I highly recommend Adam Curtis’s documentaries for anyone who has not watched.
Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression (2017)
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Re: Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression (2017)
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the explanation > The falling off of skill, realism, and other similar metrics Can you elaborate on this? Are you saying artists now are generally less skilled than artists from back then...? As for realism: isn't this still very much the goal of plenty of video game design, TV/movies, and various other forms of art?
Artist here. Artists are indeed less skilled today, but there is an effort to improve the situation (ARC). Google 'twilight of painting'. Concept artists are highly skilled, but they do something different than the painters of yore. They turn around decent looking stuff in a few hours. It's very impressive, but it (naturally) lacks the depth & thoughtfulness achieved by painters like Caillebotte.
Here ARC refers to Art Renewal Center, I think.
Re: Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression (2017)
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. The modern art world is predominantly a tax evasion and racketeering scheme, designed to transfer assets outside the influence of national and international law.
How does it work? And what’s the evidence that this is true? People love to say this but I’ve never seen anyone go beyond the surface on the took. The impression I get is it’s mostly people who don’t know what they’re talking about repeating a pleasing idea.
It's used for money laundering, wealth transfer and tax avoidance. You buy and sell art, especially art that permanently resides in freeports, with cash, with shell companies that don't declare their ultimate beneficiary. You then avoid anyone knowing that you paid criminal X or criminal X paid you with the proceeds of crime. You avoid your government knowing that you have $XXX,XXX,XXX of assets stashed away that you're not declaring. You don't pay capital gains tax on it. And so on.
Governments around the world have been passing legislation in the past few years, and putting diplomatic pressure on governments of other tax havens, to tighten scrutiny of these international financial transactions.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-freeports-oper...
https://news.artnet.com/market/switzerland-freeport-regulati...
https://safehaven.com/markets/markets-other/How-The-Ultra-We...
Re: Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression (2017)
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
No I'm sure you can find clear examples of painting purely for self-expression much earlier than Goya. What's new-ish is that the structure of the art world/market is set up to incentivize self-expression.
> No I'm sure you can find clear examples of painting purely for self-expression much earlier than Goya Name one. Perhaps one can mention artists like Caravagio and El Greco. But all such artists addressed themes that were common: the bible and the clasiics. The unique thing about the romantic movement was that they placed immediate human experience above god and godliness. Honestly, check out Goya's black paintings…
I feel like the obvious answer here is cave paintings.
Re: Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression (2017)
#95Curtis expresses disdain for our generation’s reluctance to form groups and struggle for power. But I’m more inclined to think this is a good thing. Power struggle between groups is a zero sum game, while individual freedom is not. It’s true that individual freedom also leads to power structures, and that those can be oppressive to certain groups. But I think that problem is better addressed with individual and unive…
When everyone is individualized and alienated from each other, you wind up with a deep emptiness in a population looking for community and organization to fill the void. This is exactly the methodology Stalin and Hitler took to get people on board with totalitarianism. People are fundamentally social animals who need community and social structures, and making everyone into an individual creates instability and allow…
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Re: Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression (2017)
#96I highly recommend Adam Curtis’s documentaries for anyone who has not watched.
I recommend only with three serious reservations: Viewers should be well aware of the Kuleshov effect. Viewers should understand that Curtis is highly selective in what he takes and puts together. Viewers should carefully consider any decision to watch while under the influence of substances that tend to make you suggestible or impressed.
The amount of archival footage Curtis riffles through for his pieces is an impressive part of the story of his storytelling. It should also be its own implicit warning. The runtime of the footage he watched and did not include dwarfs the runtime of any single piece of his you might see. To be well read on any particular event, much less time period, that he jaunts through would take a stack of books and a lot of serious attention.
Re: Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression (2017)
#97I follow the contemporary art world pretty closely, and a feeling I often get is that it's merely a giant collection of individuals expressing themselves in a way that fits into the market system of galleries, museums, auctions, etc. There are of course artists focused on political causes, but for the most part it is entirely devoid of any centralized ethos or ideal. While this situation is freeing for the individual…
Agree, but i don't think postmodernism can go away. One thing i find fascinating about postmodernism is how antagonistic it is. As it core, it's deeply anti-metanarrative, and i think that it's main structural characteristic. Which is, in a way, a bit anti-intuition, as we like to understand the world with meta-narratives. I won't go into politics (basically, all parties create metanarrative, all use postmodernist ar…
Is it just me or is that not an even grander meta-meta-narrative?
