41–50 of 59 posts
Strategizing about how to discuss a book you haven't read has to be the ultimate form of pretentiousness.
Or mere utility/functionality (save time not reading some books AND advance your scholarly/literary/etc career as someone who reads and knows them). A con isn't "pretentious". People who have actually read a book can be much more pretentious about it -- in the sense of acting as if this gave them some unique insight over other mere mortals who haven't read it.
Imo a lot of literature has 0 novel content, so this is not suprising. Additional: I'm always shitting on the humanities in the comments here. I dont have anything against them, I both produce them and consume massive quantities of them. My point is simply that they are trivial. If all art suddenly disappeared it wouldnt really matter. If knowledge about, and/or the fruits of STEM stuff disappeared it would be a huge…
A lot of art inspires people.
How many young men saw that movie about Facebook, and didn't want to become the next billionaire?
Art influences the masses. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worst. That FB movie for the worse, in my world, but I felt that eay about Disco, and Cowboy hats that Travolta brough upon us.
Art is everywhere. Now if we lost Banksy I don't think we would unravel.
TLDR; the most important thing about a book is it's historical and social context in the web of literature of it's time, so by understanding relationships, peers, and authors, reading the actual text is not necessary
That said, and not having read the book in question ;), I think TFA is to be read in the context of literary professionals, not muggles[2] who read books for the enjoyment of actually reading the book.
1: The Turing paper is supposed to be a very enjoyable read. Needless to say, I haven't actually read it.
2: I haven't read any Harry Potter.
TLDR; the most important thing about a book is it's historical and social context in the web of literature of it's time, so by understanding relationships, peers, and authors, reading the actual text is not necessary
I never heard this about books, but this has always been my understanding of modern art. An entirely-red canvas is meaningless and valueless on its own; but in its context as a response, in a specific cultural time and place, to artistic trends of the time, one particular entirely-red canvas is quite valuable indeed. It's much more akin to objects (including books!) signed by people: the value of the object is that t…
2. It's not really that complicated. Writing operates in the exact same way; without the context of our societal language, a novel would just be "meaningless and valueless" as it would simply be a bunch of black symbols on a piece of paper. This would likely be more obvious if we lived in a visually-based society and not a linguistic-based one.
Imo a lot of literature has 0 novel content, so this is not suprising. Additional: I'm always shitting on the humanities in the comments here. I dont have anything against them, I both produce them and consume massive quantities of them. My point is simply that they are trivial. If all art suddenly disappeared it wouldnt really matter. If knowledge about, and/or the fruits of STEM stuff disappeared it would be a huge…
Imo a lot of literature has 0 novel content, so this is not suprising. Additional: I'm always shitting on the humanities in the comments here. I dont have anything against them, I both produce them and consume massive quantities of them. My point is simply that they are trivial. If all art suddenly disappeared it wouldnt really matter. If knowledge about, and/or the fruits of STEM stuff disappeared it would be a huge…
Not only does art greatly enhances the enjoyment of life, it's been a critically important survival tool throughout human history and pre-history. Even for primitive humans, art was used to help record and offload and pass on critical information through stories, waypoints/maps, and artworks. Our appreciation for beautiful forms, structures, rhythms, etc, is an evolutionary adaptation that helps us arouse interest and fascination with our world, inspiring us on to greater things and ultimately increasing our survival. This is why our appreciation of natural beauty and art is universal across cultures and time. Many have written and talked about these ideas. STEM doesn't happen without art.
Technology, on the other hand, has put us and our planet on the brink of extinction. Obviously we are now 'all in' on STEM for the survival of modern civilization, but there are a lot of people living in the world today who may disagree about the fruits of progress.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> TV and movies will rot your brain regardless of whether it's The Big Bang Theory or Citizen Kane. I cannot agree with that at all. A great deal of cinema is heavy enough on information to be educational. Think about how much you can learn about history, literature, economics, or politics from watching Jean-Luc Godard’s output from 1962-1968. Even if the medium has flaws in the depth of its presentation, its compila…
You're talking content. I'm talking neurobiology.
Like.... little worms will be transmitted directly through the screen, and a bad smell will start pouring out your ears?
Give us a break.
Visual storytelling is fundamentally different from pure linguistic storytelling. It has much higher bandwidth, so it provides a richer set of simultaneous messages (in some ways similar to an opera or stage play or puppet show, but with even more flexibility over the visual content), but also causes a forced progression through time that makes it not as easily amenable to skimming, reading out of order, re-reading, cross-referencing, or pausing to write direct responses to the text.
But there’s a huge amount to learn and appreciate in visual stories. The best visual stories are incomparably better than the worst written schlock, and vice versa.
