Author: Youngjin Kang Date: April 10, 2025
Crafting a piece of art which appeals to everybody is a challenge, primarily because the audience consists of innumerable individuals, each of whom possesses a unique set of knowledge and expectations. Making every one of them appreciate your art is nearly impossible.
It is also a mark of virtue, however, to strive to let your art be accessible to as many people as possible. I do not mean that you ought to be a conformist; indeed, you will lose your own identity as a creator if you choose to become somebody else just for the sake of gratifying the cheap taste of the crowd. However, it is just as unwise to brand yourself as a lonely genius who is a victim of one's own extraordinary talent, and use it as an excuse to cut yourself off from the rest of the world.
And if you are to entertain the notion that the audience must be sufficiently "educated" in order to comprehend your art, it will function as a proof that it is your own lack of aptitude which made such a prerequisite an absolute necessity.
The root of the problem with which you might be struggling, with regard to the compatibility of your "creative endeavor" with that of the expectations of the general public, could be broken down to three major elements of rhetoric which often conflict with one another. I will go over them below.
In most cases, people prefer to see and hear things which are already familiar to them. It is especially true in the context of mainstream media, where consumers are expected to be spoon-fed the sort of products they can easily identify and sympathize with.
People want to see things they have already seen, and hear things they have already heard, down here on Earth, right under the Sun. Originality is an unforgivable sin in the mass market of cheap pre-packaged customer satisfaction, and anything which deviates from the norm even by the slightest degree gets thrown into the trash can as the most despicable form of pompous nonsense. The very moment your audience faces something which does not instantly please their eyes in the most obvious manner, they will turn they heads away without a glimpse of forethought.
Your average audience is heartless, and every one of your words will be rejected and utterly ignored unless you present it under the spotlight of shallow idolatry.
Thus the most viable strategy from an economic point of view, in the end, is to aim for the lowest common denominator and make sure that every split second of the customer's attention span is dedicated to what's the most appealing to the senses - sex, violence, gluttony, gambling, and whatnot. And in this bloodless world of business and profit optimization, your moral eloquence has no place to stand.
To be fair, some forms of art go deeper than mere sensual pleasure, and they manage to elaborate themselves quite far as to plead with the viewer's emotions. Soap opera, heroic stories, and other breeds of romanticism fall into this category. They appeal to the poet's heart, and paint the picture of one's fairy tale castle with colorful narratives.
This kind of art relies its momentum on the provocative energy of justice, remorse, compassion, and other moral sentiments. In the end, however, will such an emotional drama surmount the accusation that it is nothing more than a mere piece of political propaganda, designed to exploit the hopeless who are desperate enough to sacrifice their hearts for a charismatic demagogue?
Emotions are indeed mighty means of furnishing your art with motives. By sticking to the suggestive power of personal feelings, it will surely be able to attract the eyes of those who are in need of spiritual reassurance. If such an objective is the sole philosophy upon which your art is founded, however, on what basis will you be able to assert that it evinces more flavors of elegance than the myriad self-help (aka "personal development") lessons which flood the marketplace of hope sellers?
The aforementioned two methods of rhetoric, which rely heavily on either senses or emotions, may perhaps be too shallow and soulless in your world of art. As a result, you may be convinced that it is pure reason alone which has the force to suggest to the audience that your art is not just a mere piece of mindless entertainment, but something which carries some philosophical substance in it - something which is of intellectual and scholastic value.
This too, however, is vanity. People who are too busy to spend time outside of their worldly matters (e.g. business, friendship, family issues, jobs, etc) are hardly likely to pay attention to sophisticated ideas which constitute the pastime of pure intellects.
People who do possess enough time and talent to appreciate intellectual endeavors (e.g. scholars), on the other hand, will refuse to pay attention to your ideas either because their egos are too strong to let them acknowledge that somebody else might know something which they do not know. These elites are busy endorsing their own intellectual superiority, so they are unwilling to give any credit to their potential competitors.
And you know what? You, too, will not be able to free yourself from this evil if you do not keep your own ego in check.
In the world of ethos, we stick to things which directly arouse our senses; it is the amusement park of superficial pleasure, devoid of philosophy. In the world of pathos, we struggle to win the hearts of people by means of emotional appeals; it is the bottomless pit of clumsy poetry in which nothing remains but the romance of momentary feelings. In the world of logos, we take refuge in the home of academic elites; it is the secret treehouse of "deep thinkers" - a select few who defend their secluded egos in their petty ivory tower of intellectual pride.
What, then, shall comprise a graceful work of art, which is endowed with its own philosophy yet still manages to grasp the souls of those who regard it? This is a tricky problem.
In my honest opinion, the best way to solve this is to endeavor to strike a fine balance among ethos, pathos, and logos.
Casual arcade games are sugarcoated with ethos, but they often lack both pathos and logos. Soap operas are rich in pathos, yet they are poor in logos. Minimalist arts and their intricate geometric patterns are filled with logos, but they fall short of ethos and pathos. It is only when we bring ethos, pathos, and logos together on a single line of narrative, that we will be able to formulate a universal kind of art whose voice resonates in everyone's ear. For at the focal point of their intersection, there is divinity.
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