Why the fuck even make art; also, the Olympics

I guess we haven't shut up about fucking generative AI yet. It continues to baffle me that people who have been granted the responsibility of decision making power at major creative corporations are so taken in by this obvious scam.

There are a dozen reasons why replacing artists with language and imaging models is a bad idea – an underrated one, in my opinion, the likelihood of these companies folding within the next year.

None of this is interesting. It is simply the latest and biggest example of the failure of the people who have all the money to recognise that tech has kind of plateaued.

The latest and biggest example of the fact that too much power and capital is in the hands of easily duped weirdoes, who don't just lack imagination but fundamentally do not understand what imagination even is, or why it is valuable.

Which is a hard bridge to cross, right? Talking about the point of making and enjoying art is difficult and often fruitless. If you get it, you don't need it explained. If you don't get it there's not an explanation in the world that will make you understand. Right?

So, I love the Olympics an unreasonable amount. I love it because – and I mean this sincerely – I love seeing people poor a huge amount of money and effort into deeply silly things. (As an aside I genuinely believe that one of society's biggest issues is our failure to give silly things the respect they deserve and, relatedly, our failure to recognise which of the things we take very seriously are actually extremely silly. Complimentary.)

Obviously all sports are silly, at heart.* I think about Jenny Slate talking about footballers rushing after the toy all of the time. But the Olympics is how you get to learn about athletic silliness you've never really considered before, and it's the best.

Speed climbing or badminton or table tennis. Stumbling across elite level table tennis is truly wonderful. And what happens, inevitably, is that you find a guy to care about from a country whose geography you're at best vaguely aware of and you give your whole heart to the hope that he will win at the sport you don't understand.

To me – and again, I mean this with absolutely sincerity – this is a demonstration of humanity's true value. We are so determined to care about something outside of ourselves that we will emotionally commit to some random doing some silly sport we'd never heard of till this morning.

And that's the whole point. It's not about finding the best athletes in the world, not really. You realise this when you watch something like gymnastics, which obviously I do every time, obviously. Because gymnastics scores are based partly on the difficulty of the routines, and everyone knows beforehand what their difficulty score is going to be.

At best, we're there to find out which of the tiny pool of athletes with the absurdly high difficulty scores is having the best day, today. Most of the competitors don't have a shot at a medal – they never did. Many of them don't really have a shot at getting through the qualification rounds.

But they're there anyway. Because winning is not the point. Investing emotionally is the point. I just think that's neat.

There is, of course, no point in trying to figure out why we do this. Why we cry and cheer about very silly (complimentary) things. It's an innate, reflexive part of us, so we can only assume it fills some need we don't fully understand. It is good for the soul to spend a few days emotionally reliant on this one wee lad from Moldova doing well in the canoe slalom, or whatever it is that's grabbed you this time around.

All creative work is really about is exploring this crucial facet of our humanity. From the broadest commercial entertainment properties to the most self-indulgent personal artistic projects.

A while ago I saw a post by Emily St. James on Bluesky saying that writing fiction is about inventing a guy to torture, which is funny and true, and of course not the end goal. The end goal is to put your tortured guy in front of someone else and say, hey, care about this for a while. Step outside of yourself and care about this. It's not real and it doesn't matter but something within you needs to care about it.

That is why artists make art. That is why audiences engage with art. Because something within us needs it. It is about picking up and looking at that part of us that wants to care so much that we are always actively looking for something to care about.

Art is an act of communication, art is about connecting with people you'll never meet, art is about making people feel things because those things can only be felt, they can't be explained.

What other reason is there to make art? What other reason is there to live?

*Of course there is a much darker side to caring about sport which it is important to be aware of, even if the causal factor there is less the activity in question and more the damage done to the male psyche by centuries of complex patriarchal expectations around identity.