What is art for?
John holds that art helps people understand themselves and feel less alone, and since 2022 he has called it a gift exchange between maker and audience. In 2023 he said art need only exist to be worthwhile, and in 2026 that writing is first of all for himself.
Axis: art matters in itself ... art matters by what it changes
Positions by date: 58 records in 58 videos. shift and revise mean the position moved; tension — disagreement with the other speaker.
John
| date | how | position | video |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2008-05-20 | first on record | John says we must get past the idea that art is merely supposed to be pleasurable; books need not offer characters to identify with. | Guys Love Giraffe Love 00:00:41 |
| 2008-08-26 | restate | John says literary symbolism is Holden's way into us and our way out of ourselves, answering those who say English class ruins books. | The Catcher in the Rye, Part 2 00:03:15 |
| 2009-09-27 | restate | John argues TV for chickens shows contemporary art can be good by raising all kinds of interesting questions. | TV For Chickens 00:02:08 |
| 2010-03-10 | refine | John says that as a writer he aims to tell good and true stories rather than to serve or win sympathy for an agenda. | New Tour! New Book! (Remember Books?) Your Q's A'ed! 00:02:35 |
| 2010-06-16 | refine | John: good contemporary art forces us to think more complexly about the spaces we overlook, and failing to grapple with complexity is a bad life strategy. | In Defense of Contemporary Art 00:01:59 |
| 2011-09-07 | restate | John rejects the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable: books are in the business of creating great stories, not merely likable characters for simple identification. | The Great Gatsby: Living the Dream in the Valley of Ashes 00:01:40 |
| 2012-01-10 (said on 2012-01-09, implied) | restate | John says reading and writing, when they work, bring fanaa, a dissolution of the self; writing TFIOS he felt he transcended the limits of himself. | The Fault in Our Stars 00:02:55 |
| 2013-05-21 | refine | John argues good art matters, and always has, even when it 'makes nothing happen': Ai's rebar work gives form to love, anger and grief amid tragic statistics. | Poetry Makes Nothing Happen: Thoughts on Ai Weiwei from the Indianapolis Museum of Art 00:03:24 |
| 2014-03-25 | restate | John defines art as lots of people working together across time and space to make the world suck less for themselves and each other. | I Gotta Go: Signing Off and Thinking about Inspiration 00:03:06 |
| 2015-09-01 | restate | John says poetry can really matter in real lives: because it is musical and memorable it shapes choices, so poets and readers must be careful with language. | The Road Less Traveled By 00:03:37 |
| 2015-12-22 | restate | John says that like any good myth, Star Wars helps us understand and identify ourselves as people. | The Myth Reawakens 00:01:46 |
| 2016-11-17 | restate | John says he reads fiction for consolation, to feel unalone, and to escape the prison of his consciousness by living in someone else's mind. | Decathlons, Pretension, and the Weirdest Animal I've Met: It's Question Thursday 00:03:01 |
| 2017-04-11 | restate | John suggests art and life are like the ball of paint: you choose your colours, add your layer as best you can, and it is eventually painted over until almost no one knows about it. | Making the World's Largest Ball of Paint 00:02:05 |
| 2019-03-12 | restate | John learned that novels do not solve problems or heal wounds; when a story works it is because, as Emily Dickinson put it, it tells all the truth but tells it slant. | Going Home with Alaska and Miles 00:02:28 |
| 2019-05-07 | restate | John doesn't read to find what's wrong with a story but to be moved in every sense: to go places he hasn't been and glimpse worlds, including within himself. | How I Read and Why 00:01:43 |
| 2019-07-09 | restate | John recommends decorating your walls, which he once thought an unnecessary expense: album art, prints made with an Art Assignment video, or student art shows; it enriches indoor life. | Life Hacks My Wife Taught Me 00:02:26 |
| 2019-08-13 | restate | Metaphor exists not to torture high school English students but to make the dull bright, the old new and the distant close. | How I (barely) Passed 11th Grade English 00:00:29 |
| 2019-09-10 | restate | John says art is not only old masters' portraits or the billionaires who collect them as tax shelters: it is people throughout history trying to express what it felt like to be alive, what they valued, or how to shift values. | Another Contender in the Room 00:01:27 |
