thesis: the generational and connotative divide between emoticons and emojis is that emoticons are improvised and emojis are purpose-built
:) is like a little bit of humanity peeking out of the machine, saying "this system wasn't made to be used this way but I figured out how to send you a little smile"
😀 represents the machine re-asserting control by helpfully providing a set of emotions that is more flexible and readable, but is also limited to a fixed set, discouraging improvisation
🍆 represents the re-emerging resilience of the human spirit as we find new ways to break the machine's rules and repurpose its limited tools to express forbidden concepts
I have no idea where I'm going with this, I had another asthma attack and they gave me a lot of prednisone and it's hard to describe what that does to your brain but definitely something
Do you have any interesting takes on modern or contemporary art that you'd like to share?
I unironically think that a lot of the most interesting stuff happening in contemporary art is being done by furries. I'm maybe gonna write about this eventually but a large part of that is that a lot of contemporary figural art is so bogged down in reference and allusion, in this sort of vague postmodern way where nothing necessarily like means much of anything but boy we sure are shuffling these symbols around as furiously as we can. can't swing a dead idiom without hitting an edgy deconstruction of some vague sort of Manet's Olympia or Demoiselles D'avignon or what have you, bonus points if Mickey Mouse is there too. I'm not a big fan of the whole sort of pop art lineage these days, basically, particularly since SO much of that shit immediately became a huge part of the NFT ecosystem.
meanwhile I feel like there's this genuine interest among furry artists, among other people doing cartooning and more "low" art, in making art for the sake of some... external ideal or vision? rather than just an inward looking critique of The Art Canon And Also Pop Culture If We Can Manage It. maybe this is "metamodernism"? people seem to finally be getting Real Into That Term lol. mostly I just think that someone sincerely employing techniques derived from abstract expressionism to draw a furry shows at least some engagement and interest that goes beyond some of the like slapdash Mr Brainwash style "let's slap two things together" stuff. (this is obviously a pretty narrow band of "contemporary art" it just seems to be a pretty popular that I happen to think is pretty boring lol)
These thoughts suggest something to me also about "Original Character" paradigms, which furry art is certainly tightly-assosciated with (though probably co-originator of with tabletop gaming, at a guess.) An external vision: Fictional characters that exist in no particular context of a story or world (so they can therefore be easily slapped into many different story scaffoldings as desired,) who instead exist in free-floating splash panels which may not even be drawn by the character creator but will often be drawn according to a reference sheet or commissioner's direct instruction, thereby maintaining the integrity of the fiction. This is genuinely a new idea, new subject, and new market, by art history standards — can't have been around longer than 40 years (again, a complete guess on my part,) and has been the domain of underground subcultures that entire time.
You can also easily see the Bored Ape-style NFTs as a kind of recuperation or, er, aping of this idea. I saw so many people making the point that these celebrities getting in on the fad could get so much more bang for their buck commissioning artists, but of course, that's a subcultural norm that they'd be totally unaware of and unsold on.
For my part, I find "Original Character" conceptually odd. Working with original characters and scenarios etc. has more or less been the norm since cult of the author first took off around the 18th century (rough guess on my part), so why bother highlighting that fact at all? You could make an argument that this linguistic shift reflects a broader cultural shift toward working with pre-existing narrative elements, but it's a very demanding argument; too demanding for me to go into in the space a Cohost comment what was originally meant to be a Cohost comment provides. Beyond that, I see Original Character as reflective of changes in the conditions under which art has been produced for a while now. It's somewhere between an implicit admission that working with art that has already proven itself commercially viable has been the norm since Sherlock Holmes (another rough guess), and a hedge that your creative output is too amateurish and commercially unviable as of yet to be recognized as just a story, a character etc.
That's really fucking depressing! Since when did we cede artistic legitimacy to the market? To the profit a given piece of art can generate, almost certainly for someone else?
"Andy Warh-" That's enough rough guesses out of you.
Not sure how to shoehorn NFTs into this analysis, other than just writing them off as the logical conclusion to any art under capitalism (pure exchange value, bereft of any and all use value).
Both Nintendo and Sega formally enter the video game console market with the Famicom and the SG-1000, respectively, in 1983.
I'm honestly surprised that English speaking circles don't acknowledge this, given the historical importance of these systems' releases. Japanese circles tend to celebrate today, but tellingly, only as Famicom Day. Let it be known that Nintendo has been monopolizing public video game nostalgia through the Famicom/NES for a while now.