Art and Attention in the Taylor Swift Eras Era

Hey there,

Today I’m kicking off a two-week experiment. Want to join me?

Here’s what I’m going to do: Every time I hear a Taylor Swift song, I drop a dollar in a jar. Every time I see her name in a headline or see an image of her on my phone or computer or TV, I drop a dollar in the jar. Every time someone I’m with mentions her name or starts singing one of her songs, I drop a dollar in the jar.

Please don’t get me wrong. This has nothing to do with criticizing Taylor Swift — she’s incredible and deserving of all success and praise.

This has everything to do with what happens when the success of someone like Taylor Swift gets diced up, commodified, multiplied exponentially, then served through every possible channel to grab our attention. It’s not so different from when the American economists told farmers that monocrops are more lucrative than biodiverse farms, and suddenly corn and soy began showing up in everything we eat.

Again, don’t get me wrong: I love corn in so many ways. But I also know (from experience, believe me) what happens when corn is all I consume. It wrecks my gut and wreaks havoc throughout my body. Perhaps more importantly, we are finally reckoning with the devastating impact that monoculture farming has had on the land, water, and the biodiversity of plants and animals. If you insist on cranking out only one product to the exclusion of everything else, you might soon find out how much the initial success of that one thing actually was connected to and dependent on the health and well-being of the very biodiversity that has been threatened.

Anyway. Back to Taylor. I’m not trying to knock Taylor’s success, or her talent as a singer, songwriter, and performer. The incredible numbers are also worth noting. If you saw last week how many friends shared their Spotify Wrapped or Apple Rewind, you probably also saw that Taylor topped everything. News reports all year have touted the economic impact of Taylor’s Eras tour, and just this week came the news of her movie’s record-shattering first week at the box office. In my hometown alone, we saw a $48 million economic impact from her tour stop in July. Wowza.

Yet what I’ve been wrestling with lately has nothing to do with her talent or success. It has to do with the absurd ubiquity of her brand at this cultural moment, and how Taylor Swift’s name, face, and identity — her brand — has been commodified into catnip and tossed into every corner of our attention-driven economy. Or, to keep with my metaphor, her brand has been commodified into corn and made into a key ingredient of seemingly everything we are currently consuming.

But, to pivot for a moment, I’d like to make a small argument here for the artists in your local community. I wish I could show some of the behind-the-scenes of what I see with my friends who pour their blood, sweat, and tears into their paintings, poems, and performances. I’d like to show you how GOOD their work is, how worthy their art is of our attention and contemplation — the kind of work that challenges, affirms, distorts, praises, grieves, confuses, elevates, and reminds us of the many facets of the human experience—indeed, that there are myriad ways of experiencing life itself. I’d like to make the case that the painters, poets, singers, musicians, sculptors, dancers, writers, and artists offer the very biodiversity our culture requires to keep us fed and well and free in the fullness of our humanity.

And also, I wish I could also give you a sense of how discouraged so many incredibly talented and worthy artists become when they pour all of their work into an exhibition and don’t sell a single painting; or spend years on a book only to learn from the small press publisher that there won’t be a second printing; or put months of rehearsals into a performance that is the presence of so much life and joy, only to have a dozen people show up—and half of them are on the guest list. And many of them will keep doing it even in the face of such discouragements, setbacks, and struggles. In the haunting words of Gillian Welch, “They were gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn’t pay.”

My point I’m trying to get at is this: My attention is an act of devotion. My attention is tangled up in how I spend my time and my money. My attention is relational and impacts others. My attention is political, because if every dollar spent is a vote for the world I want to live in, then the connection between my attention and resources is powerful and full of potential.

That’s why I’m not writing off Taylor Swift, banning her name, boycotting her albums, or trying to cancel her for anything at all. I’ll still listen, still sing along, and still wait with bated breath for news of her potential engagement Travis Kelce.

But instead, I’m launching this silly little experiment just to see what happens when I drop a dollar in a jar every time Taylor Swift pops up and grabs my attention. And at the end of these two weeks, I’m going to take an accounting of these “moments made into money” and determine what I’ll do. Maybe it will be enlightening, maybe not. Maybe it will be ten dollars, maybe a lot more. But I’m already wondering where where else I might redirect this attention and consider how it might support the brilliant, talented, hard-working artists in my community.

I’m getting ahead of myself. For now I’ll just pay attention to my attention. This season of the year moves so fast. So I’ll take my time.

Are you ready for it?

Andrew