#theres also a reason i make music that is at once danceable and highly unpleasant

[noisytenant]

I think I've said it before but it's helpful for writers and people in the whole "fanfiction, ya, literary writing" discourse to be knowledgable of the concept of kitsch.

While some snobs decry kitsch as technically and conceptually devoid, it really isn't--it's cruel to devalue an artist's labor simply because you don't think their work "advances the culture" or the viewer's understanding of culture.

Kitsch has a number of definitions, but I'm using it as "art designed to invoke a specific high-power emotion (like melancholy, love, awe, joy) without encouraging analysis of that emotion, just allowing the art to be a space where that emotion lives". It's designed, as much as anything can be designed, for some level of universality. This is why we get so many paintings of cats, of beautiful landscapes--the artists believe that the majority of people will see a landscape and appreciate its beauty, will see a kitten and long to protect it.

Art that affirms our desire to feel something--and offers little more than that validation--isn't shameful, and in many ways it's necessary, but it's also not the kind of art that people spend a lot of time analyzing. Its merits are usually limited to the technicality of the work. One may say, "This romantic fanfiction is really well-written," which is taken to mean "the characters are consistent, the grammar is legible, the prose and language is evocative." In some situations, it means, "This fanfiction added to my understanding of the work it derives from." Rarely does it mean "this fanfiction fundamentally changed something about how I view myself or the world around me"--not to say that fanfiction can't or shouldn't do that!

We can and should critique art, literary or not, if we feel that it inadequately completes its established function. One might say, "I understand that the writer was trying to highlight the cruelty of racism by depicting it head-on, but I think it assumes readers will have the emotional intelligence necessary to hold both the perpetrators' and the victims' experiences in their minds at once and make the antiracist choice at the conclusion of the story. If I were writing this book, I wouldn't make that assumption, and I might replace unresolved graphic scenes with more consequence-focused scenes." One might say, "This erotic fanfiction is designed to sexually excite the reader, but it is depicting a decidedly abusive relationship, and I question the idea that there is anything exciting and not horrifying about that."

You don't have to say that whole mouthful every time you want to tweet complaining about a book you didn't like, but you would at some point want to make it clear through your art or longform criticism how you choose to address these issues.

We can also just say that we don't like something or that we're not personally comfortable allowing it into our lives. One might say, "Depicting brutal acts of racism brings to mind experiences in my own life that are traumatic, and I don't think this work can do what it intends to do for me personally." There's so much art in the world that seeks to do similar things; surely you'll find the works that touch you as long as you keep an open mind.

Artists of a primarily kitsch nature aren't incapable of critical thought, so if YA or fanfiction authors have good-faith critiques of more literary works, we shouldn't snub their criticism simply because they choose to focus on art of a more straightforward nature. However, a lot of the highlighted discussions (which are of course cherry-picked to look as dumb as possible--not maliciously, just naturally, because we remember the things that make us angriest) could be more charitably framed not as "this person is too stupid to understand a complex work!" or "this person's art is worthless, unlike this meaningful work!", but instead as "this person deals in a tradition of art that is popular and longstanding, but very distinct from the literary tradition of art they dislike. both traditions might learn from each other, but ultimately asking one tradition to transmute itself into another is asking for a different work entirely."

The line between kitsch and non-kitsch isn't clear-cut, but it provides a helpful framework for understanding why people seem to misunderstand what a work is designed to do, and how artists will sometimes obfuscate their established goal and tradition in order to avoid criticism.