XXXTentacion - ?

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