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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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The entire art world, root and branch, all the institutions and nearly all the artists, is left wing. There's nothing on the right to subsidize.

The closest to mainstream rightwing art I can think of are artists like Stonetoss and other Twitterati, who have a sizeable following on platforms with less leftist moderation.

That is an exaggeration. Actually my post was partly inspired by some similar complaints by George Alexopoulos (GPrime850) who is on the right although of more libertarianish bent.

Also, there is enough money in right wing circles to create institutions. And you can change current institutions.

Well, someone could complain that they weren't right wing enough, but the daily wire got some films made. If they aren't good enough to qualify point is that there is enough money among right wingers to fund this.

This attitude of hopelessness stinks and ensures that nothing will change. It is a dishonorable way to engage with the world for any political or cultural movement.

Also, it makes the act of complaining a waste of time. What is the point if you got no positive vision?

Also, there is enough money in right wing circles to create institutions.

They will be laughingstocks. Not just because they're right wing, but because, having to start from zero, they will suck. If you manage to keep one around long enough, it will be suborned.

And you can change current institutions.

If you do (e.g. the way DeSantis is trying with New College) , they will be cut out of the art world as a whole. You will not be able to get prestigious or even competent staff or faculty, any students or clients will be shunned until the institution returns to the fold.

This attitude of hopelessness stinks and ensures that nothing will change.

That nothing will change is what engenders the attitude of hopelessness.

Also, it makes the act of complaining a waste of time. What is the point if you got no positive vision?

Fine arts only survive because of subsidy. A lot of it is private subsidy from what I call "Left, Inc.", but a lot is government subsidy. I favor zeroing that out whenever possible; trying to subsidize right-wing art is doomed to fail and will most likely just hand money to the left.

If you do (e.g. the way DeSantis is trying with New College) , they will be cut out of the art world as a whole.

I might be missing something here, but wouldn't that be the point? To create a completely separate status hierarchy?

I mean, yeah, the existing artistic elite isn't going to jump ship. Do you want them to? That sounds like you're asking for your new institution to be marched through all over again. Plus, these aren't the natural members you're looking for in your new institution. This is a high risk/high reward venture and you don't want a bunch of established people with baggage from the old institution. But do you know who totally goes for high risk/high reward strategies with a very high chance of death (social in this case) in exchange for a chance at status?

Young men with no prospects. In every age, in every nation, there are young, low status men looking for a way to take big risks to jump up the status hierarchy. Whether it be a colonial expedition, the rap scene in the Bronx, or a Somalian pirate joint-stock venture, there's always takers. As a bonus, this is a decent chunk of the art world's demographic, this lets you sap your opponent of the natural energy that comes with an influx of youth.

So on one hand you promote this vision of the omnipotent left and a hopeless situation where any effort will inevitably fail. But on the other hand you say you favor zeroing out goverment subsidy and left inc.

I understand you have a libertarianish ideology. Why isn't that hopeless, too? And who is going to stop the private subsidy from Left inc?

If the left is so powerful, why are they going to let you stop their gravy train?

Actually, it is easier to subsidize right wingers than to stop all subsidies on the left. Plenty of rightists including some rather edgy sources, with more limited reach than if things were completly evenhanded do manage to gain enough donations to keep promoting their political content.

If the people behind platforms like substack, gab, odyssey, rumble shared your perspective, that wouldn't have happened as they wouldn't had bothered to do so. Same with Musk and twitter although not sure about whether censorship has really improved that much there. And if after their first ban, they didn't come back and tried again, or didn't try because others got banned on the right, you wouldn't see some of these people making money even in youtube.

They will be laughingstocks. Not just because they're right wing, but because, having to start from zero, they will suck. If you manage to keep one around long enough, it will be suborned.

The one dude I mentioned did pretty well. Shadiversity maybe sort of qualifies and his books were decent. Criticaldrinker maybe qualifies as rightist enough, and he also has well reviewed books and these are just internet personalities. Lets just say your perspective of no right wing artists around isn't accurate. Plus, in addition to actual artists who have been there and other talented people who won't suck because they are talented, you could get others who either flip cynically or actually change in a manner that is affected by incentives but doesn't feel to them as a cynical decision.

Of course these people do have some success already, and more having that opportunity would be a good thing.

