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Why do you talk about these things like you "can't." You obviously can. You made the post. Losing karma is engagement with your post.

I would like to think the truly right-wing-- in it's best sense-- attitude would be an appreciation for the ability to openly voice these opinions and the ability for people to openly disagree with you. If you're getting downvoted by individuals for your criticism of a private opera house's policies, that's a win for personal liberties, not an indictment of them.

I don't mean to strawman, but it seems like you're advocating for the exact opposite of what you claim. You want an authority to step in and tell these people downvoting you that they can't have their opinions? You want your viewpoints to have a certain number of mandated agreements?

I suppose I take for granted the interest in underground, counter-culture, Berlin-esque experiences. I genuinely cannot imagine someone preferring "Vegas-style" clubs in NYC. Your comment reads as what a Bushwick club kid thinks an uptight tech bro larping as a raver might write.

I actually agree that the grunginess of Bushwick can be obnoxious and frankly gross a lot of the time, but the thought of hanging out with a bunch of cishet normies in an expensive SoHo club is anathema to why I would even go out in the first place.

Rule of law also allows for banality of evil and bureaucratized, monopolized violence. I've seen some other arguments against sympathy in this thread (the murderer was wealthy himself, insurance companies aren't actually the archvillains of healthcare). Those other arguments haven't convinced me, but they certainly complicate the narrative.

A blind appeal to "rule of law" is the one argument that I think is stupid on its face. Law as the sole moral barometer will always result in marginalization and injustice. It is the function of protest, civil disobedience, and yes, sometimes violence, to shape law as a function of morality.

>Are you seriously arguing that art is doing more for the world at large than the IT industry? Come on...

Yes? Art has been made for at least 17,000 years, it is a fundamental expression of human consciousness. This is like asking if symbolic thinking or language is more important than IT. Yes. Obviously. The sum of all IT work is a blip compared to the sum total of human expression across our species's existence.

You're right, if IT hadn't been present during the last pandemic, we would have been much worse off. But even if we had apocalyptic human collapse and reverted to a pre-historic hunter-gatherer existence with primitive technologies... people would still be making art.

This is some kind of bizarre reflexive libertarian outburst to my comment that had little to do with the role of government.

Firstly, lots and lots of people use government-engineer built apps. I pay for the products of government engineering contracts every time I tap my phone to enter the subway. Car commuters use it every time their plate is scanned to cross a government-built bridge. Often the same companies that carry out government, tax-payer funded contracts are also taking on contracts in the open market.

Governments fund non-profits like art museums because these institutions, while existing within the free market, provide a public good that most agree ought to be as accessible as possible. To that end, the non-profit model allows for museums to guide themselves based on an ethical mission (usually having to do with providing accessible art and culture) rather than a profit-driven market strategy. They are still private, so the board has autonomy from government oversight, but they have tax structures and funding structures that position them as utilities rather than business ventures.

Museums, like for-profit ventures, still compete for funding, they still compete for relevance and cultural capital, and they are still beholden to providing a service that people care about. Fantasizing about slashing government budgets doesn't really make sense here. The government is taking money from people to fund museums because if we all pay $100 a year to arts funding in our taxes, we get to go see sculptures from 2500 years ago in a palatial building attached to a giant park for free... Without group buy in, that same experience might be stratified to only the very wealthy.

You seem to think it is politicians deciding what art people see. In reality, it is arts experts pitching the relevance of their expertise to secure funding and outputting culturally significant material to justify their existence in the same way software engineers make themselves appealing for government contracts.

Amount of art knowledge isn't subjective, it's a testable and verifiable metric. And the idea that all subjective tastes should be equally valued is a relatively recent invention from within the last generation or so that isn't taken very seriously outside of entry level art appreciation groups.

You can have whatever subjective response to art you'd like, but whether your response should be considered as serious insight and commentary into the structure, context, and significance of that art depends on how much time you've spent studying the field and honing your ability to read artworks.

