spineflu

Th Esteemed Deed Commemorator

@spineflu

whats the opposite of a fixer?

  • he/him

resident gungler. 30 or 40 years old and do not need this.

paints at fakesambinder

Here? Here's where I post cats and while high.

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spineflu
@spineflu
NireBryce
@NireBryce
vectorpoem
@vectorpoem

on "cultural progress"

As someone who went to art school, 3 US presidents ago, and would have graduated with a minor in art history if he hadn't run off to join the circus at the last minute, I feel at least mildly qualified to weigh in on this.

This analysis makes some fundamental assumptions that I don't share: that culture has a direction and a velocity, like it's a vehicle we were/are collectively, at times unconsciously, driving in a given direction. It's a Fukuyaman view, and even has an odd distant echo of Marc Andreessen's recent grandiose pantspoop of a manifesto - tech determinism, the idea of scientific progress, projected onto culture. Cultural Progress.

Reading this made me realize how much I now see art as a function of society, one of many sensory organs grasping to understand the natures of our reality and our selves. What "direction" or "velocity" has a body that is shivering in the cold, coughing in sooty air, squinting to read tiny print?

So when the author here asks for examples of distinct cultural newness, I don't really know what to say. I might as well pick a random file from my Bandcamp (RIP) folder. Every new work I see around me is grappling with the current convulsions of society under capitalism, its aestheticizations, dying empire, platform monopoly, etc - which are unique in time, if ever-echoing in history. Even the most bog standard old-is-new-again nostalgia trawl is the way it is because of the contemporary forces that have shaped the market it so eagerly pours itself into. They are part of the piece; the piece is only aesthetically indistinguishable if you willfully ignore that context around it, but why would you? Don't we have an obligation to always interrogate these surrounding contexts? Isn't not doing that kind of how we get into a lot of these messes?

So I don't really see culture as a vehicle, standing still after a heady century of screaming down a new highway. I see it as a body, a sacred yet profane and an unkillable yet fragile body, that is currently having trouble breathing, because it is being strangled by the forces around it. And so I don't think the problem with culture is that it isn't serving up exciting new novelties to feed us some lascivious sense of The Future. The problem with culture is that it's being slowly strangled, and we need to kill what's strangling it. Because, ultimately, we need it to live.

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in reply to @vectorpoem's post:

DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

This article is fascinating to me because it seems like it completely excises the people. There's no labor, there's no humans involved, there's certainly no directional or world-historical class forces, it's just... some shit that happened for no reason and it's fine actually.

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spineflu
@spineflu

i do have to wonder how much of the "cultural detritus of the modern environment" is just....

120 years ago, we didn't have a direct, archival record, media-wise; we had books, which changed between editions, for a populace that was still like largely illiterate. The way to replicate and instill culture was archetype and retelling, not on-demand playback.

In contrast, the nostalgia-heavy popculture we have now is just co-exploration of existing known properties, not too different from a bibliographic essay.

Looking at both as a way for a populace to tell their foundational stories - whether that means they inform the way they live their life, or simply their mood for the next half hour - you can see it as just a medium shift; its not teleological.

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ryusui
@ryusui

i think you nail an important part of it

cultural history is like a fossil record; badly incomplete and skewed towards particular specimens

for every Dickens or Shakespeare or Michelangelo or Monet whose works get immortalized, how many simply fade into obscurity? how many works have simply been forgotten, giving the impression of these Great Big Paradigm Shifts created by Great Artists instead of a gradual evolution?

we are at a point where we can capture EVERYTHING; you can, for the time being, go online and be treated to a selection of everything from the great to the middling to the poor, all treated as equally worthy of preservation; you can read "My Immortal" and "Slaughterhouse-Five" back-to-back, or wash down a viewing of "The Room" with anything from "Citizen Kane" to "Avengers: Infinity War"

and i think that all this has done is make something clear that people whose perspective of history is all Roman columns and naked marble statues cannot see:

PEOPLE GENERALLY DO NOT BELIEVE THEY EXIST IN A CULTURAL GOLDEN AGE; SUCH THINGS ARE ONLY ACKNOWLEDGED IN RETROSPECT

you could buttonhole some random person in the 19th century, or the 16th, or all the way back when Aristophanes was writing, and you would have a nonzero chance of them telling you, with all the legendary works of art being produced right around them, "nobody produces anything good anymore, it's all junk these days, culture has plateaued, i fear for future generations raised on this garbage"

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jcolag
@jcolag

I "love" these sorts of articles, because there's also always the implicit discussion that "culture" means "culture produced by a large corporation, for which I am deeply entrenched in the primary demographic." Because...yes, if you have denigrating or euphemistic names for entire classes of culture that you won't engage with ("chick flick," et al), then everything is a superhero movie that doesn't want to offend people who grew up in the '50s. Go figure...

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