Post a controversial opinion

nope

1) art and creative work existed before capitalism and will exist after it
2) hella tons of shit mistaken for "art" and "creative work" these days

sbag

Why do you post here

― El Tomboto, Sunday, October 15, 2017 12:20 PM

bc i love everything

― sleepingbag, Sunday, October 15, 2017 2:27 PM

I have to admit my respect for this riposte

By giving voice to crazies like AJ?

Off the top of my head? Milo Yiannopolis, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Gavin McInnes...

He is popularising these people, giving them an audience. I have an old friend whose entry-point to the far-right was Rogan. I see nothing to celebrate about him (though Newsradio was great, obv).

any basis for a "surplus" of creative arts has to be taken with the same grain of salt as assuming a "surplus" of technological advancement - if we're building and inventing new shit too fast for our society to adapt without killing ourselves, that would be a surplus, right? And yet we're not all dead (yet). The idea that any human endeavour is producing a surplus in 2017 seems to me to be inherently reactionary and actually, ahistorical! Tell me a time when we had exactly the right amount of creative arts. I bet it was a time that sucked.

1995 and rong

I always liked to call Joe Rogan Joe Rogaine

"insane surplus of art and creative work"

What planet do you live on? I'd like to live there. Sure as hell ain't this earth.

― Le Bateau Ivre, Sunday, October 15, 2017 1:10 PM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

any basis for a "surplus" of creative arts has to be taken with the same grain of salt

― El Tomboto, Sunday, October 15, 2017 1:42 PM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't want to shock you but you are on a website where people are paid to have opinions about the emoji movie and the 73rd fall album

controversial opinion: this, from 2017's Fall album (actually their 82nd), is one of the best things released this year, and one of the best things The Fall have ever released

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sh7_QETK5k

about time someone actually posted a controversial opinion!

1. Art produced entirely before economic systems started shaping cultural expression - like, say, cave paintings - can be great but I'd still rather listen to Led Zeppelin.

2. Art produced in service to socialist ideologies can be boring as hell, o wait let me quote Dudley Randall on this

Telling a Black poet what he ought to write
Is like some Commissar of Culture in Russia telling a poet
He’d better write about the new steel furnaces in the Novobigorsk region,
Or the heroic feats of Soviet labor in digging the trans-Caucausus Canal,
Or the unprecedented achievement of workers in the sugar beet industry
who exceeded their quota by 400 percent (it was later discovered to
be a typist’s error).

Maybe the Russian poet is watching his mother die of cancer,
Or is bleeding from an unhappy love affair,
Or is bursting with happiness and wants to sing of wine, roses, and nightingales.

I’ll bet that in a hundred years the poems the Russian people will read, sing and love
Will be the poems about his mother’s death, his unfaithful mistress, or his
wine, roses and nightingales,
Not the poems about steel furnaces, the trans-Caucasus Canal, or the sugar
beet industry.

3. Nobody is forcing anybody to listen to particular recordings or read particular novels or look at particular paintings. Though we are all trapped here in our cages of capitalism, if we want to look at a particular painting or listen to a particular record or read a particular book, I don't see how it harms you.

I agree that there are a lot of things out there to look at / listen to / eat / drink. Many more than any one person can take in in a lifetime. But I have no idea what it means to say that there's a "surplus." No, not a lot of people can survive by purely creative labor. But that has always been true.

Writers and musicians and visual artists generally either have day jobs (e.g. teaching), exist on patronage, or (the rarest case) are hugely popular and successful in the marketplace, purely for their art. This last group has always been small, and always will be.

there are a lot of things out there to look at / listen to / eat / drink. Many more than any one person can take in in a lifetime.

I would guess this may have something to do with the human population of the earth now exceeding 8 billion, in tandem with a cultural legacy stretching back several millennia, during which time a few billion other humans indulged in the creation of artworks.

maybe capitalism has just produced a deficit of meaning and "creative endeavor" is our desperate attempt to cope with that loss

Off the top of my head? Milo Yiannopolis, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Gavin McInnes...

He is popularising these people, giving them an audience. I have an old friend whose entry-point to the far-right was Rogan. I see nothing to celebrate about him (though Newsradio was great, obv).

― Leaghaidh am brón an t-anam bochd (dowd), Sunday, October 15, 2017 3:35 PM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Really only Milo & Gavin are alt-right / far-right. Shapiro is just a boring Buckleyite (who left Breitbart last year after his colleagues refused to support Michelle Fields are Lewandowski assaulted her), & Peterson, while I find his obsession with pronouns really irritating, is an interesting theologian & philosopher. It's his audience that's largely odious. I'd put him in the same camp as Camille Paglia, which you know, say what you will, but they're certainly not far-right or alt-right. He's had a ton of liberals & leftists on his show, too.

Joe's Alex Jones podcast was pure entertainment. He got the dude stoned and drunk as fuck and even Eddie Bravo was like "No more weed, Alex."

