classical Pride)

“I work in music and like to think I have a pretty good cultural awareness generally - I go to the cinema all the time, I’m interested in art, I go to concerts, gigs, opera, sometimes I go to dance. I don’t know much about jazz though, but I want to! I’d love to be a better jazz pianist and be able to just play - but I never seem to find the time to sit down and practice.”

John Waters (Writer-Director, Artist)

“I know enough about show business! I’m proud that I am completely ignorant of reality TV [and its] stars. I’ve never seen one of them.”

Gert Jonkers (Editor-in-Chief of Fantastic Man, Co-founder of BUTT)

“I pretty much never watch television series, and that’s a problem because it seems to be everybody’s favourite reference, 24/7. I’ve never seen even a glimpse of Succession, Euphoria, Mad Men, Downton Abbey, and the many, many other pillars of today’s reference culture. I’ve seen The Crown though, which I loved, and Heated Rivalry, but struggled with the pace of the latter—cute and quite funny but boring and slow.

“On a completely different note, I’ve never done coke or speed, but that really shouldn’t be something to apologise for or be ashamed about, nor do I consider it ‘culture’.”

Sophy Romvari (Writer-Director of Blue Heron)

“True crime, but I don’t know if I want to know more haha… I realize there is a huge fascination with true crime in all mediums, podcasts, film and TV but it has never drawn me in. I find that specific type of morbidity to be grotesque in a way that I rather not engage with.

“Something I would love to be less ignorant about is poetry! I feel like there is a whole expansive world of poetry that I’ve yet to tap into.”

William Bracewell (Principal Dancer at the Royal Ballet, London)

“I don’t want to sound like a completely out of touch millennial, but my contemporary pop culture knowledge is very poor. I only just found out what Letterboxd is, I don’t have (and don’t want) TikTok, and know barely any of this year’s Brit award nominees. I don’t know if I have an active desire to hermit myself from the popular, but I’m not sure I mind lacking knowledge in that area.”