| 2019-09-24 | restate | Poetry gives John language to understand the overwhelming worlds within and without him; much of his experience resists language, which makes it hard to understand. | I, Too, Dislike It 00:00:58 |
| 2020-03-03 | restate | When ready to look at the world and its people, John wants exercises in consciously experiencing human dignity, meaning dignity as being worthy of respect and honor. | Consciously Experiencing Human Dignity 00:01:27 |
| 2020-04-07 | restate | John says art can be whatever we create for and with each other; the prompts need no fancy supplies, only attention, which helps us find and even create meaning. | I am an artist. 00:02:15 |
| 2020-04-14 | restate | John says Paige Lewis's Space Struck gives language to his overwhelming anxiety, as in 'I'm the vice president of panic, and the president is missing'; he calls himself the Vice President of Panic. | books that help 00:03:02 |
| 2020-09-15 | restate | John says poems and songs don't exist primarily as riddles to be solved: art exists not to be figured out but to be lived with. | All That Glitters Is Gold 00:01:27 |
| 2020-12-01 | restate | John says the maybes are essential to what makes art visceral and thrilling to him; it's human nature to seek answers and he hopes they're found, but meanwhile we should revel in the mystery. | The Utah Monolith, What It Means, Why It Matters, and Whether It's Aliens 00:03:40 |
| 2021-05-11 | restate | John says writing works only when reader and writer lay down their shields of cynicism; feeling an author knows something about you makes you less alone, which he loves most about art. | I am a small boat. It's Question Tuesday. 00:01:53 |
| 2021-09-07 | restate | John recalls Horace's line that poetry should delight and instruct; making art it is easy to focus on one, but his favorite jokes, poems and novels do both. | My Two Favorite Jokes 00:02:50 |
| 2021-11-02 | restate | John says lasting is not why books exist: they exist to be helpful to the people who find them. | enough 00:01:44 |
| 2021-11-16 | restate | Like Dürer with the rhinoceros, John depends on others' words and images for orbital sunrises; that is one gift of art: a window, not fully transparent, into other worlds and lives. | Orbital Sunrise: The First Art Made in Space 00:07:26 |
| 2021-12-01 | restate | Like Kent's work, John finds Sarah's collages beautiful, ethically challenging and interesting to ponder, as where the natural meets the artificial and the unbuyable meets the buyable. | Loving the Loves of Your Loves 00:02:26 |
| 2022-05-03 | restate | John believes that by standing there without judgment, stories proclaim their characters' full humanity and help us see the humanity within ourselves. | My Religion and My Banned Books 00:01:56 |
| 2022-05-10 | restate | John says living with an artwork for years, seeing it through ever-changing eyes, gives an experience deeper and lovelier than wanderlust. | An Attempt at Exhausting an Artwork in Cincinnati 00:03:24 |
| 2022-08-30 | restate | The art that means most to John is art he connects to personally: a painting that looks the way his OCD feels, or art made by someone he loves. | How to Buy Good Art for Less Than $100,000,000 00:02:55 |
| 2022-11-01 | restate | John thinks art needs mutual generosity: making the work is a gift to an audience, and the audience's attention is a gift to the artist; this gift exchange is central to how he understands art. | Is This Painting Upside Down? 00:02:55 |
| 2023-01-10 | restate | In a comment, John says all his favorite art makes him feel things intensely without knowing why, and that is the magic; making viewers feel that way was his big hope. | Introducing: The Format creator comment |
| 2023-02-21 | refine | John used to think art had to be great to be worthwhile; now he thinks it only has to be. | Maybe Art Only Needs to Be 00:03:44 |
| 2023-04-18 | restate | In their only long-standing disagreement, John maintained that to be true, a novel had to be hopeful and redemptive, with some moral or ethical responsibility to readers. | goodbye to my friend 00:02:08 |
| 2024-02-02 | restate | In a channel comment John says art is for the people and that Sara's work, including the Hanklerfish painting, is available at her shop. | The Weirdest Thing I Did in LA creator comment |
| 2024-04-16 | restate | John says one point of art is to help us feel less alone, especially in abstract parts of us hard to understand or share, and the Turtles film does that. | I Already Got Paid 00:02:45 |
| 2024-05-07 | restate | John says art must be made as a gift, and, wildest to him, the person receiving it must give a gift in return: their generous, open attention. | A Secret about Art 00:02:48 |
