Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression (2017)
thecreativeindependent.com
thecreativeindependent.com
While this situation is freeing for the individual artist, I can't help but look at previous eras – say, the Italian Renaissance, or the high point of Ottoman miniature painting [1] – and admire the lack of complete self-expression. Instead, you had a much narrower focus of acceptable work and topics, with the result that artists were all engaged with basically the same art forms and the same topics, across the entirety of the artistic community. For example, both da Vinci and Raphael were painting Madonnas [2], whereas today you'd certainly never have two world-famous painters in direct competition working on the same type of painting – because their value is determined by their individuality and self-expression, not their expertise/skill.
This is a widespread post-modern culture thing and not limited to art, of course, and probably won't go away for a long, long time, or at least until you get a massive society-wide idea like Christianity to take root again.
1. The book "My Name is Red" by Orhan Pamuk is all about this. Great book. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Red
Mightn't this have to do with the fact that most paintings back then were commissioned by rich clients, who were probably competing with each other in some way? "Aha, my painting of Madonna is better than yours!" sort of thing
(I know nothing about art history, so I'd be happy to learn why this is silly :P)
It's also worth noting that artists themselves were more directly competitive. Da Vinci and Michelangelo had a bit of a rivalry, for example:
https://artrkl.com/blogs/news/art-history-feuds-michelangelo...
https://www.historyextra.com/period/renaissance/leonardo-mic...
You can't really imagine this happening between top contemporary artists today. "Gerhard Richter says he's a better painter than Takashi Murakami," is a headline that wouldn't make much sense.
> 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?
Video games, movies, etc. typically do care more about skill and realism, but they're a different thing from "fine art", i.e., art in art galleries.
Somehow someone managed to convince the world that Hollywood is not real art, but some other arbitrary weird stuff is.
(To avoid confusion, I personally love the arbitrary weird stuff.)
The world knows this is art but some bullshit artists, pun intended, in New York pretend like it is not. Then other bullshit artists in other cities follow what the bullshit artists in New York are doing because most aren't creative or free thinkers at all.
I love galleries personally but it is a class of non-creative, closed minded, bullshit artists at this point.
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.
Meaning, whereas in the past, if you was the first one to figure out, say, perspective or some color, you was able to draw what others could not. You did something knew and you are remembered for it. Today, if you can draw super realistic portrait, you are one of many talented artists who learned that from a books and classes.
> 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?
No one knows artists behind video games. I do not thing realism is the distinguishing things behind artists who do video games, movies or tv. It is more of scene design, lightning, camera work etc that gets to be judged from the art side.
'The work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction' by Walter Benjamin is a great read. There's a short but dense preface outlining the topic in purely Marxist terms; Benjamin was a Marxist and the essay was written in 1935 following his flight from Nazi Germany. However, the body of the essay develops its argument from first principles and doesn't require familiarity or agreement with Marxist theory to appreciate.
By the time of the advent of photography, the skills of realistic painting had been fully fleshed out. Aside from the ultra-realism movement, there was no where left to go, hence turning inward w/ impressionism forward.
As modernism progressed, the avenues left to explore seem to get increasingly wild and crude in an effort to say something different... seemingly all that's left now for modern art is to share some unique perspective of the world, the rougher the medium, the better. Marcel Duchamp's Fountain is spectacular to me because it really called where it was all ending up.
> By the time of the advent of photography, the skills of realistic painting had been fully fleshed out. Aside from the ultra-realism movement, there was no where left to go, hence turning inward w/ impressionism forward.
IMO instead of innovating, painters gave up when photography hit the scene. Just completely threw in the towel.
To this day, every method of printing has a very limited color space that fails entirely to capture the vibrancy and brilliance possible with paints. Paintings like the Blue Boy are impossible to truly convey in CMYK and painters like Hans Holbein the younger were capable of photorealism in the 16th century that took until the mid to late 20th century to replicate with photography, with the added benefit of artistic license.
I think it's entirely artists' fault that they lost the plot in the 19th and 20th century. It wasn't until graphic design software took away their advantage of the imagination-to-paper pipeline that they were truly doomed.
Sidenote: I think impressionism predates photography becoming a competitor. It doesn't predate the first photographs, but the movement started decades before photography was good enough to threaten artists.
