In the spirit of criticism that this piece is engendering:
What is actually the point/thesis here? The title is zingy but what does it actually mean? The author is rolling back & forth between an 'elitist' & 'populist' approach-- but she doesn't ever settle on one or the other. She quotes Lebowitz and the "natural aristocracy of talent" but then argues that artists should be accountable to audiences -- so which is it?
The invocation of David Wojnarowicz feels especially confused-- it's distancing itself from Wojnarowicz politics (just briefly glazing over them) to assert that "keeping private things private is now the radical thing to do", collapsing Wojnarowicz work into a contrast with Instagram/Substack oversharing confuses queer visibility with publicity.
It's advocating a kind of preciousness "why should everyone expect to publish a book?" while at the same time insisting that being an artist is a difficult path and that scarcity=quality (but when has that ever been the case?). I feel like the arts grant became a vehicle for a confused & overdetermined take.
Scarcity equates quality certainly moreso than a glut does. Nobody is reading most of Montreal's magazines, most exist, functionally, as avenues for the vanity of their contributors. It gets to a point where, yes, I do feel many writers write more for the Canada Council than they do for a coinosseur readership.
I think the piece ultimately aligns with an "elitist" position marked by the necessity of a discerning, engaged, consuming audience. The "participatory" audience is not a "populist" audience. An "aristocracy of talent" is still built upon a "consent of the governed" to appraise that talent.
I have divergent opinions on this with regards to where the locus of creation ought to be, but I will likely discuss that in a piece myself sometime soon.
Still, I think even if there ARE incongruent elements of the essay, they are all thoughtful elements on their own. If tensions emerge in such writing, reader's may become pressed to resolve them in reflection. Thesis forward writing is for the academy.
I think if you're making a claim like you do in the title then its natural for readers to expect a reasonably clear argument in it's defense. A thesis isn't exclusive to academia-- it's just literally the answer to "what is this essay arguing?". I'm not even asking for a 'thesis statement', just conceptual clarity on the author's behalf re/ the points I brought up earlier. If read thru the lens of the *34* Lit Mags article, that piece does a much better job of articulating what I take to be the underlying argument.
This seems like a fair critique; and I must take some responsibility as the editor on the piece for suggesting the title it has, which spotlights the granting aspect when I think her stronger concern was with the nature of audience membership and who art is "for." She does a good job of trying to resolve the apparent contradiction between the "populist" and "elitist" threads you identify in artmaking and appreciation—I would argue that as audience members we do seek greatness in art, but that the notion that greatness even exists sits uncomfortably in any philosophy of egalitarianism. But these two poles don't actually exist in opposition–the "aristocracy of talent" tends to express itself even in non-institutional environments so long as the artist is responding to and shaped by a discerning audience. In the Jennings example, his original audience saw him as "one of them" (which indeed he was) and so they could check him when he was off the mark, not necessarily on aesthetic grounds but out of an instinct for when he was not representing lives like their own (which included his) authentically. In the Lebowitz ballet example, there was an audience with its own form of (more intellectual/cultured) discernment that she saw as essential to the health of that form.
In the 34 mags piece that Emma's bouncing off of here, I focused on what I saw as a failure of local lit artists to take their art (and their Aesthetics) seriously, as something beyond a social game. That argument also sort of gestured in this direction about the lack of an audience for this glut of publications—which seems like an absurd claim, given how many well-attended literary events there are. But a lot of the people there are not audience members so much as artists waiting on their expected turn. So where do you find the sort of audiences that keep us all honest? That help us refine ourselves? I argued, perhaps over-optimistically, that it is enough as a starting point to stop treating all this like the quality of our output doesn't matter—and with luck, this will help create work more worthy of the attention of a smart audience.
Emma set herself a much more difficult task than I did I think: the question of where such an audience for literature is "generated" from, how it is maintained etc. Well-meaning as the idea of arts grants is (and I don't deny it has helped contribute to some very fine art, as in the example of the NFB in its prime), Emma puts her finger on the fact that it's a concept that is arguably damned by half-measures: without grants at all, eventually, some very hardy cultivars might eventually grow. With a far higher level of funding (and I would argue what would be best would be a social welfare state where arts-specific funding has a much different role since everyone has enough to get by), battles for gov't money wouldn't be so reliably won by hacks. But in the current situation, where there is some money to be had but not nearly enough, it almost seems like the gravity of the grants in defining what's produced and how we think about it is intensified. Mindful of scarcity, we write to the funders' expectations, rather than those of the audience we have (or envision); rather than to ourselves, who are organically connected to that audience. Art tends to die when it's made to a rubric, which is a part of what turns off people who aren't already in the gallery tryna hustle their own stuff from looking at it.