So yeah, I would agree he's "alright."

maybe capitalism has just produced a deficit of meaning and "creative endeavor" is our desperate attempt to cope with that loss

Nah, people have always done creative stuff. Some have wanted to be compensated for their creative labor with a reprieve from other sorts of labor (either a partial or a full reprieve).

Humans went from hunter-gatherer bands to agrarian societies (relatively low specialization). Only with agrarianism, urbanism, and industrialism do you get the kind of specialization that allows someone to do ONLY creative labor and nothing else.

As cosmopolitan societies developed, so did specialization (e.g., it was okay if somebody just made shoes or whatever - they could still eat, because people valued shoes highly enough to feed the shoemaker).

Cultural products didn't feed or clothe anybody, so they were produced on a volunteer basis (as leisure activities), or were part of religious observance (altarpieces, etc.), or were supported by patronage from elites (who viewed their support of the arts as a status symbol).

To me, the fun question is not "how large does a society need to be to support a poet?" but "how large does a society need to be to support a poetry CRITIC?"

mmmm, i think you're conflating technological advance with sociological advance. 21st century society to me is less defined by freedom from the _need_ for subistence labor and more by a society that has no idea what to do with its citizens.

i also don't agree with your distinction between "religion" and "culture".

21st century society to me is less defined by freedom from the _need_ for subistence labor and more by a society that has no idea what to do with its citizens.

Is it the society's job to figure out "what to do with its citizens"? In my view that gives society too much agency and the citizens themselves too little. Surely it's individual people's job to figure out what to do with themselves, not wait to be told, no?

i also don't agree with your distinction between "religion" and "culture".

Okay, fair point. But in my view, either way, the central question for the artist is the same. I.e., "Can I please just do this for a living?" Can I just do this thing that I'm good at, and get paid for it, rather than laboring in the fields all day and coming back to the hut to do it for fun? Can my creativity help me avoid spending all day in the coal mine or tractor factory, or whatever?

If I'm a stained-glass artist in the age of the great cathedrals, I want to get hired as a glassmaker to a cathedral. There are relatively few secular sources of income, and cathedrals need a fuck-ton of stained glass. Whether I'm religious or not, it seems like the best place to put my efforts. I'm not going to work all day in a wheat field or shearing sheep, and then go home to do stained glass in my spare time. Maybe I'm convinced that what I'm doing glorifies the Lord, Maybe not. I want to be remunerated for my artistry.

If I'm a skilled blues guitarist in 60s/70s London, I'm going to want to be in a band with a record deal. Working all day for an accounting firm, or in the shipyards or whatever, is a bummer, no matter how pleased I am with the licks I lay down when I get home. I want to be remunerated for my artistry.

No interesting difference, whether it's religion or culture.

jftr, no one in the age of great cathedrals was doing stained glass part time at home for fun. stained glass artists were trained as apprentices in stained glass workshops and entered a guild upon attaining mastery. and it cost money to get your place as an apprentice. but I take your point, even if the social mechanisms differed.

"Is it the society's job to figure out "what to do with its citizens"? In my view that gives society too much agency and the citizens themselves too little. Surely it's individual people's job to figure out what to do with themselves, not wait to be told, no?"

i guess that depends on if you think of humans as being fundamentally rational actors, in a sort of david hume sense, or not. certainly democratic society is based on this belief, but in my view the predicted supremacy of reason never really panned out. people create, in my experience, not because they want to, but because they're driven to, either for its own sake or towards some other end (becoming famous, getting laid, etc.).

society doesn't ever necessarily tell its citizens what to do in so many words - when it does it can expect stiff resistance - but it does shape the boundaries of our expectations, it does tell us what we can and should dream. it instills its values into us. i'm unimpressed by the (basically rationalist and hume-ian) values america continues to attempt to instill.

The "far right" are not libertarian capitalists.

Xp sleepingbag

Like that's a destructive ideology too but that's not what Joe Rogan is enabling when he gives a platform to Gavin McInnes or Milo Yiannapolous.

I was waiting for someone to point that out (without even getting into the whole history of pre-/non-capitalist art).

I mean, there was truth to that argument. Even Marx admitted that capitalism was the engine of mind bogglig innovation and social progress. That's why it was supposed to give rise to the conditions of its own undoing...

Why for people make things if no $$$, waste of time dood.

It's capitalism has given fuckers the free time to craft the artisan pieces that we're tripping over in the st tbh

Ok in ilxtopia ppl will all join into worker communes where we make tractors or whatever, and then carve cunning figurines in our spare time, great, carry on lads

It doesn’t sound that bad tbh, if someone would just all that up (maybe stet?) I’ll go ahead and try to cram my gear into my pack.

