No longer will we hang our heads in shame. We will lift our heads high, as we hang ourselves in effigy. Politics, art and culture no longer aspire to self-representation, but to shining insincerity, pixilation, the debris of our denials and our basest caprices. And “greatness” is not merely a twentieth century joke, a fleeting gag, it is the agreement for our eternal soul, devil’s contract and all.

“Art & Literature,” as we think about it now, is a few hundred years old. “Great men” and “great women,” and “works of great art,” are post-Elizabethan concepts. The “artist as hero” didn’t take hold until the nineteenth century, and wasn’t defacto until the twentieth century. But in less than a hundred years, the artist as hero has become mainstream: music, art, literature, fashion, film, everything. In Western schools, we’re taught that the artist has won a revolution. Mozart, Beethoven, Joyce, so it goes, insisted that the artist had more cultural cachet than the aristocrat, and it changed the world. Maybe-ish, but in our century, the heroism of artistic pursuit is primarily concerned not with creative freedom, but with the sale of stuff, and we attain self-actualization not through art, but through the purchase of identities we’ve dreamt up for ourselves.

The self-centered creator, the ego that self-defines, is not only the rock star, the novelist, the couture chef, it is the consumer. You need to need stuff, need recognition, need definition, to be you. To be successful, you need a fancy watch, to be Hip-Hop you need this music, to be environmentally conscious, you need this hemp thneed. You can’t be what you are, even if it’s a gender, even if it’s a race, without buying something. This is the mindset, the ecosystem, that media fosters in order to sell advertising space.

The problem for media is that this model, this story of the artist, is limited and immature, and losing its audience to an array of alternative stories, and alternative ways to find and experience culture. The internet is vast, and a mode of distribution—an egalitarian one—unto itself. The big media answer is to convince advertisers that their demographic, let’s say the readership of a book section of a major newspaper, is small but targeted; their readers also buy Mercedes. Which leads to another problem: to make sure that the readership buys Mercedes, the content is again compromised (to entice Mercedes buyers), which again shrinks the readership, which again necessitates the insistence that advertisers will reach “the right people,” which again compromises the content. Ad inifitum. Micro targeting markets is an old idea, but in old media, like print, it’s barely better than self-immolation.

In its favor, the “artist as...