"haha this 1888 painting portraying the final scene from a Tennyson poem is fanart Actually"
oh fuck off; "being based on an earlier work" is not the same thing as fanart
fanart is a product of fandom
which is a relationship to capital
You're here for the fic; all of it is also on my personal site.
"haha this 1888 painting portraying the final scene from a Tennyson poem is fanart Actually"
oh fuck off; "being based on an earlier work" is not the same thing as fanart
fanart is a product of fandom
which is a relationship to capital
genuine question: how is random a relationship to capital? like what makes the painting any different from something like bartkira? this is a genuine question i’m not doing a twitter thing or whatever it’s just something i haven’t read up enough on and would like to learn more about :)
...to an extent, I'm just being a grumpy old man about it
and also, to an extent, it's a relationship to capital because relating to capital is "inescapable as the divine right of kings"
but. "Fandom" isn't a simple synonym for "liking thing" and "fanart" definitely isn't a simple synonym for Thing Being Based On Another Thing. In the specific (Twitter) post I was complaining about, Thing Being Based On Another Thing was being treated as synonymous with "fanart", and that's infuriating because as much as people are undeniably creative within it, in fandom the creativity happens on the return stroke of a two-stroke engine in which the power stroke is inherently consumption. Fandom can celebrate in creative ways, but fandom qua fandom is ultimately a celebration of what you buy — and so fanart is the New Game+ of consumption as a hobby.
(The inseparability of the buy part of the cycle is the leverage behind every threatened fan boycott, and also the motive force behind, say, every argument about streaming the recent Harry Potter game.)
I'd argue that most of all of the history of human creativity was not in fact produced under deliberate conditions of "this is an epicycle on my hobby of being a consumer" and saying so, however indirectly, feels shockingly contemptuous of — well, art. Creativity. Humans. Pre-Raphaelite painting doesn't, in general, do a huge amount for me personally, but I wouldn't for a second drag and drop it all into the same category of human endeavour as collecting Funko Pops and say "same basic thing :)"
and calling Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott "fanart" does that.