From his great interview with the Paris Review:

I hate when art becomes a religion. I feel the opposite. When you start putting a higher value on works of art than people, you’re forfeiting your humanity. There’s a tendency to feel the artist has special privileges, and that anything’s okay if it’s in the service of art. I tried to get into that in Interiors. I always feel the artist is much too revered—it’s not fair and it’s cruel. It’s a nice but fortuitous gift—like a nice voice or being left-handed. That you can create is a kind of nice accident. It happens to have high value in society, but it’s not as noble an attribute as courage. I find funny and silly the pompous kind of self-important talk about the artist who takes risks. Artistic risks are like show-business risks—laughable. Like casting against type, wow, what danger! Risks are where your life is on the line. The people who took risks against the Nazis or some of the Russian poets who stood up against the state—those people are courageous and brave, and that’s really an achievement. To be an artist is also an achievement, but you have to keep it in perspective. I’m not trying to undersell art. I think it’s valuable, but I think it’s overly revered. It is a valuable thing, but no more valuable than being a good schoolteacher, or being a good doctor. The problem is that being creative has glamour. People in the business end of film always say, I want to be a producer, but a creative producer. Or a woman I went to school with who said, Oh yes, I married this guy. He’s a plumber but he’s very creative. It’s very important for people to have that credential. Like if he wasn’t creative, he was less.

Emphasis mine. I’ve said it so many times: the world doesn’t necessarily need more artists — what it needs is more decent human beings. It’s like Jeff Bridges’ mother told him: “remember to have fun and don’t take it too seriously.”

Don’t like something on the internet? The best strategy is often to ignore it:

The “just don’t look” strategy works for more than advertising…it’s effective in any situation where someone or something runs on attention. On the web attention comes in the form of links and pageviews so “just don’t look” translates roughly into “just don’t link or read”. If you don’t like who’s on the cover of Wired, just don’t look. If no one talks about her, she’ll go away. Think media gossip sites are ruining the web? Don’t read them. Leggy blonde conservative got your knickers in a knot? Just don’t look. Commenters ruining the internet? Moderate your comments or close them up. If some Web 2.0 blowhard says something stupid, just don’t look. Hate blonde socialites? Just. Don’t. Look.

This has always been my approach to blogging — I only blog about the things I love and want people to look at.

It’s also called “Criticism by Omission.”

Tipsy Texan lays out a philosophy of blogging that I subscribe to:

The reason why you don’t see much in the way of reviews at Tipsy Texan is because I made a decision a long time ago that I did not want to be negative, that I would write about only the things I liked. The problem is, there just aren’t that many places that i like. It is criticism by omission. If people could read my mind, they would hate me, because I am such an asshole.

And I love this paragraph on one of my favorite joints in town, Matt’s El Rancho:

I am unabashedly fond of Matt’s El Rancho. I love that shit. Is it great? Hell no. Is it sometimes just barely better than mediocre? Yes. But I still like it. That is my personal guilty pleasure, and I have lots of them. But I know better than to proclaim it God’s gift to Mexican food, or even to Tex-Mex. I know enough about the subject to know that that even though Matt’s has a soft spot in my heart, it is far from a culinary destination.

Read the whole thing: “On The Perils of Being an @sshole”