The way I think of it is taking the neurosis of the human mind and putting it out on a medium in all its glory. I don't have a deep knowledge of art history though so I'm not sure if there is much of a prior, I just am aware of the bigger movements.
Perhaps in the future we'll spend more time recognizing the mastery of craft that industrial designers put into creating household lamps and such. Especially since the history is pilling up and ready to be mined for interesting content.
https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780307594754/page/26/mode/...
The lost battles : Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the artistic duel that defined the Renaissance
Fun fact: Michelangelo was hired after a heavy snow storm in 1494 to build snow sculptures around the city of Florence — just before the Medici were exiled.
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 where narcissistic art critics praised even more narcissistic artists, supporting the notion that these artists were actually responsible for their amazing ideas.
I sincerely hope that I'm not the only one who is no longer interested in this state of affairs. Aside from some misguided nonsense, the woke cancel culture seems to have provided some welcome balance here, and when the dust settles it may become preferable again to be a modest artist once more.
I for one am not so convinced that individual expression is worthy of so much praise. I'd rather see people care for the weak instead of for the wealthy. Perhaps Hacker News is not the best place to vent such ideas though :)
That said, the art market is currently way down, and just anecdotally I feel like a lot of New Money (especially tech money) isn't that interested in art as much as the previous rich oligarchs were, so it may simply become less popular over time.
I'm all for helping others, and especially the weakest. But when I see students and other folks with full bellies and ideas considered the "weak" that's when I'm lost.
My understanding is that "individual expression" has been with us firmly since Romanticism (it was Beethoven who first promoted the idea that great artists are above kings). The whole "art for art's sake", artist as a high priest of culture etc. - these were all ideas that dominated the XIX century. They kind of withered in XX century after WW1, WW2 and Holocaust, and were replaced by post-modern modes of expression (i.e. we abandon search of the truth via art, because there is no "the" truth).
Same. Agreed. Where are you finding art elsewhere, then?
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 and you will see what I am talking about. I challenge you to find an equivalent precedent.
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).
There are too many things that are grouped under the same word: 'art'. Objects which serve different functions should not share the same name.
And there are good reasons for it, and also good reasons why you'll find ab ex in bank foyers and very expensive homes.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/artcurious-cia-art-excerpt...
There's always been a tight and complex relationship between art, money, and power, and there's always been a propaganda angle, or at least a statement of public values, to public imagery.
But so far as I know the 20th century was the first time state agencies began inventing new aesthetic traditions for political ends (socialist realism in the USSR, ab ex in the US).
The contemporary art world was birthed from the financial industry. The financial art world can be very different than an individual's study of materials and the surrounding culture.
The financial art world of today may have no relevance to what is deemed art in 2054.
People with both money and art will not let that happen
We even have remakes, reboots, prequels, sequels of movies, books, comics, games. Evolving universes and styles.
Would you say that you love this current system, but hate the outcomes?
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 arguments against each others), but one sign the world is really becoming postmodern is the state of particle physics, where physicists are more and more critical of theories seeking to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics. Once string theory and other "unifying" theories are completely abandoned (probably won't happen, but i'll never know), postmodernism will have become mainstream.
Post-modernism too can't escape critique embodied today in the constellation of meta-modernism's ideas.
Postmodernism is precisely as guilty of this — so framing it as a rejection of that concept from modernism seems wrong.
Rather, they just shallowly applied the same failings to different groups and patted themselves on the back for vapid virtue. Which suggests that postmodernism is instead the abandonment of principle for self indulgence — echoed from the artistic (collapse of skill into banal “self expression”) to the political (calling institutional racism by euphemisms such as “anti-racism”).
Postmodernism was nothing but phonies.
Even Britannica's dictionary editor don't seem to have read either Lyotard or Deleuze, and base its definition of a misreading (or mistranslation most likely, but I don't have proofs) of Derrida. Derrida later denied this reading, quite directly in "Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: An Introductory Anthologie", quite early (within the first 80 pages).
Anyway, this 'Rather, they just shallowly applied the same failings to different groups' is nonsensical when talking about postmodernism. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'failings', but the idea of using 'groups' to describe anything is quite ant-postmodernist. To be pedantic, a key idea is that any binary distinction is sustained by its negation, and groups are typical binary distinction.
