Making what looks cool
“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” - Kurt Vonnegut
Perhaps that one person is simply yourself, or someone who shares your sensibilities. Following that advice leads directly to a sometimes uncomfortable truth: it is entirely valid to make decisions when creating or consuming art solely on the basis of "because it's cool." During my architecture undergraduate studies, I often wanted to pursue ideas that reviewers and professors discouraged as 'arbitrary.' This caused me a lot of frustration, and I would usually end up with projects that felt artistically weak. After far too much time, a professor explicitly told me the secret. While reviewing some ideas with him, I suggested something that I knew I only wanted to add because I thought it looked cool. He told me that entire careers are built on Post-Justification, and it finally clicked for me. From then on, my reviews went a lot smoother. You could make whatever you wanted, as long as you could market it correctly.
It's very easy to see this kind of post-justification in projects once you start looking for it. Architects and designers who have followed a consistent style throughout their careers will often have paragraphs of jargon about how their style "creates a dialogue with the geometry of the body of the occupants" or some other BS phrase that tries to push reason onto arbitrary form. Some designers look to the hard sciences or nature to come up with convoluted, unproven theories about why the designs they already like are the objectively best. I cannot say for sure if these designers are consciously aware of their post-rationalizing tendencies or if they have convinced themselves that their aesthetic preferences just so happen to align with some universal truth that hadn't been discovered before.
A particularly prominent example of leveraging perceived authority to justify personal vision is R. Buckminster Fuller, an architect, designer, and inventor in the mid-20th century. Many people look up to him as a sort of modern Renaissance man. Some of his ideas continue to this day, and the number of people he has inspired is incredible. Much of his work, both design and writing, is genuinely compelling. He is also, however, a master marketer who leaned heavily on a fabricated persona and pseudo-scientific language to elevate his ideas. There are many biographies of Fuller, including "Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller" by Alec Nevala-Lee. This article reviewing the book and interviewing the author looks into how much of Fuller's story was purposefully fabricated and marketed so that his ideas would be more respected. He was never a licensed architect, his understanding of mathematics was rudimentary, and much of his prose often descends into a jumble of impressive-sounding but ultimately hollow word salad – seemingly designed to obscure rather than clarify, lending an air of scientific depth to choices perhaps better explained by personal aesthetic intuition. He was charismatic. He had figured out the marketing.
The world runs on stories, and the difference between something being liked or ignored is largely based on the stories that people tell themselves about it. Being able to interject your own story first – whether grounded in rigorous truth or clever post-rationalization – is very useful for critical acclaim and financial success. At the end of the day, developing this narrative skill is often required for success. I'm not suggesting that creatives shouldn't market themselves.
But we shouldn't pretend like it's not marketing. This pressure to justify has become so deeply engrained that we are expected to spin an argumentative web to describe why we enjoy or don't enjoy the things we consume. Personal artistic projects are often asked to be explained by friends or family, implicitly demanding a justification beyond simple preference. Maybe if we were all just a little bit more honest with ourselves and our friends when we simply like something, we wouldn't be so easily convinced to partake in, invest in, or enjoy things simply because of the story we are being told about them.
Consider as a counterpoint, FLCL. FLCL is a Japanese anime from 2000. It is convoluted and confusing, and despite only being 6 episodes, it has a large fanbase interested in extracting the deeper thematic meaning of its details. However, much of the fan base accepts that there is a chance that it's a loosely connected thread about adulthood with many references to things that the creator enjoys. It's widely understood that you can take whatever you want from it depending on what you're looking for. A Reddit user posted on r/FLCL asking questions about the story. The top comment simply jokes, "Watch it again!" This is a community that accepts ambiguity and personal interpretation over any author-sanctioned narrative.
The stories around art are not immutable. Death of the Author is a well known concept for a reason. Feeling pressured to create a complicated story for the art you consume or the art you make is a mistake. Take what you want from art. Make the art you want to make. "This is a thing that I think is cool, here you go" is a complete story, and one you shouldn't feel ashamed of.