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A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

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Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

#21

Post by colechristensen »

Those are some pretty -- to use the author's word -- transcendent conclusions to draw from a top 50 Patreon list.

Even if you were assuming the patrons were all American (obviously false) the most popular creator would have fewer than 1 in 10,000 people subscribing.

Patreon is an obscure way to fund yourself that a very small number of people make their living from, it's not a bellwether for the American heart.

I don't know what high brow things the author finds missing from the list that would change his conclusion, but this seems very much like a conclusion looking for scant evidence for to justify something to write. That page would have been better left blank.

Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

#23

Post by krapp »

baud147258 wrote: post #10
SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #5

Culture evolves, and people increasingly question tradition for tradition's sake. Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world, the decision to have children or not has many contributing factors (economic, for one), and it's hard to be patriotic when every country has so many skeletons in the closet you'd think it's perpetually Halloween.

> Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world I'd say both are orthogonal to each other. The religious view of the world explain the "why do we exist?" and the scientific view the "how do we exist?".

Religion lays claim to both the why and the how. The belief that "religion explains why and science explains how" is entirely modern. For most of human history (until secular science arose as a concept,) every aspect of the material world was seen as having been created and controlled by divine powers. Even when "natural laws" were discovered, those laws were divine in origin, and thus could conceivably be arbitrarily suspended or changed under divine will.

God created the heavens and the earth, created man from the dust of the earth, and woman from man's rib. There's no room in that for the big bang, modern cosmology or evolution - one cannot accept the latter while believing the former to be anything but prose, which would make it no longer religion. Thus religion can only coexist with science as long as religion isn't taken seriously.

Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

#24

Post by Bantros »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #4

> But now let us follow the subsequent development of photography. What do we see? It has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or an electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, 'How beautiful.' The World is Beautiful - that is the titl…

Thanks, second one rings true for me

Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

#26

Post by justanothersys »

phoe-krk wrote: post #17
nindalf wrote: post #8

Not sure how the author decides what is ordinary and what is transcendent. According to him, there is nothing special about folks creating podcasts, but there is something special about a singer-songwriter. He does not say why. Take https://www.patreon.com/sonicether who earns $50k a month creating shaders for Minecraft. That sounds mundane until you realise that he's probably enabling tens of thousands of people to…

> Not sure how the author decides what is ordinary and what is transcendent. This. Why should I allow anyone to define what kinds of art should I find transcendent and, worse, which kinds of art are non-transcendent ? This article is weird and full of stereotypes; it's written from the point as if art was easily and objectively classifiable. No, art is not classifiable like that, and something that one man calls ever…

Art’s subjectivity has been debated since forever. It’s not a fact. That being said, I also didn’t enjoy the point of view in the article very much and I mostly agree with your sentiment.

Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

#27

Post by claudiawerner »

Freak_NL wrote: post #13
jetru wrote: post #7

So true. So many people I know and myself included are tired of the "rat race". We don't want to keep working for nothing, we don't want to keep hoping for that next raise, we don't want to pretend to be smarter or cooler or better than we are. What a horrible way to live in the age of plenty. Maybe, we like cold pizza. Bougey is a dirty word. We want to chill. We want fairness. Simplicity is where Happiness lies. Th…

In case anyone else gets stuck on 'bougey', it is apparently an abbreviation of bourgeoisie . Is this US slang?

Unfortunately the slang tends to refer to acts or items that are expensive, rather than, y'know, class relations or members of the French Third Estate.

Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

#28

Post by lotsofpulp »

baud147258 wrote: post #10
SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #5

Culture evolves, and people increasingly question tradition for tradition's sake. Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world, the decision to have children or not has many contributing factors (economic, for one), and it's hard to be patriotic when every country has so many skeletons in the closet you'd think it's perpetually Halloween.

> Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world I'd say both are orthogonal to each other. The religious view of the world explain the "why do we exist?" and the scientific view the "how do we exist?".

Why and how can contradict.

Easiest example is “god made people this way” vs “people are the result of random processes that came about due to happenstance”.

Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

#29

Post by 0815test »

noobermin wrote: post #14

It is rather convenient the author defines "mundane" as things he doesn't like and "grand" as things he does like. It sounds like he's merely upset that a majority of patrons on patreon don't share his tastes.

This, so much. I for one find the vast majority of so-called "high art" and "high culture" to be frankly depressing and off-putting, rather than "grand" or "transcendent" in any way. In the best of cases this is somewhat offset by the HNish intellectual interest and curiosity one can take in the stuff (and some variant of this is an often-cited point that's supposed to demonstrate the superiority of "high" culture) but all things considered, I'd rather explore the hidden intellectual interest of things that are usually dismissed as mundane, "middlebrow" or even "lowbrow".

Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

#30

Post by deogeo »

krapp wrote: post #23
baud147258 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world I'd say both are orthogonal to each other. The religious view of the world explain the "why do we exist?" and the scientific view the "how do we exist?".

Religion lays claim to both the why and the how. The belief that "religion explains why and science explains how" is entirely modern. For most of human history (until secular science arose as a concept,) every aspect of the material world was seen as having been created and controlled by divine powers. Even when "natural laws" were discovered, those laws were divine in origin, and thus could conceivably be arbitraril…

Sure, if you define religion as literal interpretation of the Bible, stuck in the 9th century, while allowing science the full benefit of modern understanding.

For example, you probably didn't have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinozism in mind when you said religion.

> Even when "natural laws" were discovered, those laws were divine in origin, and thus could conceivably be arbitrarily suspended or changed under divine will.

We still don't know the origin of natural laws. It's very probable that such knowledge is unattainable.

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