Their work satirizes art and commerce, usually simultaneously, often while still being both.
To me this project is about the absurdity of gatekeeping celebrity branded common-sense for $180, when it can more effectively be conveyed in the low-rent wikihow style for free.
The target market is basically people who would have paid $20 for a book with the same content. To them, it's not a bad deal.
Presumably, people don't actually think they're going to learn screenwriting by listening to Aaron Sorkin talk about it or by watching Gordon Ramsay.
Certainly the How to be an astronaut Masterclass is meant for pure enter/edutainment?
Compare this to Lynda or The Teaching Company. They both have amazingly high quality content, and choose teachers solely based on their ability to teach, not their fame. Lynda is focused on imparting directly applicable knowledge whereas TTC focused on serving the intellectually curious (these days they are inching ever closer to your typical airport self-help offering).
I haven't watched a master class, but they seem well produced and "aspirational" at least.
I have a friend who swears by the teaching company. I did a udemy into to Unreal engine that was oddly decent. But I like to do extension school classes that force me to show up with the threat of a grade.
The Deadmau5 intro video is entertaining (35,000,000 views!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtj6dDARgfQ
"If you are not naturally comfortable on stage, from my experience, you should try putting on a F#$!!$ helmet that covers your face.."
I don't agree with what this company is doing, stealing content from a commercial product and making it free. But I can see they're making a point, as a kind of perfomance art and social criticism. They're brazen about its controversial nature, and perhaps the free content will benefit someone who doesn't have the means to access this knowledge.
It also makes me question, how will such knowledge production be funded, if not as (highly priced) commercial products? If everyone started stealing and giving away knowledge for free, how can it be sustainable? Is it even possible to "steal" knowledge? Well, yes, in the form of information/data - but, if it's digested and re-presented, as they have done here, does copyright extend to such works?
Perhaps their goal is to raise such questions in the audience.
This isn’t my piece so I can’t say my opinions are 100% aligned with the creators intent, but going in loving the concept, I was disappointed by the lack of depth in the content... it’s a lot less a class taught by your hero, more like your professor scored a really cool guest lecturer.
While I do think $180 is way higher than it should be, I also don't believe everything there can be conveyed as wikihow. Especially for the hands-on type of subject, I'd rather see actual people doing the demo in a video than read through vague text descriptions.
Satire works are brilliant, but sometimes it has the drawback of justifying everything with "well, it's satire". You didn't laugh? That's on you.
decadent ingredients with absurdly terse instructions, and when he yells at the kid, i died!
It sounds like you don’t like a soft scramble. That’s ok! You might want bigger curds or a harder scramble (not the same thing per se!). You can watch Jacques Pepin make an omelette that you might like (big curds), or I’m sure plenty of others out there with good instruction too.
“Celebrity chefs” are probably mostly teaching soft scrambles because you end up with a very silky rich product, and most people equate rich fatty velvety textured with “high end.” Ignore the Gordon Ramsey’s out there, they’re endless self promoters with oversized egos who take on the worst of toxic masculinity.
I'm not a fan of the texture by itself.
Masterclass clearly has different goals. It isn't hard to guess that they are optimizing for something other than minimum cost per view.
Don't mind the few hundred dollar illstrations