Honestly I will say it: I didn't read a lot about consciousness, so I tend to ask questions rather than give my uninformed opinion on a thread about Chalmers' last book. I would like that people giving their opinion about postmodernism read a bit before, even if it's only baudrillard (I will still hurt, but at least I won't feel like I have to explain basics I'm not sure I totally master).
In practice, postmodernists failed in precisely the way that I quoted in my post.
You say you’re “having trouble not being harsh”, but your criticism would be more sound if you didn’t seem to have trouble reading — to the point you didn’t read my comment.
> I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'failings',
Eg, here you seem not to comprehend that my comment is replying to the quoted text, and hence means the failings of modernism that were highlighted by the post I replied to (and quoted).
My usage of the word “failings” is to mirror the usage in that post — and you’re ignoring what’s happening in the discussion to feign ignorance for a cheap rhetorical flourish.
> I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'failings', but the idea of using 'groups' to describe anything is quite ant-postmodernist.
My exact point was that postmodernists claim this — and yet, fall into precisely the same group-based policy that the post I replied to said they were opposing.
Ie, that they’re hypocrites.
> I would like that people giving their opinion about postmodernism read a bit before
You’re living down to my criticism: you’re proclaiming some virtue you clearly don’t practice yourself — since you didn’t even read my comment, as evidenced by your failure to reply on the substance.
So your comment has only reinforced my conclusion:
> Postmodernism was nothing but phonies.
The countries that adopted postmodernist beliefs collapsed within a few generations because postmodernist ideas are incoherent mindrot incapable of leading to human flourishing — and will be gone in under 150 years from their conception, due to their own defective nature.
In the US, for instance, we’re seeing a rejection of precisely that — and the accompanying collapse of media companies steeped in a postmodern ethos.
Yes and: What of all the non-famous artists?
I know nothing about (contemporary) art. But my SO attended Gage Academy, an atelier model org intent on training working artists. (Versus most higher-ed art studies which train degrees in art.)
> ...but for the most part it is entirely devoid of any centralized ethos or ideal.
The Gage artists give a lot of thought to balancing individual expression and earning a living.
If there is a shared ethos or ideal among this local community of artists, I'd guess it's: how to keep making art.
If we look at an art form where there is a lot of validation by the majority of people, tv and films, we see people “painting the same thing” all the time because that’s what the “zeitgeist” is interested in
500 years ago there were very few books and the west European zeitgeist was mostly the bible anyway.
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...
It's also weird to even call this a tax dodge. If you make money in New York and not London then you should be paying taxes to New York and not London because your operations are using New York streets and New York sewers and hiring kids from New York schools etc., and that's what those taxes are paying for. You haven't used any of London's infrastructure to do it so they don't get any of the money.
If you make money in some free port or <unspecified location> which is so un-tied to any other jurisdiction that you have no meaningful operations in any of them, why should any of them have a claim to the money? None of them have done anything to earn it.
That seems like the flaw here, not the other thing. Why should the US government have any entitlement to tax activity that occurs entirely outside their jurisdiction?
> At any rate, where a company is registered or where an asset is held doesn't necessarily have much bearing on where work is done or what infrastructure is used and to what extent.
But that's the point. They're meant to tax in the places where this sort of thing happens. If you have a building somewhere, there is property tax. If you make sales somewhere, there is sales tax or VAT. If you have employees somewhere (or are an employee and perform work somewhere), there is payroll tax.
Storing art can be done most anywhere, so naturally it happens in the places that allow it under the most favorable terms, but what's the problem there? It's the same as companies putting their facilities in some other jurisdiction because it has lower taxes. It's the normal and expected thing and one of the rare incentives for governments to improve their cost efficiency through competition.
Tax evasion doesn't cease to be tax evasion because you don't feel like you owe the government taxes.
Presumably, this is art that will accrue in value, but is (rarely) ever viewed, so is purely a financial vehicle for maintaining and transferring ownership of wealth outside any taxation jurisdiction.
Another game is the ultra rich and famous getting richer. Art is valued not just for its objective aesthetic appeal (ha ha! As if!!) but based on its providence. Meaning who created it, and also its history. Included who has owned it.
