The Uselessness of Dachshunds

On making art for the algorithm of your heart.

For the last month and some change, I’ve been drawing a dachshund every day.

Every day I sit down with a little piece of scrap paper from my art closet, spread out my 120 colored pencils, set my bottle of turpenoid far enough away that I won’t knock it over, put some tunes on, and spend no more than two hours working away.

Working away on what? This is the question. What am I doing, exactly? I know what I’ve been telling everyone each time I post on Instagram, on Facebook, on Threads, on Tumblr, on X, on BlueSky, even, resentfully, deliberately poorly, on TikTok: “I am drawing a dachshund every day until THE LISTENERS comes out on June 3rd.”

But why? I have seven dogs, but none of them are wiener dogs. There are three dachshunds in the novel (they all live, by the way), but the book is not remotely about dachshunds. As a marketing gimmick, it is inefficient and bemusing. 90 minutes-2 hours a day? That means I’ll have invested 180 hours in creating 1 dachshund for every 4-5 pages of novel. Nobody asked me to do this. No one is holding me accountable to seven and a half dozen dachshunds inserted into old paintings. I have no great strategy for what I will do with all of them when my release date rolls around. Will I sell them? A dubious and time-consuming prospect; any grand plan of auctioning them off with proceeds to benefit the SPCA and buy my busted car a new fender or some such enterprise would be retroactive. They aren’t really good enough to be bound into a novelty book; two hours is long enough to make a sketch quite good but not long enough for a proper study. For now, they’re just . . . useless.

And that’s the point.

There are lots of disturbing and frankly weird-ass things going on in 2025, but one of the things that distresses me daily is how singularly purposeful art-making and living creatively has become. The monetization of social media by social media has made even the most innocent of artistic movements suddenly aware that, with just a little viral action, a Chipotle lunch might be covered. And it’s not that I mind artists making a living—whoo boy do I have a lot of thoughts about that—it’s that I mind that this specific financial lure rewards very specific sorts of art.

I’ve posted before how topic changes a work’s popularity more than the work’s skill—for instance, I can post a sketch of a cat and another sketch of an old man, using the same level of skill, and know which one will get me more engagement. We’re living that now on a huge scale. When you open up your social media app, what does it show you now? “For you,” rather than the people you’re following. And what do you see? Posts tailored to you—posts experiencing rapid engagement. That means it’s almost always going to be the cat, not the old man. And if I’m an artist hoping to get Chipotle paid for—and yes, we want our Chipotle paid for—I’m going to draw more cats.*

*the cats are a metaphor here, guys

And just like that, your art-making has become more singularly purposeful . . . but it’s not your purpose.

Add into this the looming, gibbering specter of AI, that soulless thief of creativity. It has eaten all of our art and now digests it in thoughtless piles on the internet. I would argue that art (as opposed to, say, illustration or design) should always change both the art-maker and the art-consumer (I’m not saying I wrote an entirely trilogy with this thesis, but I’m not not saying it), and that AI art’s lop-sided relationship to consumption makes it the most singularly purposeful imagery of them all.

I could generate my dachshunds in mere minutes with the help of AI (and three liters of water for the electricity, which is a lot more than my cup of tea requires). But I bet you’d feel differently about the images you’ve seen so far.

There’s something about their wrongness, am I right? There’s something about being able to tell someone twiddled away at them while listening to some tunes. There’s something about them failing to look effortless. You can see how I suffered trying to draw poor Venus and her pals that small. There’s a limit to my abilities, to my tools. I read that John Cage liked to write music that was just at the very edge of an instrument’s comfortable range, so that the audience could hear that strain, tension, energy. That’s what is happening in these dachshund pieces. When I sit down and look at some piece created with media very unlike my pencils, by masterful creators, sometimes I spend ten or fifteen minutes just steeling and strategizing how I will even approach the style. That’s part of the fun, right?

That, and the uselessness.

Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like the uselessness makes it more obvious that it’s play. My dachshunds don’t need anything from you. There’s no call to action. I’m counting down to THE LISTENERS, yes, but everyone can see it’s an excuse—there’s never a hyperlink to pre-order, and I think I only included an image of the dachshund bookplate/print that comes from some indie stores once, as a justification for why dachshunds. This is just a game that I’m playing with myself, using my book release as a justification for spending 180 hours staring at masterworks and practicing my art-making in a very broad and purposeless way.

Will I ever need to know how to work in Degas’ style? I don’t know. But in a busy life, when would I have ever tried? We don’t have much room for purposeless practice. We don’t have a lot of time for failure. We don’t want to give time to inefficient processes that aren’t earning their keep.

Which I guess brings me to the actual purpose of my purposeless dachshunds. Because if they were truly purposeless, you guys would have never seen them. I’d have accumulated dachshunds quietly in my studio and then, many years later, my confused heirs would find them in a box.

So, yes, confession: I have a purpose. I’d like to encourage useless practice and useless play. I’d like to know art is being made that is sometimes the cat, but often, the old man. I just finished teaching a 6 month writing bootcamp (964 1:1 Zoom meetings), and one of the most difficult emotional hurdles for folks was the understanding that their first novel will most likely not get published, ever—it was just practice for the one that will. It feels ridiculous to throw oneself into a project that most people will never see, just to improve. Some of you here might remember back when I posted a short story every week with Merry Sisters of Fate. That was a little for the audience . . . and a lot to see what I could learn from it. And that’s what I’d like for this project to do.

If you were making art for the algorithm of your heart, what would it be?

What are your dachshunds?