Another clear-eyed and thoughtful piece from Discordia Review, not sure how you guys keep doing it.
I think connoisseurship is an inherent trait but those who steer clear of the more niche “high art”, find an expression for their connoisseurship in the everyday: music, food, beautiful objects and design, cars.
Obviously wish it was for writing instead... but here we are.
Really enjoyed your work. This got me thinking back to my time in College studying architecture. I’ve thought about the Art/Audience dynamic a good bit, particularly as it relates to how much of that discipline is, or should be, “Art” in the first place.
i hate it so much that no one dares to actually criticise anything properly nowadays. i write poetry and nonfiction and recently got accepted to a program that includes 3 months worth of mentorship by someone with more experience. i'm a very rookie author who only developed any sort of taste in literature over the past 2 years - which means that i suck! but no one, including my mentor, wants to criticise my work! and this is the 2nd time this has happened! i'm either the biggest fucking prodigy these people have ever seen or they just don't want to be real with me and i feel like it's the latter.
Really looking fwd to the worst offenders of this exact problem who’ll arrive to praise the essay without seeing themselves implicated :) and likewise excited to see austerity budget cut enthusiasts come in to cherry pick from this to argue against any funding support for artists at all.
But sincerely well done threading the needle. I write grants for fellow poors all the time and argue for it as tactical debt relief, almost totally divorced from whether or not they make a thing, and I do my best to do this at a volume where the people who really didn’t need the money to carve time out for themselves to write a book are less likely to win the things.
Hickey is also a nice pull for this. I like his remarks about driving several hours to see art exhibited, that the art better be beautiful enough to sit there gazing at it for longer.
Spoken like one who knows the belly of the beast. I haven't done much on the grant writing side (lucky and/or plugged in enough to receive a few the one time I attempted nearly ten years ago, was both creatively inactive and doing well enough financially it seemed inappropriate thereafter), but I did do some judging even before that and I kind of considered it my job to advocate for the people in the pile whom I both 1. knew to be good and 2. knew to be broke as hell. I was prouder of helping divert that cash to the "right" places than of most of what the mag I was working with at the time was putting out.
Ironic that you felt you shouldn't be applying for grants because of being financially stable when basically everyone who is applying definitely has more money than you. It's welfare for rich kids! (We need arts grants means testing)
Was arguing this week with a novelist who was complaining about being ineligible for a new writer’s trust grant for low income writers. He kept saying “who makes less than 35k a year?” (the cutoff), and I was like “me. I made substantially less than that last year, total, not just from writing,” and he refused to believe me. Complaining he’s not eligible for one section of 5k funding designed for people who haven’t made 35k in a year. It hurts my head.
A lot of these points hit home for me, especially the dumbing down of the audience. I've been dipping my toes into the photobook scene and recently attended some portfolio review events with my book draft. I was shocked that two reviewers, professionals in art education and publishing, told me that my work was too subtle, and to fix it I should include a few unambiguous and clichéd photos that directly state the global warming-related theme - IE a photo of a thermometer or a photo of a weather report on a TV. I think if I did that, it would be the photobook equivalent of a Netflix movie where the plot is restated in every scene and the viewer is never challenged or required to think at all.
Okay, well done. I was ready to skim this and move along, but you wrapped me back in and answered some questions I've had for decades as a creative person. I've made a lot of art that wasn't for my audience, and also a lot of art that was, and the immense difficulty of finding an audience, even finding my 70 people, after 40 years of concerted effort, comes down in part to all of this. Thank you.
