In My Mind

Depends on the medium. Honestly it's a much harder question than naming my favourite artists, but in film, I'd say Christopher Nolan's style of directing is something I just find abrasive, and the problem is I like his movies conceptually, especially considering that he's worthy of respect as a filmmaker right now at the very least for not just pumping out corpo slop.

But his films always have this air of "posh energy", even the infamously bad audio mix is a creative decision done in part to mix only for the biggest and best sound systems to provide what equates to big bombastic high budget rollercoaster rides, but I don't think it makes better films.

So with that I'd say he's my least favourite contemporary filmmaker.

Though If uninteresting answers are allowed, I'd say Zack Snyder for his general taste or J.J. Abrams for his storytelling style (as a fan of the og clovefield arg project). If we also allow something like a film producer who's not really an artist per se, then I'd say Alex Kurtzman & co genuinely robbed us of a chance for a positive future sci-fi when I think the world could use a bit of that.

To counterbalance that as a science-fiction enjoyer I love Ronald D. Moore's writing. I loved his episodes throughout Star Trek TNG and DS9, I loved a lot of his BSG reboot (though I've never seen the original) and I really really love what he's done with his new show For All Mankind which started as something I kinda liked but has grown on me so much I might honestly like it more than Star Trek at this point.

In music, it's hard to say as well, most artists I dislike I would not necessarily call artists, like Taylor Swift's music producers are artists who clearly know how to make a banger, a skill like any other, but she herself is just a singer, more performer than artist who's image and brand basically requires a degree of blandness that almost makes me miss 2000s era of pop performers.

But if that counts I guess that would be it, but it's not specifically her either, just the entire slop factory of pop music with it's chords by committee style of music-making. In a way I'm thankful for Spotify essentially making everyone develop their own hyper niche taste with artists that in real life around them only they know, that's all as it should be, let the bland mass appeal stuff die a slow death.

Once again, to counterbalance, if I had to think of a favourite in the past decade who people also might know, it'd be Nedarb, his production really underlines what the late 2010s Hip-Hop sounds like to me (post Bones and the cloud rap era ofc), though there's also Tyler with Flower Boy and IGOR and LUM and for something more obscure - Sweet Valley, who all also made the latter half of the last decade just a bit nicer for me. And for the first half I loved the lofi "blog rock" bands that came out of that era, lately listening to Skeggs a lot especially.

And for a total wildcard of performance art nothing makes me think contemporary like Jreg. It feels like no one really talks about him (hope I'm not ruining a joke here), but a ton of people are at least vaguely familiar with him even just really-not-very-online normal folks i've met off dating apps and in fact both of the people I last dated both knew and watched Jreg, which isn't that much but it's weird it happened twice.

-- ChatGPT. Jk.

EDIT: Oh shit! I forgot about probably the most relevant example of my favourite contemporary artist - Tomáš Rodr of analognowhere.com and unix_surrealism fame on Mastodon and Lemmy. Guy's comics and illustrations are just so damn stylish, and it just speaks to me on a deeply spiritual level, though he definitely hates AI stuff, at least I think so.

As someone who's into tech and is often called a techbro (a word that once meant someone like Musk or some brogrammer money chaser, but now means nerd/geek), but actually resents the corporate enshittification and commodification of technology, I love his stuff.