I have a recurring tendency to force art I love on people who didn’t ask for it and don’t love it…yet. Imagine from my perspective, having an epiphany about something, deriving from it joy and awe, love and genuine wonder. How could you hoard it and keep it to yourself?

The only answer I can find to this question is: I couldn’t, so I don’t.

In a world of soaring prices, the art I love doesn’t cost very much. You can probably access all the music I love on the streaming platform you pay for already. Novels you can get from a library or buy cheaply second-hand. People today commonly recommend way more expensive forms of entertainment without reservations. Even though what I enjoy is more accessible, I face resistance.

Some of the novels I like are large and maybe dense. They take time to read, not money, and time isn’t free. People are burned out from their jobs or raising families or just trying to feel OK in 2025. When they imagine reading the novels I hand them, they imagine the hours it’ll take to read them. My schedule is probably lighter than theirs, so it’s easier for me to conceive of time more broadly and abstract–not as hours it takes to read, but time as in lifetime. I can’t imagine going through life without encountering this or that novel or music.

We’re both right! Nobody’s wrong here. They can’t imagine juggling parenting and their professional lives with the time it takes to listen to avant garde jazz albums by Sun Ra or read a 900-page novel. People have precious little spare time, so why wrestle with art that seems strange or doesn’t suck them in right away?

I get it! When I try to push my longer, more challenging beloveds on my people, my secular proselytizing, I often sense people looking for the politest way to refuse. Sometimes when people say no to a critically-regarded work, they jokingly say something like, “I’m too dumb for it!” No! I don’t think they really mean it, but anybody can consume any art. Creating it is a different story! But consuming? It’s a question of patience and desire, not raw intelligence. Liking highbrow art is not a marker of intelligence, it’s just a question of character and personal temperament.

The way I’d frame the question people should ask themselves is: what responsibility do you have towards yourself to ensure you go through life and find really, really cool art? Are you doing right by yourself? Pushing yourself enough? People need to take this seriously! Don’t shortchange yourself! There are all kinds of BFFs in art you’ll never meet unless you look hard enough.

The algorithm is not your true friend and you shouldn’t outsource art discovery to Big Tech. Fine, if the algorithm serves up good music or whatever, don’t reject it. Enjoy! But it’s only a tool. You owe it to yourself to sample stuff that many serious people love a lot, or dig into some weird dank shit you never imagined yourself ever liking and come out on the other side, changed. Even if you don’t love it, the journey will be a trip. Maybe you will love it later, in time. It’s growth either way. You learn what you don’t like.

“Let people like what they like” is circular because people don’t know until they’ve tried it and really wrestled with it a bit. You might dislike it at first then warm up to it after understanding it better. Hate can become like, like may become love. Dense art is seldom understood right away and yields more and more each time you encounter it.

Reading Great Books is very obviously a good thing to do in life, but it’s also very obviously something people scoff and roll their eyes at. When someone is looking for a good read, what are you gonna do, recommend Proust’s In Search of Lost Time? In a way, no. But in a way, yes!

Art today is often a diversion, something to help people chill and wind down. I don’t say this sneeringly. Art is on different levels and people need to relax. I love chilling. That’s what I’m built for. People struggle to find the mental bandwidth to concentrate.

The trappings of highbrow art are also a barrier—people’s ideas about, say, Kafka are usually very different than what his writing is like. Many Canon novels are funny, including Franz’s! But people brace themselves for “heavy” art and enter a solemn, dusty headspace before opening the first page, misaligning their mood and the works’.

Recommending art that art critics or dirty hippies love draws suspicion because people don’t think of themselves as art critics or dirty hippies, and this conscious self-perception stops them from actually encountering some art.

On a logical level, you’d think everybody would prefer their art to be as “good” as possible, that we’re all on the same page, but that’s seldom how it happens. My view is people should try things in life, they may as well be good things, and having an adventurous spirit about finding it can only be good.

Personally, I can measure my life in terms of the musical phases I’ve been in. This art really means a lot to me! I’d be in my bedroom as a teenager, alone, listening to the Grateful Dead or Django Reinhardt or Robert Johnson or Lenny Breau or Charlie Parker, astonished and ecstatic. Of course I have to tell people about this stuff! I’ve never loved music more than I do now, at 40. Literature, too.

So yes I’ll tell you about what I’m into because I don’t know how not to be like that. I don’t mean to pester, just share my life and my loves. I can’t tell you what art to love, but you owe it to yourself to go into the deep end and don’t come back until you’ve caught something serious, cool and probably unexpected. When you have, you’ll know.