Ethel Cain hates fans making constant jokes. She is right to be angry.

“There is such a loss of sincerity and everything has to be a joke at all times,” she continued, before summarising the issue as an ongoing ‘irony epidemic’.

It’s bold for an artist to reject the way fans engage with their work. She says all this in fear of backlash, after all, yet she’s right to feel this way. There is indeed a loss of sincerity in our general approach to art, and the need to place an irony-poisoned filter on our feelings towards it is utterly suffocating.

ethel cain speaks on the ongoing irony epidemic and how it frustrates her as an artist pic.twitter.com/Cka4n6GQzW

— ethel cains fly (@ethelfiles) October 20, 2024

This feedback is quite devaluing for an artist like Cain, who is attempting to express herself honestly and genuinely. “The number of times I have to read the same stupid shit like ‘yes you ate that like Isaiah ate Ethel’ over and over, it makes me SO mad,” she wrote, referring to her conceptual debut album Preacher’s Daughter, where Cain tells the fictional story of being sold into prostitution then murdered by a lover named Isaiah.

As you can imagine, constant jokes about serious themes that parallel the real and personal would be tiring immediately. It’s not the reaction an artist like Cain is looking for, and she is far from the only one barraged by such inane responses towards their work.

To defend these fans somewhat, they are simply following the unwritten rules of social media platforms, resulting in a mirroring of language that becomes an ever-looping cycle. But that is part of the problem. The internet is now the main avenue for arts discourse, and the spaces where discourse can play out have homogenised into the same several social media sites. Often the limiting effects of social media bleed into the perspectives of its users when they go away to directly engage with a work of art.

Read more:

Derek McArthur: No, we shouldn’t just ‘let people enjoy things’

But it’s not surprising things have turned out this way. There is little incentive in society to honestly and sincerely connect with a work of art. We have lived through decades of neoliberalism, where art has been deprioritised unless it can be commodified and consumed, and where artistic movements and their infrastructures have occurred in defiance of that order. It has curtailed our collective imaginations greatly, guiding us towards much greyer purposes than the ones that art hopes to reach. Art is now generally seen as a fringe activity, irrelevant to the real goals of life and well-being.

Add in today’s lack of third spaces, the neglectful decimation of the arts sector, and the unimportance placed upon arts journalism, and you get an idea of why discourse around the arts is so unserious and so meme-ready. It is not a connecting trait instilled in us at this point. Many with this trait have come to it independently, and not communally as before.

The supposed democratising of the internet was meant to nurture such discourse. Yet it seems to have done the opposite. Those who approach art with an open heart and mind are in the same sea of white noise as those who don’t. Everyone’s opinion is equal, and yet anyone who has spent any time scrolling social media feeds knows that to be far from the case.

There is now a common sensibility against taste-making, the idea that one work of art elevates itself above another. Everything is simply subjective, rendering sincere and insightful thoughts and feelings ultimately meaningless. There is now a pressure to mould our thoughts around art in a specific way and artists like Cain come to bear the brunt of this.

Read more:

Can we please move on from thinking pop music is the best thing ever?

The tastemakers of the past are gone, and the mantle sits vacant. Those perceptive enough to discuss and engage with art profoundly and passionately are ignored or find themselves a nail waiting to be hammered. If someone like legendary music journalist and critic Lester Bangs appeared fresh on the scene today, would anyone care what he has to say amongst the white noise sea?

The path that Bangs walked along to develop his thinking and be heard is no longer viable. Bangs was known for critically challenging records that would later become well-known and regarded classics. He would often go against critical consensus too, sincere and honest in what he saw in certain records that others couldn’t.

His biggest gambit was his full-throated defence of Lou Reed’s guitar feedback noise record Metal Machine Music, infamously ‘the most returned record of all time’, panned by critics to such an extent that Reed himself had to paint the album as a joke despite its completely serious origins. Bangs saw value in the record that was ignored or unseen by others, and it is now a record with many imitators, seeing acceptance in such places as the high-strung classical world.

Shaping arts discourse into a healthy state is more difficult than ever, but not impossible. We live in times when genuine and honest expression needs to be embraced, yet we are distracted and engulfed by the same times as well. But there is nothing wrong with being vulnerable, and there is no need to be so protective over our thoughts and feelings. If anything, art is the safest and most productive place to wade through and explore that side of ourselves.