If the only music someone listens to is top 40, I don't think I care very much what they have to say about Bartok. If the only paintings someone is familiar with are the Mona Lisa and Van Gogh, they're not qualified to speak about an Imhof painting. Someone wearing Walmart doesn't have anything interesting to say about Demna. You get the idea.

I think the common response to this is that it is elitist and exclusionary... But we are elitist and exclusionary in most other fields too. Nobody would listen to the engineering opinions of someone who can't name a programming language. Art is more experiential, sure, but not all experience or cognition that arise from experiences is of equal insight.

>I simply made an appreciation and then explained how I got to it. It was never meant to be convincing, it was just meant to be out there… WHY am I wrong in approaching the subject in this manner?

You’re asking me to justify to you why one shouldn’t flap their mouth about things they don’t know anything about and then stand by their willful ignorance when confronted by domain experts? You want me to convince you that it’s not ok to just spout bullshit and insist that it’s a valid position to hold irrespective of knowledge, methods, accuracy, reasoning, logic, research, justification, experience, etc etc? Lmfao. You’re delusional.

Would you stand in front an astrophysicist PhD and tell them their degree is worthless because you can’t see dark matter and supersymmetry? Would you stand in front of an archaeology PhD and tell them their degree is worthless because you can obviously see that aliens created the pyramids? You don’t know what you’re talking about. Your idea of art as a purely subjective study isn’t held by anyone with even casual knowledge of the field. It’s like claiming mathematics is subjective because we all have different favorite numbers.

Multiple commenters have used pathos and ethos to argue with you because your understanding is so rudimentary and your ignorance so great that to argue the nature of art with you would be like trying to teach algebra to an ape. You cannot comprehend an actual argument from your starting point.

I for one don’t really like Warhol. I’m a spurned formalist along the likes of Greenberg and Fried, and I think the true inheritor of post-modernist conceptualism lies with Minimalists like Serra, Morris, Smithson, etc. I’m not convinced by Baudrillard, and I think the strongest Warhol is his early and late periods where he was much more concerned with illustration and surface treatment, respectively. I am still not such an uneducated simpleton so as to make the claim that Warhol isn’t art or worthy of art historical study. -This- is what an argument against Warhol looks like. Demonstrated knowledge of art history, methodology, and reasoning. You are claiming people aren’t engaging with you but you lack the fundamental skills to be engaged with. Again, this is like arguing mathematical proofs with someone who can’t multiply two numbers. Read a book!

You seem to really have very little education, perspective, and experience regarding art. When you have very little education, perspective, and experience, your opinions are irrelevant and it frustrates people to see someone so content (and self-righteous) in their ignorance

Someone on this thread likened it to watching a boxing match and then complaining that they aren't using their legs. This is a good comparison. I would also compare it to having only eaten chicken nuggets your whole life and then complaining that a serving of foie gras isn't filling enough.

Yes, the foie gras isn't really filling, the boxers aren't using their legs, and the art doesn't look like real life. But your judgement is based on ignorance. You lack the vocabulary to describe what you're seeing-- but more than that, you lack the eye to even see it in the first place. And instead of conceding that you just don't really know what you're talking about, you double down and insist that you're actually privy to some profound truth about art. It can't be that the countless Art History PhDs, renowned critics, museum collections, and artists who see the relevance of Warhol based on years of study and consideration are correct. No, your perspective is greater because you... were dragged to a museum one time and didn't really pay attention? Because you have delusions about "effort" and the difficulty of trompe l'oeil? For fuck's sake, read a book.

Joke or not, you're still demonstrating that you're naive about the scope of brand strategy.

The majority of brand management work is not material that is shown to the public, it is strategic decision making about how to position a brand and control it's reputation across markets. This includes yuppies in NYC and teenagers in Southeast Asia. The cultural positioning of Apple is a function of western hegemony and global memetics. An Eastern European housewife that wants an iPhone doesn't want it because she's done the tech research to understand that it is the most reliable and technically sound product, she wants it because Apple has taken great care to maintain their image through brand strategy. She probably sees iPhones on social media, in the hands of celebrities, the nicest store in her city is the new Apple outpost, they're teaching classes on apps and she wants to have the experience that she sees other iPhone users having.

