The most annoying man on the Internet?

This guy Jash Dholani has been getting ripped on social media recently for his “masterlist” of 15 differences between good and bad art, and, frankly, with some good cause. I don’t know much about him, but the bit of digging I’ve done has been enough to give me some picture of him. For example, this response he made to his critics:

I feel for some reason this by itself adequately sums up where he’s coming from ideologically, but for further evidence I visited his Substack, which redirected me to a site called Memo’d, which appears to be kind of like Pinterest but for text instead of pictures. Jash has three main boards called Write Like A God, Critics of Modernity, and Reading List For Aristocrats, which strike me as illuminating how our man clearly sees himself. I was weirdly unsurprised to find the “Critics” board includes a post on Julius Evola, which is enough by itself to suggest Jash leans, well, fash.

Plus one of his “memos” is called “Why You Need a Hero to Emulate”, talking about Andre Malraux and T.E. Lawrence, which ends thusly:

Bottom line. Having a hero you can emulate orients and inspires humans like nothing else can. Looking for a hero to emulate? Check out the jaw-dropping achievements of Julius Caesar, or read the sharp and bracing words of Napoleon the Great.

Julius Caesar was assassinated and Napoleon exiled to a trifling island in the Atlantic Ocean 2000km from the nearest continent. Are these things Jash thinks we should also emulate? And the less said about his Jordan Peterson piece the better. But never mind that, let’s consider the good vs bad art list…

So this… thing is what other people have been ragging on him for, and no wonder. What the fuck does most of it even mean? I mean, I may be a bit weird in this respect but in general art does NOTHING for my mood per se, neither improving it nor making me feel weird. That’s not how I respond to art. Also, “boosts energy”—what, is Michelangelo’s David supposed to shoot me full of speed when I look at it? Momentum and stagnation? WHAT THE FUCK IS A “MALEVOLENTLY BAD” MAP, JASH?

But it’s the “values” columns that kind of give the game away, particularly the “forgotten values” bit. What values might those be? I just invoked David, who I’ve no doubt Jash would consider “good art”, what forgotten values from before 1500 does he hint at? But Jash isn’t really thinking in those terms, of course, he’s thinking in terms of the modern world, of which he is clearly not a fan, and of values he sees as lacking in that modern world. Values you might describe as… not entartet, perhaps?

Actually, no. That’s not a nice choice of word in this context. But I do think think Jash Dholani is… not that far from people who would use it unironically. There’s something kind of unpleasant about this list, and there’s something about him I really dislike. Somewhere down the track I can envisage him forming a little cult of like-minded drones, he strikes me somehow as the sort of person who’d do that…