If you are Oprah Winfrey, and you purchase some art that only the top 1% of 1% can afford. It is likely that when you sell it, not only will the exclusivity of the particular artifact itself have gained value, but now that his has been owned by Oprah, it will be worth even more. And by modeling the value she places on art, she validates these extreme price levels both when buying and selling, which benefits the whole art world. [1]
Which, in full circle, makes art even more useful as a financial instrument.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Freeport
[1] https://news.artnet.com/market/oprah-sells-famed-gustav-klim...
But if you have a bunch of gold coins you can call them “an art collection” and now you don’t pay any wealthy tax on them at al.
Overestimating the value of hard-to-price assets is massively destructive (people get rid of and make no attempt to acquire those assets because the tax exceeds their value; no more art), but setting their value to zero or otherwise underestimating their value does exactly as you're seeing.
Nearly all other taxes solve this by applying the tax when a transaction occurs and the current value is known in the form of the price being paid by the buyer to the seller.
It would make tax evasion risky and expensive.
> Others are able to purchase the property from the owner at the taxed price at any time, forcing a sale.
The idea is apparently supposed to “improve societal welfare”, but the reality is it would favor the wealthiest who could afford to have and hold property, while everyone else would be at the mercy of those richer than them.
I suspect the stable equilibrium would be a lot more renting rather than property ownership, but also a much more generous welfare state such that this was not a problem, since few people would want/need to keep a house as a store of value.
That's the bull case. The bear case is "money is distributed to government contractors through overpaying for things"
That has nothing to do with the concept. The rate of the tax is separate from how it operates.
> I suspect the stable equilibrium would be a lot more renting rather than property ownership
Then the person doing the renting out would be paying the tax (and incurring the associated risks) and passing it on as higher rents. What does that help?
The problem here is assets that are hard to value. Not just in a subjective sense (what is a piece of art really worth?), but in a very practical sense. Take the things we have very good pricing information on -- stocks. If a share of Google is worth $100 and then six months later it's worth $110, but you put down $100 on the form -- objectively its market price at the time -- now someone can lift your shares off of you for a discount because the value changed and they raced to the filing office before you did. Now imagine the same thing but for something that doesn't have a high trading volume or an observable market price at any given time, but can still suddenly change in value over time.
Then it gets worse. Many types of property have a value to the owner which is different than their market value.
Suppose you operate a self-storage company. You have a piece of property which is objectively worth $500,000 where you operate your business. You declare that it's worth $500,000, because it is. Now a competitor can buy it off you for that amount just to grief you, because even though that's the value of the property, in order to move you have to contact all your customers and have them come and pick up their stuff, pay real estate commissions to find and purchase an otherwise identical property to move your business to, shut down your business while you hire contractors to move all your storage lockers to the new property etc.
Meanwhile the competitor just buys it from you for $500,000 and sells it to anyone but you for $500,000 (easy because that's it's true market value), causing you all this trouble and poaching half your customers in the process.
It's the kind of thing academics come up with which has enormous negative consequences in practice.
This isn't a problem at all. You can let the brokerage report the value on your behalf. It's weird that you picked stocks specifically, because those are actually very easy to value. That's why your brokerage can provide you with a very precise number that fluctuates every time you log in.
>now someone can lift your shares off of you for a discount because the value changed and they raced to the filing office before you did.
That someone would be the government, and the government would presumably put a bid in anticipation of your filing. When you file your taxes in April 2025 and you say your grand masterpiece is worth $1.2 million, the tax office can be prepared to say "yup, that sounds like a good price to us. Now sell it to us for that price" at the point when you file your taxes.
>Then it gets worse. Many types of property have a value to the owner which is different than their market value.
How on earth is that worse? If you put the property in at market value then the government will not try to buy it from you. They'll be going after the low hanging fruit - the guy who valued a picasso at $1 million, not the guy whose grandmother passed down a family heirloom nobody else gives a shit about.
>Suppose you operate a self-storage company. You have a piece of property which is objectively worth $500,000 where you operate your business. You declare that it's worth $500,000, because it is. Now a competitor can buy it off you for that amount just to grief you
Government, not competitor. If the government employee responsible for finding underpriced assets and bidding on them put a $500k bid on $500k property then their bonus is not likely to amount to much. They'll be aiming for $1 million bids on $10 million property.
Yes, if you let anybody bid on things it could cause more issues which require mitigation. Even then, if you put in a threshold that they have to bid 10-15% over then this would stem abuse. Imagine a competitor trying to "grief" you by overpaying $50-75k for your assets.