I felt so sorry for Tom, standing in front of me, so completely overrun by the revolting jubilations entirely beyond his grasp.
https://lucazani.xyz/2026/06/08/the-canon/
In the spirit of criticism that this piece is engendering:
What is actually the point/thesis here? The title is zingy but what does it actually mean? The author is rolling back & forth between an 'elitist' & 'populist' approach-- but she doesn't ever settle on one or the other. She quotes Lebowitz and the "natural aristocracy of talent" but then argues that artists should be accountable to audiences -- so which is it?
The invocation of David Wojnarowicz feels especially confused-- it's distancing itself from Wojnarowicz politics (just briefly glazing over them) to assert that "keeping private things private is now the radical thing to do", collapsing Wojnarowicz work into a contrast with Instagram/Substack oversharing confuses queer visibility with publicity.
It's advocating a kind of preciousness "why should everyone expect to publish a book?" while at the same time insisting that being an artist is a difficult path and that scarcity=quality (but when has that ever been the case?). I feel like the arts grant became a vehicle for a confused & overdetermined take.
Scarcity equates quality certainly moreso than a glut does. Nobody is reading most of Montreal's magazines, most exist, functionally, as avenues for the vanity of their contributors. It gets to a point where, yes, I do feel many writers write more for the Canada Council than they do for a coinosseur readership.
I think the piece ultimately aligns with an "elitist" position marked by the necessity of a discerning, engaged, consuming audience. The "participatory" audience is not a "populist" audience. An "aristocracy of talent" is still built upon a "consent of the governed" to appraise that talent.
I have divergent opinions on this with regards to where the locus of creation ought to be, but I will likely discuss that in a piece myself sometime soon.
Still, I think even if there ARE incongruent elements of the essay, they are all thoughtful elements on their own. If tensions emerge in such writing, reader's may become pressed to resolve them in reflection. Thesis forward writing is for the academy.
I think if you're making a claim like you do in the title then its natural for readers to expect a reasonably clear argument in it's defense. A thesis isn't exclusive to academia-- it's just literally the answer to "what is this essay arguing?". I'm not even asking for a 'thesis statement', just conceptual clarity on the author's behalf re/ the points I brought up earlier. If read thru the lens of the *34* Lit Mags article, that piece does a much better job of articulating what I take to be the underlying argument.
This seems like a fair critique; and I must take some responsibility as the editor on the piece for suggesting the title it has, which spotlights the granting aspect when I think her stronger concern was with the nature of audience membership and who art is "for." She does a good job of trying to resolve the apparent contradiction between the "populist" and "elitist" threads you identify in artmaking and appreciation—I would argue that as audience members we do seek greatness in art, but that the notion that greatness even exists sits uncomfortably in any philosophy of egalitarianism. But these two poles don't actually exist in opposition–the "aristocracy of talent" tends to express itself even in non-institutional environments so long as the artist is responding to and shaped by a discerning audience. In the Jennings example, his original audience saw him as "one of them" (which indeed he was) and so they could check him when he was off the mark, not necessarily on aesthetic grounds but out of an instinct for when he was not representing lives like their own (which included his) authentically. In the Lebowitz ballet example, there was an audience with its own form of (more intellectual/cultured) discernment that she saw as essential to the health of that form.
In the 34 mags piece that Emma's bouncing off of here, I focused on what I saw as a failure of local lit artists to take their art (and their Aesthetics) seriously, as something beyond a social game. That argument also sort of gestured in this direction about the lack of an audience for this glut of publications—which seems like an absurd claim, given how many well-attended literary events there are. But a lot of the people there are not audience members so much as artists waiting on their expected turn. So where do you find the sort of audiences that keep us all honest? That help us refine ourselves? I argued, perhaps over-optimistically, that it is enough as a starting point to stop treating all this like the quality of our output doesn't matter—and with luck, this will help create work more worthy of the attention of a smart audience.
Emma set herself a much more difficult task than I did I think: the question of where such an audience for literature is "generated" from, how it is maintained etc. Well-meaning as the idea of arts grants is (and I don't deny it has helped contribute to some very fine art, as in the example of the NFB in its prime), Emma puts her finger on the fact that it's a concept that is arguably damned by half-measures: without grants at all, eventually, some very hardy cultivars might eventually grow. With a far higher level of funding (and I would argue what would be best would be a social welfare state where arts-specific funding has a much different role since everyone has enough to get by), battles for gov't money wouldn't be so reliably won by hacks. But in the current situation, where there is some money to be had but not nearly enough, it almost seems like the gravity of the grants in defining what's produced and how we think about it is intensified. Mindful of scarcity, we write to the funders' expectations, rather than those of the audience we have (or envision); rather than to ourselves, who are organically connected to that audience. Art tends to die when it's made to a rubric, which is a part of what turns off people who aren't already in the gallery tryna hustle their own stuff from looking at it.
