Well said. I am going to avoid merely restating your points, which are excellent, and bring up the one thing I think you missed about outside™️ (I like that): too many think they every single artistic thing from 1900 onwards has been a government-funded, artificial, top-down ploy to “destroy the West.” And probably created by the dreaded Jews to boot. This makes it impossible to have any sort of meaningful conversation about culture with certain types. I can only imagine it’s worse if you’re Jewish and trying to talk to them—it’s bad enough as a Christian.
You have to meet people where they are and they are not at the point of RETVRNING. Nor should they be. Nor should anybody be. Link your new art to the past, build upon it. Don’t try to recreate it. Now is a different time than then. We can be informed and inspired by the past but trying to ape it can only create a facile simulacrum. To use a music analogy, jazzers put their own spin on standards all the time. That’s the way to do it. Cream and Led Zeppelin weren’t “blues bands,” they took blues songs they loved and reconstructed them in their own idiom. That’s the way to do it.
Dan Simmons didn’t try to write his own version of Dune, or even his own version of the Canterbury Tales. He threw his influences in a blender and filtered Jr through his own ideas during his own time. That’s the way to do it.
A1 right, all of it. Hell, that's what I've been doing, though to a slightly exaggerated extreme because of my melting-pot approach of "if I like it, it goes in" lol. A little electronica here, some heavy metal there, a splash of Biblical verse, a Latin phase, and a heaping helping of hardboiled dialogue.
I will admit to holding off on getting into some of the sociopolitical baggage instilled on the topic. Every word you've penned here I've had the misfortune of seeing in these discussion, but I held off on it because I wanted to explicitly tackle it in the vacuum of the arts themselves.
The #1 problem with ourside™️ is that they have completely ceded the ground on the idea that all art is political and therefore should be handled like politics. When the truth that so few wish to grapple with remains: while art can be a vessel for all manner of messages, the idea of art is innately beyond such small, material concepts. Art is, to bum that Vincent Price quote again, "the visual experience of Man made exciting by talent." It is beyond a political tool, a sociological tool, and beyond the pragmatism of decoration. It is truth, beauty, tragedy, genius, barbarous, anything you can imagine, because art is our way of reflecting upon ourselves, our world and all the little minutiae therein. And if all of Man's existence was boiled down to politics, I'd be on the first rocket out of here lol.
I get why they think this way, there does appear to be a war on beauty and truth and all that, but they seem to be stumbling in the dark because they've never really come to grips with what the arts do, especially fine arts. They impose the role art is supposed to play in this "culture war," when the truth is that art has existed before it, has endured through it, and will continue afterwards. Because at the day's end, art is art. It's not an election issue or a hot-button debate. It is an expression a time, place, feeling, brought to riveting life and shared with all people. And I'm blessed to know artists who make such work, be it online or in person.
“Because at the day's end, art is art. It's not an election issue or a hot-button debate.”
Yes and no. Whether we like it or not, art has been political for centuries. Now, every single artist isn’t political, but people ascribe meaning to their work, artists’ wishes notwithstanding.
True, but my broader point is that people are treating it SOLELY as a political matter, which is where a lot the hang-ups are occurring. I've spoken about this previously, there absolutely is no running away from messages and subtext in one's art, I've found myself subconsciously slipping material reflective of things happening in my life and in the world. The difference is that, in my mind at least, you are better off approaching your craft without imposing that baggage upon yourself. You must devote yourself to quality of work and let the other cards fall where they may. A lot of people don't have the faith in their intuition that they should. It feels like, because the radicals have gotten away with bludgeoning everyone with messages and overt pabulum, the only way to fight back is to be as loud and as obnoxious. When the true answer is to make better work, realize it with a deft hand, and weave these ideas to reach people in a broader way. Less worship music and more rock-n-roll as it were.
Ah yeah. If you’re making “political art” it’s (a) going to alienate a gigantic chunk of people and (b) probably going to suck. Just make art.
