Can We Start Calling It Art Again?

Instead of “content”?

Jenna Goldsmith
4 min readFeb 6, 2024

To be honest, the state of the world is pretty grim.

I can’t speak on a lot of the economic and political issues that are plaguing society, but I know enough about the creative world to ask one thing:

Can we start calling it art again?

We live in this culture of “Content Creators” and the constant output of stimulus to keep us staring at screens and holding our attention so that advertisers can slither in and sell us their products.

On the flip side, we are living in this world of mass creation.

People have an almost endless variety of media they can use to document their lives, emotions, relationships, etc. From charcoal drawings to TikTok dances to blog rants to songs recorded in bedrooms. The amount of creation happening is astounding.

Then it gets labeled content.

And fed back to us for mindless consumption like digital popcorn.

Language is powerful and the catchall phrase of “content” for any media we consume has blurred the lines between what exactly is being made (ei. a theatrical movie vs a youtube video) into a vague wishy-washy soup of media. But it’s the quickest way for executives, who don’t lift a finger to make…

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