Another clear-eyed and thoughtful piece from Discordia Review, not sure how you guys keep doing it.
I think connoisseurship is an inherent trait but those who steer clear of the more niche “high art”, find an expression for their connoisseurship in the everyday: music, food, beautiful objects and design, cars.
Obviously wish it was for writing instead... but here we are.
In an overall sense, there isn't enough demand to support all these lit mags.
That's why they resort to the unethical practice of charging submission fees.
If you want to launch a lit mag as a labor of love, more power to you. But don't try to make me pay for it.
Really enjoyed your work. This got me thinking back to my time in College studying architecture. I’ve thought about the Art/Audience dynamic a good bit, particularly as it relates to how much of that discipline is, or should be, “Art” in the first place.
i hate it so much that no one dares to actually criticise anything properly nowadays. i write poetry and nonfiction and recently got accepted to a program that includes 3 months worth of mentorship by someone with more experience. i'm a very rookie author who only developed any sort of taste in literature over the past 2 years - which means that i suck! but no one, including my mentor, wants to criticise my work! and this is the 2nd time this has happened! i'm either the biggest fucking prodigy these people have ever seen or they just don't want to be real with me and i feel like it's the latter.
Really looking fwd to the worst offenders of this exact problem who’ll arrive to praise the essay without seeing themselves implicated :) and likewise excited to see austerity budget cut enthusiasts come in to cherry pick from this to argue against any funding support for artists at all.
But sincerely well done threading the needle. I write grants for fellow poors all the time and argue for it as tactical debt relief, almost totally divorced from whether or not they make a thing, and I do my best to do this at a volume where the people who really didn’t need the money to carve time out for themselves to write a book are less likely to win the things.
Hickey is also a nice pull for this. I like his remarks about driving several hours to see art exhibited, that the art better be beautiful enough to sit there gazing at it for longer.
Spoken like one who knows the belly of the beast. I haven't done much on the grant writing side (lucky and/or plugged in enough to receive a few the one time I attempted nearly ten years ago, was both creatively inactive and doing well enough financially it seemed inappropriate thereafter), but I did do some judging even before that and I kind of considered it my job to advocate for the people in the pile whom I both 1. knew to be good and 2. knew to be broke as hell. I was prouder of helping divert that cash to the "right" places than of most of what the mag I was working with at the time was putting out.
Ironic that you felt you shouldn't be applying for grants because of being financially stable when basically everyone who is applying definitely has more money than you. It's welfare for rich kids! (We need arts grants means testing)
Was arguing this week with a novelist who was complaining about being ineligible for a new writer’s trust grant for low income writers. He kept saying “who makes less than 35k a year?” (the cutoff), and I was like “me. I made substantially less than that last year, total, not just from writing,” and he refused to believe me. Complaining he’s not eligible for one section of 5k funding designed for people who haven’t made 35k in a year. It hurts my head.
A lot of these points hit home for me, especially the dumbing down of the audience. I've been dipping my toes into the photobook scene and recently attended some portfolio review events with my book draft. I was shocked that two reviewers, professionals in art education and publishing, told me that my work was too subtle, and to fix it I should include a few unambiguous and clichéd photos that directly state the global warming-related theme - IE a photo of a thermometer or a photo of a weather report on a TV. I think if I did that, it would be the photobook equivalent of a Netflix movie where the plot is restated in every scene and the viewer is never challenged or required to think at all.
I didn't have Waylon Jennings on my bingo card this morning but this is a great read. Thank you!
Fantastic.
Okay, well done. I was ready to skim this and move along, but you wrapped me back in and answered some questions I've had for decades as a creative person. I've made a lot of art that wasn't for my audience, and also a lot of art that was, and the immense difficulty of finding an audience, even finding my 70 people, after 40 years of concerted effort, comes down in part to all of this. Thank you.