Re: Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression (2017)
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No I'm sure you can find clear examples of painting purely for self-expression much earlier than Goya Name one. Perhaps one can mention artists like Caravagio and El Greco. But all such artists addressed themes that were common: the bible and the clasiics. The unique thing about the romantic movement was that they placed immediate human experience above god and godliness. Honestly, check out Goya's black paintings…
I feel like the obvious answer here is cave paintings.
I don't know about that, I think cave painting was highly meme driven.
Chauvet Cave and Lascaux are similar (lots of overlapping paintings of large animals), but some 16,000 years separate them. Is that individual self-expression? It looks to me like entrenched tradition.
Stencil paintings of hands are a common theme, but bizarrely are found all over the world: Argentina, France, North Africa, Australia. This too can only be a meme, I think. Possibly the method, spitting out paint, was the meme, and the idea of making stencils of hands arose naturally by accident in all these places, but even then there is no sign of real individual self-expression going on. It's also intriguing to me that three of the places I mentioned (on three different continents!) include stencils of animal hands (large birds or lizards).
Re: Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression (2017)
#99I want to disagree with him and I want to agree with him in almost equal measure, I think that is ambivalence. My cynicism says that people like him, people who create psychologically dense pieces for the BBC, are actually on the side of conformity. I've felt since I was young that we are being sold our revolutions. They've firmly commoditized the opposition.
I'm tired of the politicization of everything. Even in this piece, there is an implicit call to political action underneath his attempted reframing of individualism. He wants us to see the power in being a member of a group. It is some kind of call to group-think, to pretend you are an individual and yet still act within a political body seeking power.
The real question I have is much deeper. Sapolsky has been on the podcast circuit pushing his new book that insists we have no free will whatsoever. Žižek claims that we are locked inside our ideologies. But I keep going back to ancient Greek philosophical ideas that entreat me to "know thyself".
I heard on a podcast recently that Sartre's lament that "hell is other people" is best interpreted as the observation that our instinct to mimic others invades our own freedom. When our peer group expresses strong virtues we are pressured to conform by threat of ostracization. This leads to anxiety as our own sense of virtue may be misaligned according to the group.
Yet I have a growing belief that finding my own virtue, something that completely originates within myself independent of external influence, is the real key. And Curtis here is suggesting that technology can be used to that purpose, to unite like-minded individuals based on their genuine virtues.
I suppose it is the power-seeking aspect of this piece that sits poorly with me. That I would (or should) seek other like-minded people for the purpose of exerting some political influence. It seems to me that just identifying and remaining true to virtues that I feel originate within myself is hard enough. To also consider the political consequences of grouping up with others and combining our resources to affect societal change is more than I want.
It reminds me of the conversation Jesus is said to have had with Pontius Pilate. He asks Jesus if he is trying to raise an army to overthrow the Roman order and Jesus responds that the Kingdom he is interested isn't of this Earth. There is something to that religious language which I think we've forgotten.
Re: Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression (2017)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if this trend will continue for as long as you fear. Individual expression had had some boosts during the Renaissance, during Romanticism (perhaps due to atheism, as a first response to globalism, and due to scientific discoveries regarding the mind) and again after World War II (perhaps due to the "American Dream" propaganda, and perhaps even as a way to fight communism?). A strange culture developed wh…
> Individual expression had had some boosts during the Renaissance, during Romanticism (perhaps due to atheism, as a first response to globalism, and due to scientific discoveries regarding the mind) and again after World War II (perhaps due to the "American Dream" propaganda, and perhaps even as a way to fight communism?). My understanding is that "individual expression" has been with us firmly since Romanticism (it…
Some confusion here: is self-expression about expressing personal moral ideas, perhaps political ideas? Because "art for art's sake" was originally (with the aesthetic movement of the 1870s) in opposition to didactic purposes for art. It was supposed to be about beauty rather than telling the audience something (which in mainstream art at the time typically meant something hamfistedly "improving").