Stop Talking About Art Like You’re a Mid-Level Entertainment Industry Executive

This is an edition of the newsletter Pulling Weeds With Chris Black, in which the columnist weighs in on hot topics in culture. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Thursday.

Every day, I fire up my machine and start poking around the internet looking for interesting things to read, digest, and regurgitate. I follow and subscribe to countless personalities and media companies to deliver the info I crave, and my appetite is insatiable. Thanks to our podcast How Long Gone, my work spans many industries: media, music, entertainment, publishing, and food. It’s a lot to keep up with, but hoarding information that becomes almost instantly obsolete has been my kink since I was in high school. The difference is that now everyone is obsessed with data, and it’s sucking all the fun out of everything.

Social media and the proliferation of newsletters have given rise to a new kind of person online: someone obsessed with an industry they aren’t involved in, but thanks to readily available data and paid subscriptions, can talk like an insider all day long. Guys who might once have just “loved films” are now reading Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The Ankler, and Deadline, and listening to Matt Belloni’s Puck podcast so that they can spout off opening-weekend box-office numbers and Bob Iger’s comings and goings. They know directors’ salaries, the details of the possible David Ellison-led Paramount Skydance/Warner Bros. Discovery merger, and what David Zaslav had for lunch. These people have no skin in the game; they probably just grew up loving movies and became fascinated with how they were made. But access to unnecessary information is turning these people into data and gossip junkies who can’t just buy a ticket on their AMC app and go enjoy something because they’re thinking about how many screens constitute a limited-run opening and how that will impact the China numbers.

It’s no different in the music business, my true love. When discussing or debating an artist’s success, my friends love to tell me about Spotify streaming numbers, which I have honestly never looked at. But I have read Hits Daily Double and Bob Lefsetz since the early aughts, and I go to the Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, and Pitchfork homepages daily. I like to see who’s going on tour, discover a new band or song, and occasionally read a viral review. But stan culture has 17-year-old girls debating first-week numbers and merch-bundle scandals because they noticed their favorite artists’ new albums collapsed on the Billboard chart after the first week. I don’t give a fuck about the Drake vs. UMG lawsuit because corporate espionage (or allegations thereof) doesn’t affect my listening experience. Twitter has thousands of people posting screenshots from the Ticketmaster website to let you know that your favorite artist didn’t sell out an arena in Denver on a Tuesday night. You’re a human being with a life: Do you really need to know what Sir Lucian Grainge said on the Q3 earnings call?

Let’s do our best, as a society, to leave the data to the bean counters and enjoy art, because there is no reason, as fans, to care about the numbers. I get that it’s fun to debate and discuss, and I do it myself, but we cannot let it cloud our perception or impede our enjoyment. I love plenty of records that Pitchfork has shit on. Letterboxd is a social media platform where people with no skin in the game and too much time on their hands get to play pretend Siskel & Ebert. Let’s just enjoy stuff while we still can.