boarprince

silent hill tourist

games/horror/paleontology/wrestling/anime. i'm just some guy that likes to think too much and talk too little. dog pics incoming


vectorpoem
@vectorpoem

between the futility of defining concepts like "art" and "politics" and the omnipresence of capitalism, this subject is too big and too amorphous to approach with anything but a series of random jabs at a colossus, fists mostly passing through its dark vaporous form.

disney is currently running a star wars series about the early years of the rebel alliance, and without spoiling much the most recent episode focused on, ah, recognizably current capitalist modes of production. people naturally glommed onto this, and other people naturally pointed out the Capitalist Realism subtext.

8 episodes in, i have enjoyed it a lot for the maturity of its storytelling, and the depth and texture of its political themes relative to the rest of Star Wars (which admittedly rarely exceed crayola). but i haven't really found much critique of capital in Andor. it has focused entirely on insurgency, all the different forms it takes for people at different levels of society, and the people on the other side, swallowing the poison. its depiction of total fascism is far more banal, and thus scarier and more real, than the action figure jackboots chewie & pals were blasting ~40 years ago. but the clear political change everyone is trying to enact is replacing that fascism with something more democratic - there is no talk of replacing modes of production or economic systems beyond that. and that's fine. i'm not too interested in whatever discourse is happening around all that, especially anything that takes on the all-too-familiar twitter Yet You Exist In Society overtones.

the specific formulation, though, "it's hilarious that disney is funding this [putatively?] anticapitalist tale [when disney itself is one of the 20th & 21st century's great capitalist molochs]" got me thinking about the good ol' relationship between art, political expression, and political change. all of this preamble, then, just to shake a few loose thoughts out of my head:

  • art only occasionally functions with any effectiveness as Argument (and argument doesn't usually "change peoples' minds" anyway).

  • rather, art can change how we think about things we already believe.

  • art crystallizes. art can be the first concrete artifact of something people had long been thinking. art can turn a real event into a fiction that eventually takes on more power than the real thing. art can amplify or silence, erase truth just as easily as reveal it.

  • art is a particularly mysterious form of few-to-many human communication. it inevitably says many things to many people, far beyond its creators' original intent.

  • art can ask "what would it be like in a world where X is normal". in so doing, art can normalize what was once strange or unthinkable.

  • art can propose particular theories of change. the 80s kids movie trope where the rich local tycoon villain is immediately and forever undone by accidentally "saying what he really thinks" near a hot mic, is offering a particular model of change that we have seen disproven again and again in 21st century politics.

  • art can depict moments of political change. obviously. in so doing, it teaches us, conditions us, to what moments of political change "look like", and what leads up to them. these depictions may or may not have much to do with historical reality. these moments are crafted by storytellers who want to tell good stories, with all the attendant selection pressures and craft concerns.

  • art in a particular cultural context, like say 1950s-1980s scifi futurism, can operate in a long, slow, leaky feedback loop with political economies and ideologies. the silicon valley tech ghouls who wield so much power today are throwing their grotesque fortunes at space colonization, sentient god-computers, cybernetic immortality etc because they regard these things like childhood promises, and feel they are owed them by the universe - laws of physics, biology, ethics, economics be damned. (how's the stock price doin', Mark?)

  • art acts not on political groups and their actions so much as on the vast intricate webs of social context within which these groups exist. obviously art is far from the only thing acting on this shared social context. it's in the mix. art is at the party but it's whispering. but maybe sometimes, on the right night, people wake up the next day and find themselves thinking what it was whispering.

  • art acting on politics is like wind acting on sandstone. in the moment, in moments of immediate need, it's barely anything - annoying even, grit in your eyes and teeth as you trudge ahead in utter practicality. it is obviously no substitute for Action. but over the long enough term, invisibly, it works away, leveling mountains and carving new monuments in the landscape of our dreams. art is simultaneously powerless and immensely powerful.

  • personally though, it doesn't make sense to me as a creator to think of myself as consciously wielding this power. it seems unbecomingly grandiose next to the simple task of making something good and true that captures something of human experience. we can't know what effect our work will have on the world, in 50 years or even tomorrow, and that shouldn't be why we make it.

  • can art ever truly change the world? i don't know. has it made my world richer and more worth living in? yes.

  • can art harm the world? absolutely.


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