everyone wants to be a DJ, no one wants to dance

This is not an essay about nightlife, not exclusively.

When I was 15, I used to sneak out the house to go clubbing. Climbing through my bedroom window, crawling to my Rav-4, holding my breath as I turned the key in the ignition, then slowly pulling away in the deep blue stillness of a Thursday night, I had the sense that I was participating in something holy. In the sacred vacuum of my car, only the earthy paper-like smell of air conditioning could bear witness to my dreams of transgression and independence. I didn’t know it yet, but I was becoming an artist.

I present this example to mark a paradox that troubles the title of this essay. Pure, anonymous participation in something strange and beautiful is often that which draws us to the center of it all. The best writers I know are devoted readers. The best musicians I know listen to music, constantly. Is it such a problem that everyone wants to be an artist these days?

Maybe the issue is an inherited impulse to be creative, but primarily as an exercise in value-making. Participation in the creations of others, for so many of us, has been made to feel like a means to an end. We read books to become better writers, or so we can seem well-read. We listen to music to sharpen our influences and find our “target audience.” I know I’m not alone in this vulnerable, terrified exercise—studying the things I enjoy and swatting away insecurities until my own inspiration strikes. This affected pursuit is not new. Whether we like it or not, aesthetic life under capitalism becomes dominated by the commodity form. Art practice, with all its ethereal and sublime possibilities, begins to feel like an exclusive members-only club.

First, why do we crave access? Why do so many people want to “be DJs?” In a 2015 essay for The Atlantic, Debbie Chachra writes that the cultural primacy of making is informed by the “gendered history of who made things.” Historically, we have come to understand that producing things of value is intrinsically superior to not producing. Repair, analysis, caregiving, sharing, touching, feeling….it doesn’t pay the bills or get you a Wikipedia page.

There is also, of course, the seductive title of “artist.” An aura of mystery, genius, and importance surrounds the word. In a culture where works of art, online presence, and tangible skills flatten so deliciously into commodities, being a “maker” at the center of culture leads to social currency and real currency. An artist today is, by necessity, an entrepreneur.

Another definite reason so many people seek the troubled social status of “creative” these days is because it’s easier than ever to become one. The democratization of this pursuit is, on one hand, a beautiful thing. But it’s also incredibly lucrative to those who supply the means of production. As creation gets conflated with entrepreneurship, making art becomes an experience, a lifestyle, to be bought and sold. The subtle injunction to network, curate, and fetishize ourselves (and spend as much money as we can afford along the way) can’t be good for us.

The problem is not that everyone wants to be an artist, it’s that enjoying art with other people for the simple, loving pleasure of it all has become devalued. If that’s the case, what are we even doing all this for? Why be an artist at all if we can’t enjoy the things we create?

I think so often about an interview I saw once with Fran Liebowitz, where the author and critic talks about the effect of the AIDS crisis on American culture. It’s easy to understand how many artists were lost, she says, but there’s not enough talk about the lost community. “Why was New York City ballet so great?” she asks. Well, there was George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Sure. But, that audience.

“There was such a high level of connoisseurship, of everything. That made the culture better. A very discerning audience…is as important to the culture as artists. It’s exactly as important.”

If everyone’s a DJ but no one dances or earnestly cares about the music, everything has to be broader, more conspicuous. Artists are pressured to do whatever possible to be seen and heard, not their best work out of love.

We know that all art is the result of thousands of sources; we understand the illusory fetish of ownership that gilds our concepts of art, craft, technique, and expertise. So why do we continue to place so much cultural primacy on creators as individuals, and not part of a larger tissue of artistic life?

Roland Barthes writes in “The Death of the Author” that when we read a sentence in a book, no real person utters it: the voice is not to be located, “and yet it is perfectly read…because the true locus of writing is reading.” The multiplicity of art is inscribed in its destination, not its origin. In the interest of distinguishing this essay from yet another hand-wringing piece about some cultural problem, I want to linger on the possibilities that await us when we return to that magic—the real purpose of art, the reason we’re all here.

I confess that as an artist myself.

How would my life change if I danced more? If I listened more, instead of talking? Walter Benjamin writes that “the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.” I don’t want to absorb art to fulfill my own ego, I want to experiment with ways to be absorbed by it all. The way forward is precisely in valuing the things I have learned to avoid: sharing, slowing, watching myself disappear.

When I used to sneak out the house to go clubbing, I was always strangely rule-following in that pursuit. I didn’t drink and drive, I finished my homework before leaving, I didn’t linger in hallways with men I didn’t know, or stay too long in smoke-filled rooms. The point was to learn and explore, to experience being inside what was outside. I wanted to protect the magic.

I am most happy when I feel myself exist beyond any fixed identity or role. I am most happy when I feel lost in the things I create and love. I’m no longer me, but part of something great and unstoppable. The power of that loss is always striking when it occurs, and it happens again and again when I stop thinking about myself so much, and just enjoy it.

And maybe Yeats says it best.

“Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

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Thanks for reading my first Substack essay <3 Feel free to share it, I wanna know your thoughts, too! I’ll be doing this once a week and more if you’re a paid subscriber ; )