Something tells me that you will still object.
>It's the kind of thing academics come up with
Sometimes people who object to the practicalities of a tax are actually objecting to it on principle.
How does that help? The value is constantly in flux. They would still have to be faster than the other party (presumably well-heeled large investment banks with fast computers) trying to pick up stocks at a discount to their current value.
Conversely, trying to asses the value non-continuously leads to all kinds of weirdness where people temporarily shift their holdings to more advantageous asset classes on the day the form has to be filed. Or it just provides a method for defeating the tax entirely: On the day before your filing day you sell all your stocks and use the money to buy an assortment of esoterica from your buddy, declare it to have minimal value (because no one else could easily use or sell it), then the next day you sell some other difficult-to-value stuff back to them for the original amount of money and put the money back into stocks. In general people could arrange for the asset someone could deprive them of to be something nobody else would want.
> It's weird that you picked stocks specifically, because those are actually very easy to value.
You might think so, but then there's this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_premium
If someone wants to own 51% of a company, they typically have to pay you a price for your shares above where they're currently trading. But it's really only those last few shares that yield majority voting rights which have that higher value, not all of them. Not even the 49% they don't buy. And yet every individual share is perfectly fungible, so how are you supposed to value them to reflect the amount you could normally get, without giving up the control premium you would be entitled to if a buyer comes who wants a controlling interest?
> That someone would be the government, and the government would presumably put a bid in anticipation of your filing.
This completely defeats the premise of the tax on both ends. You now have the government rather than potential buyers assessing the value of the property, they still have to estimate the value of hard-to-value assets and the whole thing just becomes a game of trying to guess the government assessor's secret estimate of your property value. Not to mention the fun new game where you acquire or create hard-to-value assets that you personally know are not worth very much or will otherwise be overestimated by the government assessor, and then try to come in just under their assessment value so they overpay you for them.
And how is the government supposed to anticipate your filing if neither of you know it's about to happen? If you're in the business of trade you could have bought and sold something in the time it takes them to estimate its value. What happens for a company with diverse inventory and a high turnover rate?
> If you put the property in at market value then the government will not try to buy it from you. They'll be going after the low hanging fruit - the guy who valued a picasso at $1 million, not the guy whose grandmother passed down a family heirloom nobody else gives a shit about.
This is an adversarial process. If you can value a $100M asset at $2M and not lose it unless you go below $1M then that's what everybody is going to do. It would be an entire industry dedicated to valuing property just above the threshold where the government would actually take it, with everyone striving to operate just at the threshold, wherever that is. You can't put a safety margin in because the market will just remove it.
It's like the speed limit. It doesn't matter if the sign says 55, if you only get a ticket at 70 then traffic moves at 69 and anybody who gets ticketed for going 58 is going to be surprised and resentful.
> Government, not competitor.
Then how is this solving the government's problem in valuing things? The whole point is to let anybody do it so the market can decide if someone is undervaluing their property.
> Even then, if you put in a threshold that they have to bid 10-15% over then this would stem abuse. Imagine a competitor trying to "grief" you by overpaying $50-75k for your assets.
They've interrupted your business, stolen half your customers and possibly caused you to exit the market. That could easily be worth $50-75k.
Also notice this is identical to just telling people to overpay their taxes by 10-15% by overvaluing their assets, because anyone whose assets are fungible would just undervalue them by the allotted threshold, and for others 10-15% is nowhere near enough. There isn't any specific fixed margin because the cost of being forced to sell an asset can be arbitrarily large. Suppose you buy a piece of property that you're now using as the terminus for a $100M undersea cable. The property is just an arbitrary acre of land but the $100M cable is now fixed in place.
Or take software for example. The Linux kernel is "free" but how much grief would it cause if people suddenly couldn't use it anymore? Does Linus Torvalds have enough money to pay the taxes every year on the one-time amount old Microsoft would pay to make that happen?
> Sometimes people who object to the practicalities of a tax are actually objecting to it on principle.
Sometimes people who like the principle of a tax dismiss the practicalities.
They're very different things. They're perhaps opposing.
And yet, not incorrect.
You can also see the small changes in the medium; everybody at once adopting click-bait titles once one person was successful with it. As soon as a channel gets some success like 'Hand Tool Restoration' then everyone starts doing the same thing.
