Though so named after a microscopic, eight-legged animal, this is not a science newsletter. So what does the tardigrade have to do with art, culture and media criticism?
The tardigrade, also known as the water bear or the moss piglet, is what I call a ‘zeitgeist animal’. This is a term I came up with to describe a living being that sums up the collective sentiment of our current moment. It should not be confused with ‘spirit animal,’ a term most often used by adoring fans to heap praise on someone they admire in a style woefully appropriative of indigenous wisdom.
No, the tardigrade is a zeitgeist animal because it reflects our zeitgeist — the defining spirit of our time. In 2017, the tardigrade made headlines when it was discovered to be so resilient, so hardy, that it could survive an apocalypse, radiation, deep space, the death of our sun or a new ice age. It has remained a dystopian darling of those in the know ever since.
The tardigrade has also popped up all over the place in popular media — from Ant-Man and the Wasp to South Park, Family Guy, Rick and Morty along with other cartoons I probably haven’t seen. But music and literature are slower to catch on to the metaphorical power of this animal.
That’s the Tl;dr on why the tardigrade is worth our praise — it’s a little creature that can teach us about resilience. What if, when Thoreau was out looking for wisdom in the woods of Walden Pond, hunting for a way to survive the creeping existential dread of his own zeitgeist, he was actually searching for the same qualities that a tiny little animal called the tardigrade, resting in some nearby moss, had the whole time?
The tardigrade is an artful animal. By this I mean only that its ability to self-actualize, to create tools for itself to survive, come what may, fulfill the same function as art at its very core. Art is survival. A good story, doubly so.
So that’s the intention of this newsletter—to unpack lessons around art as tools for survival. We can’t have such snooty discussions, though, without also talking about the media industry a bit.
I started this newsletter because arts journalism already had a pre-existing condition well before the pandemic but freelance budgets on respirators. As publications focused on appeasing ad buyers to meet revenue projections over the last decade, true criticism and analysis started to dwindle, and access journalism reigned. This meant even less space was available to profile experimental artists, unpack provocative work and publish long, heady conversations. Though I’m speaking in the past tense, this is still very much a problem.
Every Tuesday I’ll share a new issue featuring lessons on survival from my arts reporting career past, present and future — some awesome unpublished interviews and excerpts. I’ll also post roundups of major developments in media, music, film, television and more.
Paid subscribers will get the exclusive, unpublished stuff alongside weekly serialized fiction from a project I’m working on.
Thanks for your support, and making it this far.
Onward,
Justin