What is the value of art?
Whatever the individual values human emotion and experience at.
Everyone wants to be entertained. To me, reading comment sections of things makes me feel like no one wants to be entertained the way people are offering it. I feel that's from the entry bar being lowered into the worlds of content creation. The only barrier between doing and consuming is the amount of time, money and willpower you're willing to invest into making something worth someone else's time to then consume. This barrier is what separates commentator from creator.
It's way easier to bitch about how something didn't happen the way that you thought it should (which may be a fucking stupid way to do it). With every varying taste, the only thing I can suss out that everyone wants in a story, is the truth as close as it can happen within the world that's being crafted. Violations to that have fluctuating degrees of success depending on the audience. And you will always hear about it if there's space for someone to speak their mind about it.
I thankfully haven't been a target of someone's hate and bile for something I've made, but it's disheartening to see when people don't understand things that seem so obvious to yourself. While that leads to the wonder of the world being a collection of different perspectives, some people's perspectives are just fucking stupid. Either they weren't paying attention to the finer notes of what was given to them, or some imagined sensibility was offended, but if someone doesn't get it, the vitriol that spills out is best avoided. That may be in part because liking something is so standard and automatic. If someone rages on about something they hated, you end up with some of the greatest poetry of a human's soul. Which, if redirected could become a fresh work in its own merit. But alas, most folk prefer to spend their time bitching about stuff they hate instead of creating something they don't.
What brought this on was watching the season finale of True Detective, and thinking back to post episode tweets that mostly rang with the, "what is even going on?" message. True Detective, like any great mystery/noir, requires you to take the thing as a whole. But since it has to wrap up something in the space of sixty minutes while advancing the season plot to an ultimate conclusion, that means every week has to have something for those just tuning in, and esoteric things for those trying to tally off, "whodunnit". If you're casually watching the show, it's going to leave you feeling lost at times. The show is designed to confuse and obfuscate. But when shows have mass appeal, the more that insist on spoonfeeding all the answers up front.
It's like when you're watching a new movie, and you have someone constantly in your ear asking, "Who's that? What did they say? What did that mean?" All you want to say to them is, "Shut up, I have the same information as you." But you don't because while annoying in theaters, you're still friends with this person for some reason. That's how I picture everyone who didn't get season 2 of True Detective while it was still airing.
Season Finales are a perfect time for people to be disappointed by things. Mostly when they don't end the way the audience wants it to end. People still gripe about Seinfeld's finale, Mass Effect's ending, the end of The Sopranos, the final season of Dexter, and there are some valid complaints. But endings are always bitter for someone. The reactions you receive shape the legacy of the entire series. You end up being asked, "Why did it end in a church," for the rest of your life if people don't get the way it ends, which overshadows the entire work.
A good ending needs to be a payoff for every interaction through your entire work. It needs to answer all questions, tie or cut all threads, and only leave the questions the creator wants to ask be left lingering in the audience's mind. If you can do that right, you've got the world by the balls.
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