I agree with your assessment, but would add that sometimes fads popularize people with such skill and attention to detail that their success is well deserved. My Mechanics is one of those cases.
I would say it's even more fascinating that despite the richness in today's world that we can still find some common ground at all.
Is this supposed to be a bad thing? Because, if that's what you're saying, then what is your idea of "art"? Something that you can buy, have promptly delivered and hanged on a wall to decorate a space and get compliments from passers-by?
Would you like if all music was something designed to be played on the radio or in malls to decorate musically the environment?
The art world seems to be divided into impenetrable pieces that you need 10 years of education before you can understand how they "engage with the conversation", and dross that is supposedly only suitable for motel 6 bathroom walls.
Most of the art economy is money laundering with a defensive wall of sophistication put up around it. Most people know the emperor has no body paint, but it's not worth having a bunch of sophisticates sneer at you to bother voicing an opinion.
You might think some pop song is hogwash, until you hear cover after cover that cannot nail it.
Much of contemporary art is the same way. Outsiders without any knowledge may think it’s a giant scam, but there are plenty of logical reasons, historical or ideological or otherwise, for artists making the things they do and collectors buying those things. You might not like those reasons and they might not be good ones, but I’m not seeing anyone even elucidate what they are in the first place.
> Is this supposed to be a bad thing? Because, if that's what you're saying, then what is your idea of "art"? Something that you can buy, have promptly delivered and hanged on a wall to decorate a space and get compliments from passers-by?
Are you disagreeing with the comment’s view of the contemporary art world’s POSIWID? The initial question seemed to disagree but the stawman you constructed concords with the parent’s pov, albeit focused on the decoration instead of the tax benefit.
Yes.
>Because, if that's what you're saying, then what is your idea of "art"? Something that you can buy, have promptly delivered and hanged on a wall to decorate a space and get compliments from passers-by?
Let's start with making a space more beautiful, and see where it takes us from here.
Definition could also include connecting with us (difficult if "divorced" from our tastes), enriching the culture, and serving a higher purpose...
>Would you like if all music was something designed to be played on the radio or in malls to decorate musically the environment?
You got it backwards. That's what modern art is currently. Only that the environment isn't a mall but a gallery or some rich person's wall.
That's why its "wildly divorced from the tastes of the majority of people in society".
Because it's either banal or high concept wankery. So like music being either musack or some avant guarde exercize for other academics to applaud. In the art world we could use some Beatles or Animal Collective or Aphex Twin or Aurora or Tame Impala or even some Taylor Swift and Luis Fonzi.
Something designed to elicit an emotional reaction from human beings. It doesn't have to be a pleasant emotional reaction, but there should be one. On that metric the modern art world has with their art, generally speaking, failed. You can't be completely divorced from people and still elicit emotional reactions. Your swings just miss.
Hilariously enough, the art world itself, continues to elicit quite strong emotional reactions, even if the art itself does not. It's possible the entirety of the art scene is actually wildly successful performance art that went entirely over my head.
- https://www.rusi.org/publication/understanding-art-market-an...
- https://www.fatf-gafi.org/content/dam/fatf-gafi/reports/Mone...
When anything goes, you get splatters of paint on a canvas, which is much less interesting as it's much less creative. That, and the market forces as you said -- it's not creative, it's just signaling and marketing.
It's not high art, but what I admire about the original Star Wars film is that it was so difficult getting it made -- it took passion, talent, and craftsmanship to make a movie like that possible -- they had to literally invent new ways of doing things for that to be possible. Seeing the same kinds of movies today, where it's all done on computer -- requires less craft, less creativity -- and that's why these modern movies all feel uninspired.
Creativity within limits is where it is at.
Far better examples would have been The Blairwitch Project (1999) or Following (1998).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbuster_(entertainment)#Bl...
Rather by their conformity and tame-expression
And those are the big names - the conformity of the middle-tier fine arts scene is mind numbing...
I've noticed that most of the truly great works of art (in my opinion) have been works produced under unusually restrictive constraints.
"Computers can see us as large groups, but they’re glum and only aggregate us to sell us stuff. In reality, the computers give great insight into the power of common identity between groups. No one’s using that."
That's from 2017. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. From ISIL to Q-Anon to MAGA to LGBTxx, finding dispersed but like-minded people and using them to build a political movement is now common. Worse, automated blithering with LLMs works all too well.
