What about videos of people dancing is going to hurt literacy. People will consume Apps instead of TV, neither are literature, but one you can participate in.
You may be too old to let yourself like new things. Where's the childlike wonder?
I don't use The Tik toks either, but let me not lose mine.
Just to clarify, TikTok does not do ad revenue sharing. They have a creator fund, but TikTok creators really make money via brand deals, merch sales and direct donations from fans.
You should look up some TikTok creators from Egypt, there is plenty of great stuff out there.
The basic premise of your argument as I understand it is that art is something you see in museums or art is something that has been gated by age or by scholars or by "cultural significance". This is not how art works, some great works were discovered long after the artist had died. TikTok creators create art, some of it good, some of it bad, but it's art all the same.
Second, that is not the argument I am making. The ancient Egyptian clay pot at a museum was just an example. I stated the act of getting money is not devoid of the context of which it was acquired when it comes to art.
It does actually take a sort of literacy to understand and appreciate art. Go talk to anyone about art who has spent a lot of time studying it and then talk to someone who just walks through the museum to take instagram pictures and you get very different answers about what they see.
To you, yes. Not everyone is you though.
>It does actually take a sort of literacy to understand and appreciate art.
No it doesn't. It might add something (or nothing at all or detract from it) but if it is a hard requirement then it isn't art.
> Go talk to anyone about art who has spent a lot of time studying it and then talk to someone who just walks through the museum to take instagram pictures and you get very different answers about what they see.
Exactly, and both are equally correct in their view on the art pieces. I'm sorry but your post sound like one of those snob magazines that try to make art only something for the rich and well educated. It is neither. If anything money detracts from art and studying something too much can too. A young child can appreciate art by Leonardo da Vinci or Mr. Brainwash just as well as an art professor. They just appreciate it in different, equally correct, ways.
That being said, it’s much more natural to actively read than to actively watch TikTok. Thus, in practice, reading is often a better activity than watching TikTok. The first chapter or Robert Adler’s “How to Read a Book” talks about active reading in more detail; he has a few more arguments too.
Side note: unless you are a relativist and think everyone’s view about art is equally correct no matter what, the person who studies art is probably “more correct” than the Instagramer; a lot of art requires cultural context (e.g, familiarity with the Bible and Ovid) to understand. If you are a relativist, then why does nearly everyone agree some art belongs in a museum and a lot of art is garbage that nobody cares about?
E.F. Schumacher coined the term 'adaequatio' for this.
"What enables man to know anything at all about the world around him? … Nothing can be known without there being an appropriate “instrument” in the makeup of the knower. This is the Great Truth of “adaequatio” (adequateness), which defines knowledge as adaequatio rei et intellectus — the understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.[...]
Beethoven’s musical abilities, even in deafness, were incomparably greater than mine, and the difference did not lie in the sense of hearing; it lay in the mind. Some people are incapable of grasping and appreciating a given piece of music, not because they are deaf but because of a lack of adaequatio in the mind. The music is grasped by intellectual powers which some people possess to such a degree that they can grasp, and retain in their memory, an entire symphony on one hearing or one reading of the score; while others are so weakly endowed that they cannot get it at all, no matter how often and how attentively they listen to it. For the former, the symphony is as real as it was for the composer; for the latter, there is no symphony: there is nothing but a succession of more or less agreeable but altogether meaningless noises. The former’s mind is adequate to the symphony; the latter’s mind is inadequate, and thus incapable of recognizing the existence of the symphony.[...]
For every one of us only those facts and phenomena “exist” for which we posses adaequatio, and as we are not entitled to assume that we are necessarily adequate to everything, at all times, and in whatever condition we may find ourselves, so we are not entitled to insist that something inaccessible to us has no existence at all and is nothing but a phantom of other people’s imaginations."
It's absolutely childish to even for a minute assume that my perception and understanding of chess is "equally correct" as Magnus Carlsen's. He sees complexity and depth in the game that I cannot, because I do not have the capacity for it, learned or otherwise. And the consequences of not recognizing this, are equally dire, again Schumacher:
"When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level (or grade of significance) of the object of knowledge, the result is not factual error but something much more serious: an inadequate and impoverished view of reality."
The problem of art being impossible to appreciate without sufficient training is that there then becomes no way to detect dishonest art. The worst possible intentions are officially impossible. There is no way to stop the dissent into art created for the sake of producing "inadequate and impoverished" feelings in all but the most devoted followers. Post-modernism is one such authority play all the way down.
See, there it is again. The snobbery. We are discussing art, not music theory. No, one that has played Bach for 20 years cannot by default appreciate art better than someone who just heard Bach for the first time. It is exactly the same as saying only a mechanic who have worked on cars for 20 years can appreciate a good sports car or only a doctor can appreciate the human body. It is pure elitist nonsense! Just because you know the theory behind how something is made doesn't mean you are better at appreciating it. Far from it. Using all kinds of theory on, say, a book will often ruin it.
It is those who have used a lot of time on theory that want to believe they are better, not those without the theory that understand art less.
Alternatively, this is the kind of thing guys like Banksy and Warhol were doing with their art. It's a pretty narrow minded view of art to not include some of the stuff going on on TikTok.
Plus no one in their right mind would have compared the Pieta to a local bard with a talent for singing and dancing getting paid to entertain people. Just a lot of backward comparisons all because people have in their mind a single definition of what "art" is and should be.
What's your point with this?
Are you equally as dismissive of reading books other people wrote?
The heart of TikTok is video creation and remix. That's why memes spread so quickly there.
We only came up with words and writing to cover the gaps with facial expressions and motions.
Truly, from the dawn of writing we’ve been dealing with the faults of expressing ourselves via words. The issues have been worth it however, because communicating complicated ideas across time and space was impossible otherwise.
Now, video has progressed to the point where it is trivial to use as a storage medium of ideas. We are still in the very early days of “moving pictures,” and with any technology, the first iterations often look like toys. In the far future, we may look back at this very moment as the start of a surge of _better_ communication across all boundaries; time, space, country of origin, species perhaps?
This is all baseless speculation of course, but it’s fun to speculate.
It feels like a forced attempt at viral marketing. "Maybe if we act shocked, they'll be shocked too!"
Just watch how babies react when you make the same face.
I suspect social media just hijacked and metastasized the response.
Apparently it's quite profitable to have endless eyeballs refreshing ads.