Meta Artful Writing
Writing is better when you can't tell how good it is
I just read two amazing pieces of writing and they made me think: Why are these pieces so good? It’s because they are brilliantly written without drawing attention to the writing itself. I call this “meta artful writing.”
My new book Learning to See is about the unique and powerful way that visual artists see the world, and how they look at works that have been created by themselves and by others. I’m a professional writer, and in a similar way to these artists, I read differently from most people. When I read I notice the writing. I notice when someone uses a cliche; they get points off for that, especially if it’s an easy cliche. But what draws my attention are the artful writers. I stop and reread when I notice a sentence that’s a little unusual—a sentence that’s written in a way that no one has ever written a sentence before. I notice when someone uses a word in a way that’s different than I’ve ever read before, and yet, it makes total sense. Sometimes that new word use is absolutely perfect.
But there’s a risk for the writer and I try to avoid this risk: I try not to be writerly. If the writing draws attention to itself then it’s too artful. Sometimes it seems like the writer is showing off. Like, “look at me, I’m a great writer.” But the really great writers are the ones who just write it. They make it look easy. But the hardest thing to do is to make writing look easy. (You can quote that one.) I notice that. I notice it when a writer makes it look easy, and I notice it when they’re showing off and making it look writerly.
Now, for the two pieces I read in The New Yorker magazine dated May 26, 2025. You can rely on The New Yorker to have brilliant writing. The main issue I occasionally have is that the authors show off their erudition too much. They just can’t avoid throwing in a sentence about what Irving Kristol said to them at a party, or what Gore Vidal wrote in a review of some musical or book or whatever. You know who you are. But these two pieces don’t do that. Well, they don’t do it as much as usual...
The two pieces are both reviews. The first is a review by Adam Gopnik of a new book, Who Knew, a memoir by Barry Diller. Gopnik, accurately, calls Diller an “aging entertainment tycoon.” The other is a review by Hua Hsu of a new movie about the 1990s band Pavement; the movie is called “Pavements.” I usually don’t read reviews if I don’t care about the topic, and I’m not interested in Diller or Pavement. But I had some time to kill, so I read these reviews, and the writing took my breath away.
What makes the writing “meta artful” is that it’s artful but in a way that knows about its artfulness, and plays with the artfulness, while dodging it so you don’t notice. These two reviews are examples of how hard it is to make it look easy. I’m not really sure how to describe how I read writing. I can’t teach anyone how to do it. It’s like the artists and designers who I interviewed; they say that their goal is to teach students how to see like they do. That’s why I called my book “learning to see.” But in my interviews, I myself didn’t learn how to see. You can’t learn it from talking about it. So I can’t tell you how I read this writing in a different way from most people. Let’s see—maybe I can provide a few quotations.
Gopnik is one of the writers who too often does that thing where he throws in something about Gore Vidal, but in this review, he behaves himself more than usual. He still does a good job of showing off how culturally savvy he is, but he does it in a meta-artful way. Here he is quoting from Diller’s book, about what Diller wrote about the home-shopping network QVC.
“The shows,” he writes, accurately, “looked as if they were produced in Poland in the 1950s.”
Why does Gopnik toss in the word “accurately”? To let us know that he’s aware of what Polish TV looked like in the 1950s. Is he, really? Did he go check it out on YouTube before he wrote this? Maybe he’s just complimenting Diller’s observation. Look back up a few paragraphs and you’ll see that I myself tossed in a gratuitous use of “accurately.” But I forgive him for that because the review is meta-artful overall. A major theme of his review is an extended riff on William Goldman’s famous saying about Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything,” meaning that no one knows what makes a movie good and no one knows which movies are going to succeed and make money. Maybe Gopnik drops these cultural nuggets knowing that we’ll get it. Is he showing off, or is he complimenting the reader? It’s definitely The New Yorker brand. Maybe he writes this way with a wink, knowing that people like me are going to be noticing. And he’s unapologetic, because we both know that he knows more than I do. Anyway, I was going to tell you why I like Gopnik’s essay! Here’s how he develops William Goldman’s saying: “This may be the essential truth of all commerce. Do the people at Lindt headquarters, in Kilchberg, really know anything [about chocolate]?” Then he tells us that one of Lindt’s most successful products was “The Dubai bar.” Gopnik concludes:
“Who really knows anything about anything?”
So true. But that also means that rich Capitalists just got lucky; they didn’t get rich because they were any better than the rest of us. If you read Gopnik a lot, you know that he’s not a fan of Capitalism. At least he’s savvy enough to not call it “neoliberalism” in this review; remember what I said about cliches? Gopnik knows how to avoid cliches—that’s one of his best qualities as a writer. Critiques of Capitalism won’t get you kicked out of The New Yorker, that’s for sure, and I doubt your editor is going to ask you to tone it down.
Right after this review is Hua Hsu’s review of the new movie “Pavements.” Hsu doesn’t do the Gore Vidal thing, and it’s refreshing. I’m sure that he knows he’s not doing it, and that it’s a choice. This movie sounds very hard to describe. Hsu has trouble describing it, and now here I am trying to describe his review of it—I guess you could call this a meta-review. Anyway, here I go: It’s a film about the 1990s indie-rock band Pavement. But—and try to follow this:
The film is ostensibly a documentary, set in 2022, when the band reunited for a tour, and it includes some typical scenes one might expect. But the bulk of “Pavements” takes place in an alternative America where the group is “the world’s most important & influential band,” worthy of idolatry.
