What interests me about art isn't just the result, it's the process, and the connection that process creates.

It's more than the "aura of the artist" which Walter Benjamin talks about in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction (highly recommend for anyone interested in past discussions on his topic), it's the fact that the writer is directly processing their world as experienced into an artifact which will allow me to understand their experience and enrich my own.

The loop is:

World -> Human -> Written Word -> Reader

compared to: Corpus -> Engagement Optimized Output -> Reader. This is something David Foster Wallace talks about in an essay E Unibus Plurum - the concern that artists producing art from media consumption rather than direct experience creates a house of a mirrors. Even if the optimization is for literary quality, it's still not coming from the world. Serious art is a kind of news, not just entertainment.

Beyond that, creating art isn't just a technical process, it's an open act of self-shaping and self-discovery that is meaningful to and reflective of a community. I worry about losing the deeply insightful members of society that artistic practises create. Of course if you're a media producer interested in profit that's perfect - they want caged pigs to consume their slop, not thoughtful connected individuals.