One of the most paralyzing feelings when writing, painting, or anything-ing is the feeling that you have to make a “masterpiece.” Oh let me scratch that off, it’s not the pretttiest picture ever drafted nor the slimiest insult ever hurled. Let’s sit down and really plan this out, maybe storyboard it, or even spin out some Jira tickets that atomize its actions.

It’s infuriating and yet it can feel impossible to fling off—“do I just not care, like not a bit? Do I too need to check my privilege instead of mansplaining with my freeform writing?” That was until I read Manny Farber’s essay on termite art vs. white elephant art.

He skewers in painting in particular the “burnt-out notion of a masterpiece,” with its “obeisance to the canvas edge” that undercuts its nominal radicalism. How free can an artist really be if they’re just consumed with the strict forms of the Old Masters?

This argument reminded me of why I always disagreed with assessments that said that OK Computer by Radiohead or (insert another album here) was the actual “greatest” album and not Sgt. Pepper, the traditional rock-critic pick for that accolades. Silly: those other albums are simply obeying the form of Sgt. Peoper, too tepid to move beyond even its tiny details such as the cross fading of songs into each other and the big, long closing number.

Taking risks makes me nervous, but less so than trying to make everything a smoothed-over “masterpiece” that visibly bears the weight of all its predecessors. Sloppy drawing, sloppy blogging, sloppy living with few “optimizations”—it’s so appealing in an age when anyone can make their own synthetic “masterpiece” for their fellow screen-eye-glazed shutins with a few clicks.