Art itself—not to mention artists as people—tends not to be bound by the quest for likability, and yet likes are what the current tyranny of quantification prioritizes most. In Filterworld, what is likable succeeds and what is not likable is doomed to fail, particularly in any arena of culture where audiences are requisite for survival. And because our American cultural landscape is almost entirely subservient to capitalism, that means more or less all of it.
