The discourse side of Twitter has had a busy week or two, all thanks to a lengthy piece on The New York Times, which came out on October 5. By Robert Kolker, ‘Who’s the Bad Art Friend?’ Title piece. A work of art is seeing a protracted debate with chunky threads discussing the merits and demerits of two ‘friends’ embroiled in a prolonged legal tussle. Don Dorland and Sonya Larson, two writers from the Boston literary troupe, protested the latter for allegedly picking up a portion of a letter the former had written to the recipient of a kidney donation. Dorland claimed that doing so was plagiarism; Larson denied and said that Dorland’s allegations against him contained an element of racism and the white savior complex. In the legal battle Dorland sued Larson for plagiarism, and Larson sued Dorland for defamation. The Twitter debate has, by now, delved into the obscure realm of the centuries-old question of the interplay of racism and morality, as well as the age-old question of life with art.
What are the focal points of the ‘Bad Art Friend’ debate?
Key discussion points for most of social media revolved around Dorland’s ’emotional need’, which she was negotiating with her Facebook post on kidney donation, and a free, navel-tackling omission of “kindness”. Brand that talks about self defense. The side that Larson has been admonishing has been to appropriate one’s lived experience and then to label their resistance as white privilege. Ethics discussed: is an act of kindness useless if the doer does it for praise? There have also been several conflicting narratives on who was the first to legalize the issue. However, beyond the technicalities, there is another side to the BAF debate. During their fight, Dorland found that Larson and other members of the writers’ non-profit Grubstreet were having lengthy conversations, discussing how serious the former was. At the core of the matter, then, is also the question: What if the people you consider friends secretly hate you?
I know writers hold the idea sacrosanct that everything is fair game to them, but this, and the first Cat Person essay (https://t.co/hS0kV2csBS), there *are* to be talked about what we are doing for our motivations
I am haunted by this comment, for example: pic.twitter.com/gHvN28SVs1
— kidneygate (@kidneygate) 13 October 2021
The real lesson from Bad Art Friend is coming to think that when someone super annoying does something purposefully great, you need to post the image below instead of building an elaborate torture narrative where Good things actually go bad and there is evidence of their evil nature. pic.twitter.com/Va44OyYZyj— Ash Vs The Evil Dead (@why_wolf) 14 October 2021
You don’t gaslight someone, co-opt a deeply meaningful and personal life experience for your own narrative, then call their response “white privilege.” As an AAPI Woman, Very Embarrassed and Disappointed for Both Sonya Larson and Celeste Ng #BadArtFriend— sheena (@shnanigansq) October 7, 2021
What are getting kidney memes?
Kidney memes are about – well, kidneys. The primary line that targets these memories, however, is one from a NYT original piece that quoted Dorland as such: When friends and advisers at the Grubstreet conference failed to mention her kidney donation, she said, “What The writers don’t care about my kidney donation? What kind of confusion did I have, because I thought I was in a community of service-oriented people.”
Where have you heard of ‘Bad Art Friend’ before?
Bad Art Friend? oh you mean Dorian Gray?— sparknotes (@sparknotes) October 6, 2021
The debate over the use of life’s art creation is as old as time, with inspiration, transformational use, copies and original discourse (no pun intended) since the beginning of literature. Perhaps, one of the earliest known contemplations was none other than Plato, in his Theory of Mimesis, where he stated that literature is twice removed from reality; In short, he believed that all art essentially imitates life, and that the idea is supreme reality. Along came Oscar Wilde and shattered the concept, writing in his “The Decay of Lying”: “life imitates art far more than art”. So this debate is not new and has been going on for centuries without any solution.
In popular culture, the latest material that deals with an extremely similar theme is the Netflix film “Malcolm & Mary,” starring Zendaya and Denzel Washington. Here, the discourse is further complicated by the romantic dynamic between the lead pair, where one wins acclaim after making a film that rises above the life of the other. Here too, racism is heavily involved in how they affect the subject of art.
Is the actual art at the center of the drama any good?
The New Yorker staff writer Katy Waldman read and reviewed Larson’s short story “The Kindest” at the center of the controversy, saying that the absence of kindness stripped it of its literary merit and turned it into a “takedown in disguise”. Kolker quoted Calvin Heinick, a friend of Larson’s, in the original excerpt: “The first draft of the story was actually a takedown of Don, right? But Sonya didn’t publish that draft … she created a new, better story. “. Waldman rejected this claim in his article, insisting that the original purpose of the story remained through its revisions.
What is the verdict and why do people care?
After all, who is the bad art friend? The overwhelming consensus on Twitter and elsewhere seems to be that everyone involved in the drama acted unforgivably in more ways than one, and no one is a guilty victim or one-sided wrongdoer. Perhaps what has kept so many people engrossed in the drama and leading it to the discourse is the simple fact that it appears to be a problem with a solution in sight. However, it is designed to keep you engaged, because the moment you think you have it, some new information comes up that confuses the context for you. The Guardian columnist Emma Brooks writes in an opinion piece, “It happens every few months, somewhere, with a new genre of near credibility. Someone who usually works for a large media company.” , devotes considerable resources to excavating an obscure story of relatively little public interest”. This, Brokes argues, leads you to question what you are doing with your life. So if, for the past two weeks, you’ve found yourself scrolling with bated breath down hours’ worth of Twitter Bad Art Friend threads, somewhere it was meant to be.
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