| 2024-12-10 | restate | John tells his younger self his books will not last forever, since forever is an incorrect concept, and calls that great news: someday The Fault in Our Stars will be read for the last time and humanity will go on. | On Writing 00:01:18 |
| 2024-12-17 | restate | John says the novel's teenagers smoke, drink and behave self-destructively because books exist not as moral screeds but as tellers of truths. | About THAT Scene in Looking for Alaska 00:00:29 |
| 2025-10-21 | restate | John says readers are co-creators of books, rendering even a popular book unique by bringing themselves to it, which is why books express deep things nothing else can touch. | Is Book Publishing Dying? An Author's Perspective 00:04:50 |
| 2026-01-13 | refine | These days John thinks writing is for him, and only also, hopefully, at some point for the reader. | why we make art 00:03:24 |
| 2026-01-20 | restate | Extending last week's (week of 12 January 2026) video, John says we make art not only to delight and instruct others, as Horace said 2,000 years ago, but also to delight and instruct ourselves. | Am I ... Good? 00:02:40 |
| 2026-02-14 | restate | John says that over the last nine years he has struggled with what art, especially storytelling, is for, and concluded that we have always done it: even when half our children died and we died at 30 of infected teeth, we told stories about the stars; it is essential to who we are. | Project for Awesome 2026 part 3! 06:49:33 |
| 2026-07-07 | restate | Citing his friend Kaveh Akbar's line that art is where what we survive survives, John says he tried to write about what we survive and how art records our survival. | On the Death of the Author 00:06:20 |
| 2026-07-14 | restate | John says two of the coolest things art can do are inspire more art and lead to deep, lasting connections. | On the Road Again 00:01:39 |
| 2026-09-15 | restate | John says books are a co-creation of text and reader: writer and reader both bring their deepest selves, so the same book read at different times is different; the text doesn't change, you do. | YouTube Says This Video Has 683,183 Views, It Actually Has 312,584 00:04:22 |
| 2026-09-22 | restate | John says the conversations around art matter more than the art, which hardly matters in a vacuum: it needs a reader or viewer to become real. | I Want You to Know Nothing About This 00:01:02 |
| 2026-09-30 | restate | John says art is not a luxury, as our economic system implies, but essential human expression and a core form of bit commitment: humans made art before caloric surplus or specialization of labour. | The Point of Life 00:02:32 |
| 2026-10-02 | restate | In Hollywood, Ending John tried to argue that art is essential to human experience and a site of joint enchantment where our attention intertwines and deepens our connection. | the most powerful attention-consuming tools in the history of the world 00:01:57 |
| 2026-10-06 | restate | John wants viewers to think of what they put into the world as art: an attempt to refashion Earth's raw materials into something better and more interesting than it needs to be. | Make Your Art. 00:02:42 |
| 2026-10-13 | restate | John says we should think of more of what we put into the world as art, like a home-cooked meal or a hand-knitted sweater: turning Earth's raw materials into something transformational and better than it needs to be is art. | My Lungs Are on the Outside of the Body 00:01:52 |
Hank
| date | how | position | video |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2012-07-13 | tension | Hank says he reads very differently from John: for what books do to him, not how they do it; analysing all the time would stop the book doing its work. | An Army of Mindless Drones 00:00:00 |
| 2014-06-06 | restate | Hank values the film for opening up the mysteries of life, love and hurt for examination and understanding, which the world needs more of. | Thoughts from the TFiOS Premiere! 00:03:26 |
| 2017-09-29 | restate | Hank learned from TNG that themes are as important as plot, sometimes more, since diversion is the least a story can offer. | What's This Video About? 00:03:27 |
| 2026-03-27 | restate | Hank thinks people care about the stories around what they consume: everybody knows an AI dance video differs from a real person moving their real body. | What is 'Slop' (and why it gives me hope) 00:09:38 |
| 2026-10-01 | restate | Hank says his artwork is not video but the channel, the brotherhood, the whole thing: from people unsure which brother is which to people making Hollywood, Ending cakes, fonts and hospitals in Sierra Leone. | Are We Still YouTubers? 00:06:57 |
Dates are upload dates, which set the order. Where the speaker gives a different recording date in the video, it is added as "said on YYYY-MM-DD, implied" (derived from the date said in the video).