Bespoke tractors fyi making tractors, or anything really, is just performance art now that we all only basically live off silicon valley intellectual sweat iirc

Maybe the Russian poet is watching his mother die of cancer,
Or is bleeding from an unhappy love affair,
Or is bursting with happiness and wants to sing of wine, roses, and nightingales.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/images/mayakovsky.jpg

Anyway, Peterson is neither a theologian nor a philosopher, and he certainly isn't interesting. If I was Jung I read Jung, and I'm more than capable of misunderstanding Darwinism all by myself. The guy gets $65,000 a month (!) off the back of some notoriety as a transphobe - right wing teenage boys are a gold mine if you're willing to add a veneer of authority to their prejudices.

Ha, I sometimes considering starting a thread devoted to Jordan Peterson. He is an endlessly fascinating phenomenon to me.

*consider

at a time when young scholars struggle to find next month's paycheque, this old tenured white guy hits on a way to pull in a VAP's annual salary every month via an absurd anti-pronoun crusade (on top of his http://www.sunshinelist.ca76K CAD salary from UToronto), while simultaneously portraying himself as a perpetual victim.

I think we can all agree that there is a certain breed of grossly ill-informed, emotionally deficient undergrad outrage-bots which are not worthy of serious consideration, and it would make it easier to hear these icons of the alt.right out if you didn't have to slog through their tales of fighting with them

*http://www.sunshinelist.ca76K CAD salary from University of Toronto
xp

$176K CAD: http://www.sunshinelist.ca

yeah he's a huckster, his audience sucks, & his pronoun (& postmodernism) obsession is so irritating & always the opening bit for way too log in every interview i've seen. none of it comes off as transphobic to me, but he's clearly marketing and profiting himself to an audience of transphobes. having said all that i found the stuff he's said about religion and art and structure and music utterly compelling - i haven't read much jung so it's very likely it's all in there. i don't think he's alt-right & he doesn't identify as alt-right - he keeps it vague & tries to have it both ways.

Is he still worried about pronouns? I haven't been keeping up.

Ok. I’ll give this a try. pic.twitter.com/Ft4CpqYWrg

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 15, 2017

go crazy

http://dailysignal.com/2017/04/03/politically-incorrect-professor-gets-denied-grant-funding/

I haven't read his scholarly work, honestly, but I have no doubt that he has interesting things to say; I would hope that's the case if he has tenure at the highest-ranked school in the country. As far as I can tell, though, this bizarre online activism career seems to be a primary focus for him these days. I assume that's why he didn't win this $400K peer-reviewed research grant this year, although he has convinced right-wing media in Canada and the US that there is a politically correct conspiracy against him: http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/an-opportunity-to-make-their-displeasure-known-government-pulls-funding-of-pronoun-professor. (I do take some relish in that he has managed to get the National Post comments section outraged that the government isn't giving enough tax money to a social scientist.)

2xp!

("That's why" = he has been spending his time on 'activism' as opposed to research, not that his activism has offended the Politburo that controls SSHRC grants)

he has a pretty entertaining way of talking. kind of a funny voice, working himself into a frenzy arguing -- in monologue -- with some caricatured version of his opponents' arguments. i also appreciate how he points to the gulag archipelago as a guide to what awaits us if the cultural left gets away with their preferred pronouns.

i think this "activism" stuff is a ruse though. he has a thing he sells called the "self-authorship program" which helps disaffected young people (mostly men) "sort themselves out." i think he is trying to market this to the gamergate crowd by setting himself up as the guru of the lost boy shitposters.

if this is the case, it's not too bad. in theory, he'll redirect the attention of these people away from the culture wars and toward introspection, encouraging them to master their own lives before they try to dominate others. i even saw a thing once where he said something like, "think about it. you're 20 years old. what do you know about the economy? sort yourself out! (TM)" he was addressing a hypothetical leftists (as usual) but the argument could still apply to folks on the right who similarly turn to politics to avoid the problems in their own lives. maybe they'll get the message.

anyway, this guy w

is def more of a self help guru than anything else, with his jungian archetypes. i feel weird that i know so much about him but there are just SO MANY youtube rabbit holes to fall into.

the function of government or large organizations in general is to determine how to address the aggregate needs and desires of individuals at the group level and the human element has been set aside as people substitute profitability and the flow of capital as a measure of success instead of determining how to help individuals

it’s not that government is there to shape lives and tell people what their role is, it’s that it should exist to provide a framework for possibility that benefits all people and ensures everyone has the access to make their own way

it’s not government regulation and taxes and affirmative action keeping people from reaching their potential, it’s regressive economic and social forces keeping your peers from elevating the best among them

Lament For the Pronouns

O! Pronouns, why must thou be so ill-equipped
for your job, that poets' wings are clipped
when they, of many a shape, & gender,
must limit perforce their poetic tender
to "I, it, he, she, we, you, they"?
There's got to be a better way.

Rogan pressing Milo Y on the consent stuff probably helped his downfall.

I don't like how he defends Alex Jones but I think it's possible he's made Jones a joke with some people who would normally take him seriously. They're friends but Rogan makes fun of him all the time.

bravo Aimless