XXXTentacion - ?

Lock thread imo

Flop pass the bong

so far the only thing of value I've gotten out of this thread is a lol from Whiney's comparison of Andy Gibb to Kendrick Lamar.

that was a good lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivaBXBudr1I

lmao these kids have zero idea how big michael jackson was

XXXTentacion was on track to being bigger than Justin Bieber and Micheal Jackson... this is unfair 😔

— RiceGum (@RiceGum) June 18, 2018

"bigger than Darby Crash" just doesn't have the same ring to it

I don’t think “authenticity” is ever a legitimate value

lol is this "i don't see race" but for art? this is an entirely meaningless statement.

I'm inclined to agree that determining an artist's "authenticity", or measuring the value of their work by trying to gauge how authentic they are, is a fool's game.

it is an inherent quality to any work. not the sole defining one ofc but a quality.

there is a reason that when Miley Cyrus uses trap dancers only to discard them people take notice

it seems like if you are an art critic, trying to understand the personal motivation & cultural/social context of a work and the signifiers used within is important. history is important. context is important.

a fool's game yes but describing any subjective experience is a fool's game and everyone is a player.

trying to understand the personal motivation... is important

not really

& cultural/social context of a work and the signifiers used within is important

yes definitely

it is an inherent quality to any work. not the sole defining one ofc but a quality.

No it's not, because there's no such thing as "authenticity" in art. The very nature of art-making is the construction of a thing which is inauthentic, a representation. Unless you're talking about, say, an Abstract Expressionist painting which is literally just what it claims to be - an arrangement of colors on a surface. A Barnett Newman painting is "authentically" itself. But in music, "authenticity" is a way to reduce artists to clichés and stereotypes.

there is a reason that when Miley Cyrus uses trap dancers only to discard them people take notice

Yes, and that reason is "People are stupid and believe in bullshit myths about 'authenticity.'"

I'd go one further and argue that the very existence of the work itself - the medium that occupies the space that the artist and the audience interact on - by its very nature renders any judgment about the work's "authenticity" on the part of the audience as impossible. You never see the "authentic" or "real" artist, all you see is the work.

Οὖτις otm

You never see the "authentic" or "real" artist, all you see is the work.

Exactly. I mean, you could argue that XXXtentacion or Tekashi69 attempt(ed) to break down the barrier between their real selves and their artistic personae by getting giant tattoos on their faces, thus making it impossible for them ever to be anyone but who they are/were "onstage", but ultimately it's all still performance.

used to think that & preach that gospel, now rather think that none of anything is performance and that the supremacy of artifice is a myth we buy into because the possibility of authenticity is too terrifying to even consider, but that's just me

rolling deconstructing the face tat thread

the racially and economically loaded history of "authenticity" also makes it pretty unpalatable imo, the "othering" of locating some kind of "noble savage" authenticity within people that were not rich or European is where all this bullshit really stems from - black people have "soul", latinos are "passionate", poor people are "real" people etc. Why continue to perpetuate this nonsense.

xp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eginkPg4JI

the supremacy of artifice is a myth we buy into because the possibility of authenticity is too terrifying to even consider

well it's kind of a zero-sum thing, right? Either it's all artifice (hey, what is the "real" me anyway?) or it's all authentic. idg where terror comes into it, apart from the general terrifying fact of our existence in a cold, mechanistic universe, I guess.

xp

here's where I'm at, it sounds confrontational but I don't mean it that way: every single piece of art anybody makes tells me something about that person no matter how hard they may try to make it otherwise. art is inherently authentic, it's all self-expression, even John Cage couldn't shed self-expression though he spent his entire career in the attempt at & can be said to have died trying. that there is my take, I think all this "authenticity is a critical fallacy" stuff is old-hat new criticism baggage that should be cast off like an...old hat

it's all self expression but well what is the self, really

There is a signature, yes, as the artist leaves more or less identifiable traces all over the work, but the work is beyond the artist, mocking any and all attempts at appropriating the creative act. We may speak of degrees of inauthenticity, perhaps, but even that leaves much to be desired: who's to say the overlap of person and persona isn't an elaborate ruse on the work's part, for example?

every single piece of art anybody makes tells me something about that person no matter how hard they may try to make it otherwise

Yeah, but so does the persona they've created in which to make that art, is what I'm saying. There's always that layer in between. And the persona is part of the art, but to deny that there's a persona at all is BS.

To pick a specific example, Jim Osterberg is not Iggy Pop. But it tells you a lot about Jim Osterberg that he came up with "Iggy Pop." And you can sort of track, album by album, the process by which "Iggy Pop" took over, to the point that there's a whole category of what I call "The Adventures of Iggy" songs on his albums, particularly those from the 1990s and after.

It seems to me that "all art is self-expression" is only trivially true, in the sense that (more or less) all art is made by someone, and most someones have some interiority, so it's reasonable to assume that an artist's interiority somehow enters into the explanation for the art they made, if only fractionally. But plenty of art can be understood perfectly well without knowing a thing about the inner life of whoever made it, or without coming to understand the artist through the art.

Anyway I don't actually know where the conversation in this thread is headed but I've been reading A.C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, and I have been having thoughts, which means I have to post something.