Those who are determined and try to persevere have a future. The very attitude influences others as well. Have you considered that the attitude you have in the past existed as well and might have influenced things into reaching this point?

Of course, it is also our choice to let your hopelessness infect others. I rather we let it consume you and others who share your perspective alone and the rest wisely reject it. I wouldn't mind if you changed your mind too, but whatever you think, we don't have to follow you.

I understand you have a libertarianish ideology. Why isn't that hopeless, too? And who is going to stop the private subsidy from Left inc?

It is, and nothing. The Left has a crazy web of non-profits and commercial entities, and possibly entirely-phony industries to funnel money from one into the other. For just one example, it's been widely reported that the Wikimedia foundation gets far more money than it needs to keep Wikipedia running. Where's the rest go? Some goes to feather the bed of Wikimedia employees of course, but the largest part of it gets distributed to other non-profits. Wikimedia is basically laundering money intended for what people think is a good cause (funding Wikipedia) into things they probably wouldn't donate to. Multiply that by the number of "front" non-profits, and it's huge. I think it's safe to say that pretty much any donation to a large not-explicitly-right-wing non-profit will end up funding lefty things. And it wouldn't even matter much if individuals stopped contributing, because what they pay for razors and beer and other consumer products would end up being partially donated (as part of a marketing campaign) to various do-gooder organizations which would then do lefty things with them. That's also what would happen if you tried to fund right-wing art without building everything from scratch; you'd end up funding the left.

I would eliminate the tax deduction for gifts to NPOs and I would make the gifts received by NPOs taxable income. Whereas previously a rich person could give 60 dollars and government would effectively match 40 resulting in the NPO getting 100 now if the rich person wants to give the same post tax amount the NPO ends up with 60 of which they need to pay 12 of tax (before deductions for staffing, etc). You cut their resources almost in half.

Then you invest in your own artists and train them to be just as good.

The money's there, the people can be found, nothing stops you from going to art school and just faking your politics if the credentials matter that much.

I note that this can be done, because the Mormons have done it. When I was in SLC I attended a taping of Music and the Spoken Word with the Tabernacle Choir, and the modern Mormon sacred music made me think “This is what the culture that produced Bach and Haydn would be putting out if it had drifted since 1900 instead of actively self-destructing.” The Mormon Conference Center is very visibly built with the same desire to glorify God as the great European cathedrals, and is the only modern building I have seen built by people who hoped it would still be standing in 1000 years.

The money's there, the people can be found, nothing stops you from going to art school and just faking your politics if the credentials matter that much.

Most people can't pull off the fake, and will get converted instead. And you've got the additional constraint that you need to start with someone with talent; Hitler and Bush ain't going to cut it.

Then just use the free tutorials online or invite artists to teach your people.

Are Bush and Hitler the best examples of right wing artists?

Also, while Hitler did commit various warcrimes, his regime committed attrocities and so on and so forth, and he was a bad person, he was actually a good painter. Of course I am not judging here by the standards of the best painters. Without his infamy, if you put in front of most people his paintings they will not think they are the result of someone without talent at all.

The entire art world, root and branch, all the institutions and nearly all the artists, is left wing. There's nothing on the right to subsidize.

What makes you say this? There are plenty of artists out there that aren't leftist, they just aren't as well known. The show 'The Leftovers' had a very distinct religious/right wing bent, as has been discussed here.

There are excellent right-wing writers on Substack, like N.S. Lyons, among many many others. There are beautiful depictions of angels from a relatively classical stance (although I don't know the particular political views) like the Angelarium.

This sort of blatant and knee-jerk negativity is foolish and defeatist. It's a major reason why your values continue to lose. Conservatives of the past fought evil regimes when their children would be beheaded as a consequence, you can't bother yourself to fight against leftist art?

they just aren't as well known

The entire crux of the matter, and won't be well-known so long as the access and power is in the hands of the current arbiters of what is and is not 'good art'. Some artist becomes major right-wing/conservative favourite? Well those redneck knuckledraggers know nothing, they just like country music and paintings on velvet. Maybe that person is commercially successful, but if they ever want to be added to the pantheon of 'good art', they better drop the wrong views.

