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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   30515 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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A slight tangent, but the discussion on art and taste has reminded me of an observation that has stuck with me for years.

I dont recall the exact source but it was a podcast or video essay discussing the decline of the Oscars and "the Telos" of going to the movies. The observation was that the current critical and academic consensus is that in order to be a "good" movie it must challenge its audience and deconstruct its subject/genre and that by extension that the "best" movies are ones that are difficult for the lay-person to enjoy/appreciate. It was then pointed out that this consensus is a historical aberration as from Ancient Greece up through the mid 20th century it was widely understood that the whole purpose of art and the mark of a truly "great" artist was to construct a complex idea or emotion and be able to communicate it to as wide an audience as possible.

I think with movies it has gotten bad. Look at best pictures today. Largely unappealing to the masses. But in the 90s Braveheart won best picture.

The "Best Picture" winner typically will be Oscar-bait over a crowd-pleaser, though often the winner appeals to both. Famously, "Annie Hall" won in 1977. Sure, Braveheart won in 1995, but in 1998, Shakespeare in Love beat out Saving Private Ryan. In 1982 Gandhi beat out E.T..

it was widely understood that the whole purpose of art and the mark of a truly "great" artist was to construct a complex idea or emotion and be able to communicate it to as wide an audience as possible.

Of course I am not an art critic, theorist or philosopher but I hate this idea of the art necessarily having a purpose. I see it all the time on reddit, variations like "the purpose of art is to [challenge your beliefs/critique society/promote justice/make you think]". However when I think of some of the most regarded artistic masterpieces of the past oftentimes I can discern no higher ideal in them than "this is beautiful" Did this perhaps have some more legible "message" originally? Perhaps, but today there is almost nothing left and it is beloved solely for its beauty. Of course with effort any sufficiently intelligent person can spin out from that various "purposes", for example the all-powerful leftist idea that all art is political and any art that appears apolitical is really just a resounding endorsement of the status-quo in every way, it goes without saying I think this is BS.

The whole idea of a "purpose" being essential in art strikes me as an English-classism. Where we would learn the 5 paragraph "hamburger" style essay and we were instructed to have our entire essay based on a single-sentence thesis about the "message" of the book. I see this high school style approach echoed in Banksy type shit, things that are extremely popular on /r/pics and can generally be summarized with a single-sentence social message like "war is bad" or "capitalism is destroying the environment"

the whole purpose of art and the mark of a truly "great" artist was to construct a complex idea or emotion and be able to communicate it to as wide an audience as possible.

Although I think this is somewhat of an oversimplification - people have been making weird shit for a long time, and I doubt that an author like say, John Donne, would have conceived of his project as "communicating complex ideas to as wide an audience as possible" - I do agree that the self-conscious elitism of early 20th century modernism, and the degree to which it stressed art's own self-consciousness, were genuinely historically novel. In spite of modernism's alleged "overcoming" by "postmodernism" (more and more people are beginning to question if the two are really distinct at all), these tenets have permeated culture and continue to influence art today.

I would never admit this on any left-wing site, but of the two great art exhibitions of 1937, I aesthetically prefer the "German art" to the "degenerate art". And I don't think that ipso facto makes me a fascist.

The only true artform left, then: memes and poasting.

There is already a museum of memes, where a PWC manager is immortalized for all to see. More people have seen this disappointed pakistani man than any religious icon. By kb of digital space, that man is a god alongside dicaprio and harold.

It’s where my artistry flourishes. And I truly think it’s an art form.

The scary thing is that you might not be wrong.

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