This is old hat, no doubt about it, but I've yet to be convinced that the opposite paradigm is any more applicable and useful.

xp

I would like to subscribe to all of youse's newsletters

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Thank God I know about Maud Gonne and Georgie Hyde Lees or I'd find little meaning in those lines.

MG iirc the dying animal

Hemiotics

But plenty of art can be understood perfectly well without knowing a thing about the inner life of whoever made it, or without coming to understand the artist through the art.

I know a lot of this is asked-and-answered for a lot of people, it was for me at one point too. but I've come think that when you know somebody's art, you understand something -- probably a big something -- about the person who made it. you don't know, like, where they live or what they had for breakfast necessarily, but the "me" you get from a person's art is probably more the "actual" person than the usually pretty tailored and practiced thing you get from talking to somebody. or living with somebody. this doesn't mean "if a guy sings about murder all the time he probably kills people" -- absurd, right -- but it's just as absurd to say that, say, Cannibal Corpse just happens to be singing about murder all the time. you have a good idea about what drives & inspires & fascinates & obsesses an artist from their themes, from the phrases & storylines & images they return to or avoid, etc etc. I don't think the art's separable from the person, nor is the persona, all that's a feint. that plenty of artists buy into the feint is interesting but in the end the personae you wear aren't external to you, they're just a version of you imo

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

it's never a bad time to paraphrase Wilde (and Yeats): the wearing of a mask is a way of telling the truth.

good post JCLC

I mostly think that authenticity is a sham: once you look closely, it evaporates away. But I do wonder if, rather than being a locatable thing in itself, it's just (one) another name for the thing that makes something (subjectively) better than something else. We all look for reasons, and language to fit those reasons, for why something leaves a wound in us, and authenticity is one name or one concept/strategy for making sense of that.

It's Romantic in the sense that it's a process of (probably false) enchantment, but (to paraphrase Elizabeth Bishop) it seems a reasonably coherent way of sorting through the things that pass us as we float through.

you have a good idea about what drives & inspires & fascinates & obsesses an artist from their themes, from the phrases & storylines & images they return to or avoid, etc etc.

does this pov require there to be an 'auteur' creating the artwork, whose interiority can be discerned through the artwork? like, if you're a jobbing director directing an episode of a long running tv show does this still apply? or a piece of art/media that is created by committee rather than by one person with complete creative control? in those cases maybe some of an individual's own obsessions and interiority creep in around the edges, but in a more diluted form? but even in a case where you have an auteur with complete control their 'self-expression' is still diluted by all kinds of things

'all art is authentic' doesn't seem that different in practise from 'no art is authentic', either way there's no point in trying to distinguish authentic from non-authentic art, or uses 'authenticity' as a concept to understand or analyse a piece of art?

A reductive story

There are communities of artists in Chicago who create music which is, through the obscuring effects of power differentials — access to PR, a weakened local press, a vacuum of investment, etc — largely invisible to the outside world.

One artist breaks out and because this stuff has been isolated from a broader mainstream, it’s culture is distinct and stands apart; outside, people want access to this experience of radical difference; they want to appreciate it, to profit from it, to enjoy it, to argue about it, to love it, to use it as a political football.

The lack of infrastructure means the demand is higher than these local artists ability to create supply, and there’s an entire system elsewhere built up to reproduce the aesthetic choices that made this local phenomenon interesting to the outside world, and the potential profits that make it worth time. And a much stronger ability to market it.

The local artists, seeing their sound or ideas replicated, respond differently: some are proud, some are angry, some are practical, take advantage of this new cachet to make further industry connections. None of the above are making much money from the thing they created; some might start calling outsider versions, which lack certain nuances or subtleties of the local culture, “fake” — aka inauthentic

Does that mean they think culture shouldn’t travel ? Does that mean they think it should be fenced in, or that they’d trade their newfound cultural cachet for obscurity? Or is it a simple economic argument, that isn’t arguing abt the illegitimacy of anyone else’s work as much as it is for the legitimacy and Real World Capital to match the much more ephemeral cultural capital they’ve earned? An appeal to the moral or ethical sense of an audience to consider the realities that what music they’ve been sold is mediated through a massive system which has not rewarded their creative endeavors but has benefitted from them?

I think in this sense, references to “authenticity” serve a very real purpose

It of course becomes more extreme when the things co opted are ie gang culture; that slang abt bloods starts getting used by corporate twitter accounts & there’s some really jarring shit where ppl are in jail & family members are dead & it’s a punchline to a guy running a social media account

I am not critiquing this as “appropriation” but just from the general POV of, like, empathy and respect for national tragedies...

Unperson: “there is no such thing as authentic blood culture so when Staples tweets ‘welcome to baples bitches’ it’s completely fine”

Yawn TLDR thread

Boring boring move it to ile

Y’all need a hot pocket instead of hot takes 24-7

Good post D-40, like exactly it

Um if I kicked off this rather droning tangent about "separating art from artist, can it be done? what is authenticity" it wasn't my intention

I was just saying that a considerable portion of rap listeners want their rappers to appear hard, and a history of criminality is an asset in this regard, my mom knows how many times 50 Cent was shot etc.

this is what spin is now

https://i.ibb.co/3rsMSkb/Screen-Shot-2019-06-06-at-3-56-34-PM.png