Or conversely, a good artist may not be able to become successful on the right, because the art is not familiar or compatible to the formed tastes. I'm told Rothko is a great painter, many have spoken and written of how his works move them deeply and speak to them, but as far as I'm concerned it's "yeah, that's nice but so what?" To me, that is something that can be reduced to the level of the kind of 'art' that is extruded to hang on the walls of businesses or in hotels or public spaces - you need something for the walls and this is something (but I don't think it's art). That's a niche that is very easily replaced by AI art.

As is the Angel Tarot, which grinds my gears on several levels. But that's an argument for another day 😁

What makes you say this?

Observation. Art schools are leftist. Art criticism is leftist. Art museums are, by and large, leftist -- only tempered by the inclusion of centuries-old art. Artists get praise and praise each other by producing leftist art. Or often enough art that is meaningless garbage but which the artist ascribes a leftist message to. It's a set of institutions even more throughly captured than the university system.

Then it's time to do the hard work of creating an alternative set of schools, critics, museums, etc that have different values, if those values are what you care about.

Chesterton, on his time attending art school (the Slade) in the 1890s:

In this chapter, the period covered is roughly that of my going to an art school and is doubtless also coloured by the conditions of such a place. There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature. Moreover those who work are, I will not say the least intelligent, but, by the very nature of the case, for the moment the most narrow; those whose keen intelligence is for the time narrowed to a strictly technical problem. They do not want to be discursive and philosophical; because the trick they are trying to learn is at once incommunicable and practical; like playing the violin. Thus philosophy is generally left to the idle; and it is generally a very idle philosophy. In the time of which I write it was also a very negative and even nihilistic philosophy. And though I never accepted it altogether, it threw a shadow over my mind and made me feel that the most profitable and worthy ideas were, as it were on the defensive. I shall have more to say of this aspect of the matter later on; the point is for the moment that an art school can be a very idle place and that I was then a very idle person.

Art may be long but schools of art are short and very fleeting, and there have been five or six since I attended an art school. Mine was the time of Impressionism; and nobody dared to dream there could be such a thing as Post-Impressionism or Post-Post-Impressionism. The very latest thing was to keep abreast of Whistler and take him by the white forelock, as if he were Time himself. Since then that conspicuous white forelock has rather faded into a harmony of white and grey and what was once so young has in its turn grown hoary. But I think there was a spiritual significance in Impressionism, in connection with this age as the age of scepticism. I mean that it illustrated scepticism in the sense of subjectivism. Its principal was that if all that could be seen of a cow was a white line and a purple shadow, we should only render the line and the shadow; in a sense we should only believe in the line and the shadow, rather than in the cow. In one sense the Impressionist sceptic contradicted the poet who said he had never seen a purple cow. He tended rather to say that he had only seen a purple cow; or rather that he had not seen the cow but only the purple. Whatever may be the merits of this method of art, there is obviously something highly subjective and sceptical about it as a method of thought. It naturally lends itself to the metaphysical suggestion that things only exist as we perceive them, or that things do not exist at all. The philosophy of Impressionism is necessarily close to the philosophy of Illusion. And this atmosphere also tended to contribute, however indirectly, to a certain mood of unreality and sterile isolation that settled at this time upon me; and I think upon many others.

Hmm I should read Chesterton. Still working through Lewis at the moment.

This won't work, because it plays to the other side's strengths. First, you'll have to somehow create all of that without including any of the people who know how to do such things (or only including the few who were booted for their insufficient leftism -- but even those are probably too left). Second, even if you do, you'll have to avoid them infiltrating and converting it, and they're really good at that. "Build your own art world" isn't quite as far out as "build your own international financial system", but it's pretty far out there.

Well then find some artists and people who are already good at things, and convince them your values are right. They won't magically lose their skills and abilities because they change political views.

Conversion is asymmetric too; it nearly always move left. To no small degree because the institutions which can convince are in the hands of the left. By the time an artist is actually known they've been steeped in leftism for so long you're never going to move them out short of a religious conversion experience.

Then figure out why conversion is asymmetric and figure out strategies to match it. If those don't work, analyze your failures and go back to the drawing board.

Your fatalistic argument of 'no matter what we do we already lost' is tiresome in the extreme.

But lately they are quite incompetent. So there is opening.

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