TLDR; the most important thing about a book is it's historical and social context in the web of literature of it's time, so by understanding relationships, peers, and authors, reading the actual text is not necessary
I never heard this about books, but this has always been my understanding of modern art. An entirely-red canvas is meaningless and valueless on its own; but in its context as a response, in a specific cultural time and place, to artistic trends of the time, one particular entirely-red canvas is quite valuable indeed. It's much more akin to objects (including books!) signed by people: the value of the object is that t…
A seminal piece of modern art is Duchamps urinal. Apparently, there was a big exhibition in Paris in the early 20th century, and the organizers were a bit snooty, but tried to be progressive, so there were no rules for this exhibition, anything can be art (context: art was at the time narrowly defined as paintings of identifiable subjects in gilded frame, or something like that). Duchamp supposed they weren't totally earnest about that, so he bought a urinal, signed it and submitted it, and sure enough, the organizers rejected it as "not art". He trolled them. Cool, exposing the hipocrites, big deal at the time.
But time has more than caught up with this gag. Exposing hipocrisy today is totally run of the mill, literally daily fare in news, comedy, whatever.
This leaves us with people paying $20 to visit a the MOMA and look solemnly at a 100 year old urinal that has literally zero inherent artistic qualities. That belong in a history museum, not an art museum. Perhaps modern art museums should be understood more as an art history museum, we're there because it feels significant to be physically near a historically significant object, not to enjoy any inherent qualities of the object.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never heard this about books, but this has always been my understanding of modern art. An entirely-red canvas is meaningless and valueless on its own; but in its context as a response, in a specific cultural time and place, to artistic trends of the time, one particular entirely-red canvas is quite valuable indeed. It's much more akin to objects (including books!) signed by people: the value of the object is that t…
1. Modern art is an extremely vast field. I really wish this "modern art = scribble drawings" meme would die. Not to mention that modern != contemporary. 2. It's not really that complicated. Writing operates in the exact same way; without the context of our societal language, a novel would just be "meaningless and valueless" as it would simply be a bunch of black symbols on a piece of paper. This would likely be more…
Is there a name for the specific kind of modern art that has red canvases, soup cans, and splatter-painting as central examples? I'd be glad to change my usage if there were a clearer term.
> Not to mention that modern != contemporary.
I'm not sure what you mean here; I was using "modern art" to refer specifically to the works of the Modern Art movement—which tended to have a lot of 'scribble-drawings'—rather than more generally to "art made in modern times."
> It's not really that complicated. Writing operates in the exact same way; without the context of our societal language, a novel would just be "meaningless and valueless" as it would simply be a bunch of black symbols on a piece of paper.
This is silly; a book can tell you a story without you needing to know anything about the time and place the book was written in. You need to know the language of the book, yes, but a book with a considerate author will often subtly teach you any jargon it uses, or the significance of cultural signifiers it refers to, etc. This is why outsider protagonists in fiction are so common.
And this is also the point of "annotated editions" of books: authors tend to write assuming their audience will understand their own current cultural milieu, but not that of other cultures or eras. A text that comes from another culture has no value to a layperson from outside that culture, until it is annotated with enough context to make it accessible.
Modern art (or whatever you'd call the subset of the movement that has scribble-drawings as its central referent) is not self-contained in this way, in the sense that people don't expect or require modern art to build in a lens for interpreting it, to consider it "good."
In a world without the "people like owning signed copies of things" effect, I'd expect art that is meaningless without inaccessible-to-laymen cultural context to mostly fail, in the same way unannotated books from foreign cultures fail; and I'd expect such works to succeed exactly to the degree to which the author—or an intermediate, such as a museum curator—went to the effort to create a more complete work that contains both the piece and its cultural context. You know: really long wall tags. Or a documentary video playing beside the exhibited piece.
You do see these, but not very often. Why? Because "art lovers" value being the ones to explain the cultural context to their friends, and value works (and curatory paradigms) that enable this, by avoiding annotation and leaving the works illegible. Thus neatly explaining how the scribble-drawings cluster of works ever achieved popularity at all. "Art snobs", who enjoy—to coin a phrase—artsplaining.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Context does not add to the fact that the red canvas is still red.
There is no value to the red canvas; there is only value in the conversation you're able to have about the red canvas, and especially value in controlling that conversation (and where/when it happens) by owning the red canvas. I.e., modern art is valuable in part because people will go to art galleries and museums to stare at denotationally-valueless art if it gives them an excuse to talk/think about art history. Art…
You do realize you're a dyed-in-the-wool postmodernist, right?