Your misunderstanding is a larger trend in the tech space of people overvaluing "utility" instead of recognizing that the driving forces of any industry-- not just tech-- cannot be reduced to a spec sheet.

Thinking that TV spots are the limits of brand strategy is just kind of naive.

You think iPhones are a superior product... Why? Other phones have more RAM, better screens, more capable OS. An iPhone is designed in response to market demands-- it is the vision of Apple to anticipate what users will want, and to show users what phones can be.

So many Apple billboards around New York show kids or families, the "memories" function of the iOS Photos app is designed to pull from forgotten pictures and tug on your heartstrings. Part of this is Apple marketing responding to a demographic of tech-consuming people becoming parents or grandparents... But it is also Apple showing us what tech is good for. It's a vision of compassionate technology that will hopefully sell more iPhones while also structuring the narrative of what an iPhone is. An iPhone is a superior product not because it has the best tech specs or the best combination of components. An iPhone is the superior product because the future of technology can be compassionate, and Apple wants to position themselves there. This is a marketing strategy, and it is likely why you associate iPhones with quality and superiority.

We cannot immediately see all possible uses and promises of technology, no matter how tech-literate we think we are. It takes institutional vision (in many cases a function of market/brand strategy) to figure out what makes a good product and how we can show people that our product fulfills that idea.

Charismatic founders are PR lol. Steve Jobs was a market strategist.

>To be tech was to stand against the corporate types who milked people for money without offering real value.

Positioning yourself as punk, as pro-consumer, as an alternative to the corporate hegemony... This was all carefully developed by marketers and brand strategists to grow their vision of selling tech. You are not immune to propaganda, it was not some granola revolution that gave the people iPhones. And that's ok! It's ok to admit that marketing is an important force that should be leveraged for change and innovation.

Marketers necessarily sell something that doesn't exist because part of their job is creating that thing.

Theranos is an example of a failed project through and through, but even something unarguably successful like the iPhone was built through market strategizing-- not just technical engineering. Identifying what consumers wanted, conveying that vision, shaping a compelling brand, these are all things that can easily be written off as "fake" by people who cannot buy into the vision, but when done well they are just as important as the technical innovations.

Sort of a vapid piece.

The optimism and buy-in that excited people about tech from the debut of the iPhone until fairly recently was a function of PR and technology marketers-- like the author-- doing their jobs very well. For any industry, generating interest and excitement is more than a purely descriptive process. The magical venture doesn't just appear and then the marketers have the simple job of describing it. Marketers/strategists/PR people play a very important role surveying the project and then articulating a compelling vision. That vision then becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy since stakeholders (both creators and users) have bought into the promise of worth.

If strategists aren't able to see a path forward, to survey the field and identify the things that make the project worthwhile, exciting, sustainable, tactical, etc... then they're just not great at their job.

Admitting that you haven't really believed in anything you've worked on as a marketer is a bit like an actor admitting that someone else is reading their lines. A good marketer, like a good actor, lives in their promises like they are already real. The realer and more convinced you are, the more you can speak your vision into reality.

i think papers like this reveal the benefits of domain-specific methodologies. a scientific paper is a bad choice for historiography.

art historical texts are usually much more concerned with close reading of artworks to establish syncretic pathways of artistic convention. art writers are usually unconcerned with null hypothesis and burden of proof. the authors here had no real claim about history or any interesting reading of artwork. i couldn't imagine something like this being disseminated in an arts journal or publication-- there just isn't enough time spent with the methods of art history, i.e close readings of the examples presented, primary source inclusion, historiographic narrative, formal analysis, etc.

i wish i could provide a counterexample, but my work is on american conceptual sculpture, not renaissance art. i think the last very good text i read on the renaissance was james hall's book on michelangelo's anatomy published some years ago.