Art Can Only Imitate Life

“Going to Whole Foods, want me to pick you up anything?” This Tinder message— courtesy of Matt, 21—lit up Victoria’s phone, and we both immediately burst out laughing. I was visiting Victoria in her sunny California hometown, and we’d spent the day playing tourist and gorging on acai bowls. Now exhausted and uncomfortably full, we were slumped together on her couch.

“Did he actually just use the ‘Whole Foods’ pick up line on me?” Victoria exclaimed, once our laughter had calmed.

“Okay but the real question is,” I replied, “did it work?”

Like Matt, 21, I avidly watched the new season of Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, the hit Netflix TV show that featured the aforementioned ‘Whole Foods’ pick up line. Though I’ve been an Aziz Ansari fan since his Parks and Recreation days, Master of None is bit of a departure from the actor/comedian’s typical work. His trademark exuberant humor is still there, of course, but it’s tempered by a seriousness and a willingness to engage with more profound topics. In the series, Ansari plays Dev Shah—an actor and essentially less-successful version of the real Aziz—while many of Ansari’s friends and family members (including Aziz’s parents!) play fictionalized versions of themselves as well.

The extent to which Master of None resembles Aziz’s own life, through both its casting and its storylines, makes it a memoir of sorts, a sitcom that feels at once highly personal and full of humor. And it’s this confessional quality that draws me to the show, lending it a sense of authenticity in a world where the entertainment industry seems like a monolithic black box. Watching the on-screen Dev deal with girl troubles and his immigrant identity feels almost like I’m watching Ansari stumble through these issues himself. But while the intimacy apparent in Master of None is part of what makes it compelling, it’s also a little deceiving. It may feel like we know Ansari, but we’ve never met him—and the complexity of life cannot be reduced to a 20-minute sitcom episode.

Ansari isn’t alone in creating this personal, memoir-esque type of art. Many musicians— from Childish Gambino to The 1975 to Kendrick Lamar—incorporate intimate stories in their music, detailing seminal childhood experiences (the outro story from Gambino’s “That Power”); post-partum depression and drug addiction (The 1975’s “She Lays Down,” about front man Matt Healy’s mother); and selfishness and economic mobility (Lamar’s “How Much a Dollar Cost?”). Meanwhile, there are comics like Hasan Minhaj, who famously spoke at the 2017 White House Correspondent’s Dinner, recounting truly horrifying stories about his earliest experiences with racism in his comedy special Homecoming King. Even less formally defined “creators” share intimate details about themselves online regularly. YouTube personalities vlog every day for entire weeks or months, often posting 30 or 45 minute videos of ‘unscripted’ glimpses into their daily lives. Instagram accounts like @hiddenheartbreak and @180daysof_not_dating post anonymous illustrations and detailed stories about their breakups as a method of therapy.

With the use of such personal stories and the increasing accessibility of art, the borders between artist and audience seem to have thinned: Ansari’s show, for example, is immediately broadcast to Netflix’s 98 million users worldwide, while many musicians release their albums across multiple platforms—like Spotify and Apple Music—all at once. But this accessibility itself reveals a bit of the contradiction: if your favorite artist shares their most intimate truths with everyone, how intimate can these truths really be? With social media creators in particular, this illusion of intimacy can be even further heightened due to the inherent democracy and sense of spontaneity of internet platforms. Many YouTubers do little to dispel this myth—referring to their fan base of millions as a “community” and passively projecting the image of a one-person production company regardless of the truth.

This is not to say that art informed by personal experience is bad, or that artists are being disingenuous when they create in this way; quite the opposite, actually. I’ve truly enjoyed and resonated with the works of each of the artists I’ve referenced—and considering the fact that Master of None won an Emmy, I’m not the only one. In a sense, audiences really do get to know creators through their content: people make art as a way of communication, to both be understood and understand the world. While I’m no Aziz Ansari, a few of my past articles for this magazine have centered around my experiences with cultural identity as a first-generation Asian American. These experiences, even if at points exaggerated or shifted to fit the article’s thesis, are a part of who I am, and have shaped the way I see myself and my world. And though I felt confident in my decision to publish these personal stories, I still felt more than a little uncomfortable when acquaintances told me they’d read my articles.

But at the same time, my experiences haven’t been limited to the few that I chose to share in my articles—and the same goes for the far more seasoned creators that have achieved commercial success and social media clout. This is a fundamental feature of creation: as all people live lives that cannot possibly be shared in total detail, storytelling is a way of picking experiences to make a point. I don’t doubt that there’s truth in Ansari’s depiction of Dev in Master of None; the inclusion of truth is part of what makes the show’s exploration of topics like love and religion so earnest and meaningful. But I also believe that the amount of truth shown onscreen is far outweighed by the amount that is left unseen. The need to understand artists through their content is a reasonable one, but we cannot productively engage with art until we realize that it is impossible to know a creator in totality, and that art is both creation and interpretation. Ultimately, art is much more about its effect on the audience—and the meaning it creates in impacting us—than the accuracy with which it represents its creator. The borders between artist and audience may have thinned, but they still exist.

Sabrina Wang ’19 in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at s.d.wang@wustl.edu.