This only works because the band isn’t the world’s most important, and the band knows that, the movie writer and producer know that, and we—the fans—know that. In this alternative world, presented in the movie as reality, there was a musical made from Pavement’s songs, called “Slanted! Enchanted!” In fact, this film has some songs from the fake, imagined musical. (My prediction: Soon it’ll be a real musical and they’re going to tour just like Spinal Tap did after their movie.) The film also has a fake museum show, including fake ad campaigns and a fake platinum record. It teeters on the edge of reality and fantasy. It plays with the genre of bio-pic.
I loved the writing in these two reviews, and here’s another reason why I loved them: They’re not just about the thing being reviewed. Adam Gopnik makes his review a commentary on Capitalism and the media industry, and Hua Hsu makes his review about the music business, saying:
Perhaps pop-music history will soon exist only in the form of authorized, brand-managed hagiographies.
He points out:
There are Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson movies due for release this year.
There are four separate Beatles movies scheduled for 2028.
Netflix is doing a nine-hour documentary about Prince. Oops—they’re not doing it, because of concerns raised by the artist’s estate. There you go—”carefully managed hagiographies.” That means that you don’t get to see it unless the band approves it first.
He continues:
When careers are seen as intellectual property, legacies will be guarded with a lawyerly vigilance. Messiness gets edited out in the name of a few key narrative turning points. In the absence of friction, contemporary bio-pics are just a series of boring victory laps.
Ouch! For you famous musicians out there, I hope you’re embarrassed by this. But, in the context of all of this, Hsu actually seems to like the movie “Pavements,” because
It caricatures the good-versus-evil dynamic of the era’s indie purism, it’s also about a kind of ambivalence. Is the band parodying rock stardom? When they act like rock idols on stage, is it real or is it a joke? I wondered if this was a joke. But it didn’t matter anymore.
These are two wonderful reviews! The writing is great, but it’s also because they’re more than just reviews. Even though I don’t know anything about the band Pavement, I enjoyed learning about pop-music bio-pics. Even though I don’t watch movies, and I don’t know about the cable industry, and the last thing in the world I would do is read an autobiography by a movie mogul, even on a 12-hour flight to Tokyo, I still enjoyed Gopnik’s review of Diller’s book. A review of a book by a person I don’t care about, written about an industry I don’t care about. And I still enjoyed it, because I loved the writing! Yes, Adam Gopnik, I know what you’re up to. Sometimes I shake my head and smile, and think, there he goes again. Maybe his editors tell him to amp it up and do that more, because we New Yorker readers buy the magazine knowing that this is what we’re going to get. It’s the brand, after all. But with this review, he holds it back and he becomes more meta-artful. Do that more often! Yes, we already know that you know more than us.
I often tell people that I learned how to write from reading The New Yorker. It’s not only that I learned to write in the same way as those writers; it’s because I also learned the ways that I don’t want to write. This is what it means to read differently—to see what the aesthetic of this writer is, and to see what your own aesthetic is. And, then, to be intentional about your aesthetic and about how you’re writing. Are you just writing? Or are you thinking about writing and why you’re writing it that way?
Anyone can write. A lot of people can write artfully. But the true writers are meta artful. It might be going too far to say that they’re meta writers, but I’ll say it so that I can claim I said it first. (That was a joke, making fun of people who try to copyright everything they say. I’m not really doing that; I’m just making fun of it. Honest!) Meta writers don’t only write; they read and they think.
That’s also what professional artists and designers do, as I learned when doing interviews for my book Learning to See. Knowing how to see means understanding what an aesthetic is, how to intentionally choose an aesthetic, and how to judge works by the standards of their own aesthetic. I’ve been watching old episodes of the Cher show from the 1970s. They’re brilliant because they’re so good at what they’re trying to do. You might not like what they’re trying to do, but you have to respect that they nailed it. Adam Gopnik, and Hua Hsu, you nailed it. Kudos for some of your best writing in these two reviews.
Adam Gopnik, “Deal or No Deal.” The New Yorker, May 26, 2026, pp. 62-65.
Hua Hsu, “You’re Killing Me.” The New Yorker, May 26, 2025, pp. 66-67.
Postscript: It took me about four hours to write this Substack post. If I’d spent more time on it, it would be shorter. (That’s an Adam Gopnik move—did you see it?) I hope you think it’s okay. I don’t put anything out on the Internet that I’m not proud of because I know it will exist forever. Or at least until the next solar flare destroys everything digital. But I’m pretty sure that I didn’t do anything writerly in this post, and that was on purpose. If you catch me doing anything writerly, like showing off my erudition in an aside or a telling word choice, please call me on it! But first, you should know that I tossed in that line about a 12-hour flight to Tokyo as an example of showing off one’s cultural knowledge— “show, don’t tell,” the first rule of writing. And I suppose that it’s showing off to let on that I know who Adam Gopnik is and that I know who Hua Hsu is. And that I read The New Yorker. Oh well. One has to write about something.