[This post was originally published on Cohost. It was written in response to posts from kastelpls and Mightfo.]
This to me is the key sentence: “in other words, we don’t simply see a kusoge as a commodity but as an array of humans and their social relations that culminated into this product.” The folks at 65DaysofStatic have said similar things. This to me leads to at least two conclusions.
First, non-mass-appeal art is important to you to the extent that you know the people making it and feel part of a community with them, or at least a kinship with them. I don’t do games, but I do listen to music. I may purchase music by a person X I follow on cohost (or who’s rechosted by people I follow), knowing full well that there may be dozens if not hundred of pieces similar in style and quality available on Bandcamp or wherever. But I don’t know the people who made those, and I do know X and the other people who know X.
Second, we don’t need to de-commodify the entire economy to allow non-mass-appeal art to flourish (bread is still a commodity, as are iPhones), or even the economy of mass-appeal art. But we do need to provide people a way to survive and make a living, at least of sorts, when they’re not making art.
I think of my favorite go-to example here, the people who created American modernist poetry in the early 20th century. They weren’t MFAs or state-sponsored writers, they were bank clerks and insurance executives and physicians and librarians and people who had some money from family or inheritances. But they were also, and more importantly poets, and part of a community of poets, a community whose works ultimately became important to people other than themselves. But their poetry was first and foremost important to them, and if that had not been the case it would not have been important to anyone else.
What then is the role of the critic? I leave that as an exercise for the reader, but I think kastelpls has provided a large part of the answer.