"The history of modern self-expression dates from the hippies."
It goes back further than that. Find a copy of "Swing Kids". The "music is the weapon" concept of the 1960s and 1970s was mainstream for a while. Back when being in a band was a big deal. Before Live Nation got to decide who performs where. Now music is just a business. Even rap.
We have a huge problem trying to get society to go in useful directions. People have forgotten how to make democracies work. So we get autocrats.
He is an amazing propaganda film maker but have to take him with a huge grain of salt.
What would you say he is advocating for that you call propagandizing? Not that I disagree, per se, just curious how you’d articulate it.
This is a great answer, and is a very good definition of propaganda, especially in this context - his propaganda, if defined as such, is good/effective, because his motivated reasoning just so stories are broken clocks that are coincidentally right because he is a master of set and setting, cleverly telling stories at precisely the time and place of his choosing and in such a situated context/Situationist (International) way that they are not even wrong, and may even be correct, but not for the reasons he claims, or even for any reason at all.
I was hoping to draw out an explanation of what his narrative(s) seek to be an explication of, and in light of what I’ve written above, maybe he’s an author of selective revisionist history? Aspects of his oeuvre remind me of Fukuyama’s end of history, possibly the way that Curtis’ archival crate digging pastiche, his overarching yet hopscotching mode of storytelling, seeks to overwhelm the viewer with Gish galloping shaggy dog stories that are almost immune to shallow dismissal.
Curtis, like Daedalus and his son Icarus, constructs a garden path (sentence) through a Minotaur’s Labyrinth of meaning; like the maze’s solver Theseus, Curtis’ ball of thread weaves a tangled web of meaning through a hedgerow inherently devoid of meaning, and like Theseus, he accidentally/purposefully neglects to raise a black flag of ambiguity announcing his return to Athens/to meaning, instead hoisting the traditional white flag of discursive arrival at certainty, resulting in Theseus/Curtis securing the throne of power/discourse for himself, indirectly crowning himself king of the hill in terms of (a)historical victors.
I always was a sucker for mixed metaphors, though, and I might be wrong or perhaps biased. I always found Fukuyama’s end of history narrative subconsciously off-putting for some reason, while being drawn all the same to Curtis’ clarion call, but perhaps Curtis’ is a siren song sung by a wolf in sheep’s clothing?
;)
I love his stuff but you really need to treat it as "thought provoking but utterly lacking in rigour". Treat it as a jumping off point for topics that might be new to you and as a nudge to view things from a different angle.
It's the end of a whole second-tier literary genre.
Part of Adam's appeal is the fact that behind it is a human being struggling to understand the world and struggling to explain it.
LLMs are incredible but nobody cares what a hyper-evolved Markov chain pretends to say about culture.
I wish. Right now, thought provoking LLMs exist, but rigorously correct ones do not. Which is a big problem if you want to use them beyond blithering.
"New Adam Curtis documentary just dropped" was really a thing for a fair while in the UK.
The Beats were proto-hippies. Many Hippies arose from the Beat movement.
The Hell's Angels were a bunch of pissed-off military veterans. They were into their own brand of self-expression.
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.
thanks for sharing
And once you're grouped with others, why not interact also group to group, rather than just individual to individual, and profit from both higher order learning and influencing the world -- which I think is similar to what you describe as "power seeking aspects".
That said, the piece about finding "like-minded individuals" remains elusive, if one is serious about pursuing one's own values and way of being in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg
encapsulating his work.
> Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
I think it's an inarguable fact that our values are majorly, if not entirely, influenced by "regional" culture and ideology. I'm not sure there is any space "inside myself" that hasn't been reached and adulterated by both the lies and earnest claims of others. All my direct empirical observations are shelved on a (somewhat) common ontology.
Zizek gives me the creeps, but I think you've been subject to too much anti-collective propaganda and are locked inside your conservative ideology. The early Christians were not radical individualists, they were a collective of idolotrous dianysian Judean.
> They've firmly commoditized the opposition.
Yes, this is called "recuperation", per Wikipedia:
> In the sociological sense, recuperation is the process by which politically radical ideas and images are twisted, co-opted, absorbed, defused, incorporated, annexed or commodified within media culture and bourgeois society, and thus become interpreted through a neutralized, innocuous or more socially conventional perspective.
