My dentist’s offering of stuff-you-watch-on-the-ceiling-TV includes the Bob Ross channel, and as I’m prone to establishing rituals I turn to it when I’m getting work done. Jaw issues that make dental work taxing aside, while I affect calm as an adult deep down I am still That Kid at the dentist who is a crying nightmare the littler kids next rooms down are staring at wondering “WTF is wrong with that kid”. It’s a way of self-soothing*. I also just like watching painting videos.
It is a little surprising, when one thinks on it: there is a streaming channel–replete with sudden commercials, which were immensely grating and near-profane when spliced with a soft-spoken man and soft music–entirely dedicated to episodes of painting tutorials that aired on public access television in the 80’s and 90’s. I’d seen The Joy of Painting some growing up, but I was a little kid when it aired. I can’t pretend I was a diehard fan before the nostalgia-cum-irony-soaked revival of all things sincere and pure in the 2010s, when Bob Ross tat (I can think of no better way to put it–just branded crap) started appearing at art stores and those ‘zany’ gift shops. I do not mean art supplies–I mean things like a Bob Ross chia pet or a Bob Ross waffle maker and other such tat I feel secondhand embarrassment even beholding, stuff that is purely reference and irony and no substance, meme-stuff of the meanest kind.
I’m working on a Snufkin costume for this Halloween, and I’ve been re-reading the Moomins books–I re-read a lot of children’s books while on the elliptical–so things Moomin have been hovering about just below my waking mind, or infusing it. (Also after the dentist we went to Goodwill where last week my partner saw a Snufkin painting that may-or-may-not (was not, as it turns out) still be there, so his silhouette was at the edges of my mental canvas, so to speak.) So it is not terribly outlandish or offhand that Moomins were brought to mind when watching Bob Ross. Both are un-apologetically genuine and free of the hyper-self-aware irony that has poisoned everything pop culture since the 90s. This is to say, the source material is.
Moomins have also been relentlessly merchandised, especially in Japan, but it’s stuff I admit I find charming–stationary, my bucket hat, the several Traveler’s Notebook-associated tie-ins that sell scalped for an obscene price. It’s pure mercantilism but it’s genuine in its own way; it sparks joy, whereas the Bob Ross stuff sparks revulsion, horror, almost sorrow, a desperate hoping the dead do not see into the world of the living. I may have bought some of the Moomins TN inserts and shitajiki at MSRP had I the opportunity, but I refuse to fall into one of the more corrosive and insidious aspects of Japanese material pop culture that is bleeding into the Western: limited-edition FOMO completionist accumulation.
It’s the same way I feel about gatcha mechanics and blind boxes working their way into Western products; they are immensely profitable and effective, so of course once the popularity of the Japanese model caught on it would be spread. I have bought blind-box figures and gatcha and it’s a little bit of fun, a bit of dopamine, and don’t have a problem with them any more than I do Pokemon cards themselves–it is the scalping and ruthless monetization that turns me off. Leaving the acquisition of some plastic ephemera up to fate makes of the acquisition a moment, a memory touched by the random flow of the universe. I collect memory triggers. And yet this rent-seeking profiteering was predictable given the hyper-financialization of everything in the US; I see desperation in it, the scramble to have a toehold in an economy that is pushing people out and creating more surplus labor each year. It is merely an extension of the idea of mere ownership being a means of revenue, not the creating of a thing itself.
I guess it is sincerity that I see in common in Ross and Snufkin — peddling, themselves, directly, either nothing (Snufkin, who repeatedly says that possessions are a hindrance to him and so much clutter) or the thing itself, the tools of the trade, the art, the lessons (Ross, during his lifetime), and in parallel do I see that essence of sincerity being sold with meta-products, that is, products about Snufkin and Ross, products featuring. Buying the seeming of something, of freedom, of art by one’s own hand, of living in the moment. Selling the essence of simplicity and non-consumption, the courage in living without pretense, in the doing. This is a form of pure vicariousness. I cannot imagine telling Snufkin I spent $500 on a notebook with his visage–the very idea would revolt him, having his image associated with such, used to manipulate people out of money.
I will not pretend Bob Ross’s popularity is purely attributed to his art; his personality absolutely cinched it, but it is a good personality, a genuine one on balance by all accounts, and that is the sort of charisma I don’t begrudge what-are-now-called ‘influencers’. If one is to be famous for being oneself that self should be admirable. Perfect does not exist and looking for it is seeking to get one’s own heart broken, and denying celebrities the dignity of human complexity and interiority, fallibility; expecting perfection is a form of objectification. But if we’re lionizing somebody purely on personality we can look for on-balance good, good enough. It would be a vast improvement over the current influencer archetype, which seems to be defined by impunity and narcissism and disruptiveness.
**I would also like to report everything looks “excellent” and the gum-pocket test was aced.
*I could not hear Mr. Ross’s voice over the scrape scrape scrape whiiiineeeee going up my jaw and into the roots of my eyes, though I am sure it would have been quite soothing. What I DID hear was the sudden jump in volume and “ARE YOU PAYING TOO MUCH FOR YOUR CAR INSURANCE???”
