Writing about how to become viral is like making a career transition from whore to pimp, or as cyberspace calls it: Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a puppy named coronavirus putting a face mask on a sneezing panda named cryptocurrency.
With SEO, you can make millions of dollars from home, lose your belly fat and notice you seldom have a dick, become a prime member and have your penile products delivered to your in under two hours, find your life’s purpose by watching all twenty seasons of Keeping Up With the Kardashians and for the days when you are feeling lonely, anxious and miserable that the world is coming to an end, there’s 5000 Hitler documentaries you can Netflix and chill.
To get here, all you need to know are a few words, or as Donald Trump calls them, big beautiful words. These are called keywords. Keywords are to SEO what googling pineapple pizza delivery near me is to finding out if you are high.
(You are.)
Every sentence you read so far has been stuffed with these words and Google knows I am actively doing that, so it will punish me by not showing this essay when you search, “How to XXX your website traffic” and instead, will efficiently redirect you to a link that will help you start a porn site.
Write good content and people will come is a hopeless self-assuredness, unless you choose to start that porn site, in which case, that statement’s literality is unintentional.
But this hopelessness may be the only hope left for art.
It’s what has given me hope in the last year. The books I enjoyed: what with their average rating of 3.5 and below; the radio interviews I found on the third page of Google, which is also when I realized most podcasts are full of shit; and finally: taking a walk in the circumference of the garden I hadn’t noticed in eight years at home: its beauty preserved by its obviousness as is its life by its privacy. This ordinariness is what gave art its mystery, its meaning.
As art, we may never have another Mona Lisa, but as artists, it will remain the touchstone, for reasons typified by what it means to succeed in this century.
A piece that automatically floats to the top because it gets a lot of traffic because it gets a lot of traffic because someone stole (/retweeted) it and caused a pandemic in the art world, four centuries after its artist died, discontent he didn’t make use of his potential, even as the most ironic smile in the history of brushstrokes stares interminably into the negative space, mournful of the people surrounding it, all of who are thinking the same thing: #photooftheday.
Meditations 