I'm not so sure about that. In fact, most recently I've been consuming a lot of Walter Benjamín and Hannah Arendt - and if they aren't considered progressive then I'm not sure what could be. I've also been trying to catch up on American Pragmatism from the likes of Peirce, James and Dewey (and a bit of Rorty too I suppose) - again, about as progressive a bunch as I think you could reasonably ask for. I would also argue that both Žižek and Sartre fit into the progressive.
But it is fair to say that I'm balancing that out nowadays with the likes of Kierkegaard and even Spinoza. My actual opinion is that an atheistic existentialism (in the form of guys like Sartre and Foucault) went too far. Exactly as Curtis laments in this post, I feel that we've lost some of the enchantment that we used to have. If a yearning for the re-introduction of that enchantment, and perhaps letting go a little of the seeking of political power, is being "locked inside [...]conservative ideology", then I will accept that charge.
I believe we can desire a kind of collectivism that is separate from the desire to wield political power. It just so happens that almost all modern collectivist philosophical theory (that I am familiar with) is centered around the desire to affect social change through political power.
> Walter Benjamín and Hannah Arendt - and if they aren't considered progressive then I'm not sure what could be.
This reads almost like a joke to me, because neither of these thinkers are radical any longer. "American Pragmatism" is "about as progressive a bunch as I think you could reasonably ask for?"
It was my mistake to use a meaningless word like "conservative," whose antithesis in my mind would be Galeano, Fanon, Federici, or Freire.
I believe the question was whether or not those thinkers were indicative of "anti-collective propaganda" or being "locked inside [...] conservative ideology".
I have no interest in the degree of radicalness. I especially have no interest in thinkers who are even more politically minded than those I have already mentioned.
I'm not seeing this is a problem of individual self expression. At least in the way it's described in this article, which I understand is to be, we're all over the place expressing ourselves in different ways and we can't come together on singular, or central topics.
I see trends, in art, specifically movies where the writers are definitely clued-in on the troubles of the time.
I think the actual problem is politics itself, which is kind of an artificial construct that puts people together for causes that are not their own, or even not directly supporting the common causes.
Because political movements end up getting co-opted by people that have vested interests in profiting off of, and controlling society for some specific benefit that does represent the will of the people.
I see local Grass-roots movements that are not politically motivated by some particular political party to be more representative of the truth and moving toward actual resolution for societies problems.
Maybe I'm talking about the same thing I just don't like the idea of politics itself, at least in the perspective of a party based system.
A great example of this is EFF podcast: Open Source Beats Authoritarianism [0]
[0]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/02/podcast-episode-open-s...
I suggest reading the book The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt.
It might be true, but it doesn't work because Curtis himself is hypernormalising — he isn't a journalist, he tells stories and emotions rather than a left-brained truth.
I think more engineers and technologists who build systems that affects people's lives at a large scale need to watch those.
Others have recommended "the century of self" for example which is great but I highly recommend his earlier stuff like "Pandora's box" and "The Mayfair set"
You're in for a treat, then. He has hours of wonderful documentaries.
Self-expression is only dangerous for the individual who possesses it. For society, it is always a positive. Contrarians are the heroes of free society, this is true regardless of how vile their views are. They are essential for maintaining the right level of chaos to have a free, functioning society. Extreme contrarians define the boundary for freedom within which everyone else can roam without fear. Contrarians are a minority by definition so they are not a threat to a functioning society.
Self-expression and individualism are critical because it's the best mechanism that humans have to prevent their political systems from declining into totalitarianism and poverty. Without self-expression, we get total compliance, an entire society fully compliant to all the whims of the elite; if the elites are good, then lucky for you, until the next regime change. If the elites are bad, then you're in for a miserable time. Not to mention that the people who seek power and who are willing to take irrational risks to attain it aren't usually the friendliest bunch on average.
With self-expression and individualism, society can protect itself against idol worship. The intentions of the elite doesn't matter as much because they can be easily replaced.
Without self-expression, society will fall into one delusion after another... By the time it wakes up from its current delusion, it will be too late, the backlash will be so sudden and massive that it will guarantee that it will fall victim to yet another delusion in the opposite extreme.
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.
...and that's where they lost me.
But that quote from Kipchoge does put it in a more comprehensible framing. Thanks.
i mean, yes.