As an aside, in college a million years ago these kids I didn’t realize were gigantic hippies wanted to start a band with me. I later learned one song was called “Dick Cheney Is A Dinosaur” and all their songs were about Republican politicians. If kindly declined the offer on account of it being terminally lame.
Well then, guess "going back in time and publishing Ravel's 'Jeux d'eau' in 1899" is now on the bucket list. I'd try and squeeze Vaughan Williams in there, but I'm not a miracle worker lol.
On the point of architecture: my dream home is a Fallingwater. As someone who's adopted mid-century America as his aesthetic anchor point, I've got lots of love for Art Deco, Streamline Moderne, Googie, and the overall utopian aspirations of Atomic/Space Age design. You'd have to lose some of the gaudier pop art elements, but I wouldn't mind living a city done up in that style so long as I could travel to the country and find antiquity in the small well-kept town. Like stepping out of a Syd Mead painting and into a John Constable.
Well said. I am going to avoid merely restating your points, which are excellent, and bring up the one thing I think you missed about outside™️ (I like that): too many think they every single artistic thing from 1900 onwards has been a government-funded, artificial, top-down ploy to “destroy the West.” And probably created by the dreaded Jews to boot. This makes it impossible to have any sort of meaningful conversation about culture with certain types. I can only imagine it’s worse if you’re Jewish and trying to talk to them—it’s bad enough as a Christian.
You have to meet people where they are and they are not at the point of RETVRNING. Nor should they be. Nor should anybody be. Link your new art to the past, build upon it. Don’t try to recreate it. Now is a different time than then. We can be informed and inspired by the past but trying to ape it can only create a facile simulacrum. To use a music analogy, jazzers put their own spin on standards all the time. That’s the way to do it. Cream and Led Zeppelin weren’t “blues bands,” they took blues songs they loved and reconstructed them in their own idiom. That’s the way to do it.
Dan Simmons didn’t try to write his own version of Dune, or even his own version of the Canterbury Tales. He threw his influences in a blender and filtered Jr through his own ideas during his own time. That’s the way to do it.
A1 right, all of it. Hell, that's what I've been doing, though to a slightly exaggerated extreme because of my melting-pot approach of "if I like it, it goes in" lol. A little electronica here, some heavy metal there, a splash of Biblical verse, a Latin phase, and a heaping helping of hardboiled dialogue.
I will admit to holding off on getting into some of the sociopolitical baggage instilled on the topic. Every word you've penned here I've had the misfortune of seeing in these discussion, but I held off on it because I wanted to explicitly tackle it in the vacuum of the arts themselves.
The #1 problem with ourside™️ is that they have completely ceded the ground on the idea that all art is political and therefore should be handled like politics. When the truth that so few wish to grapple with remains: while art can be a vessel for all manner of messages, the idea of art is innately beyond such small, material concepts. Art is, to bum that Vincent Price quote again, "the visual experience of Man made exciting by talent." It is beyond a political tool, a sociological tool, and beyond the pragmatism of decoration. It is truth, beauty, tragedy, genius, barbarous, anything you can imagine, because art is our way of reflecting upon ourselves, our world and all the little minutiae therein. And if all of Man's existence was boiled down to politics, I'd be on the first rocket out of here lol.
I get why they think this way, there does appear to be a war on beauty and truth and all that, but they seem to be stumbling in the dark because they've never really come to grips with what the arts do, especially fine arts. They impose the role art is supposed to play in this "culture war," when the truth is that art has existed before it, has endured through it, and will continue afterwards. Because at the day's end, art is art. It's not an election issue or a hot-button debate. It is an expression a time, place, feeling, brought to riveting life and shared with all people. And I'm blessed to know artists who make such work, be it online or in person.
“Because at the day's end, art is art. It's not an election issue or a hot-button debate.”
Yes and no. Whether we like it or not, art has been political for centuries. Now, every single artist isn’t political, but people ascribe meaning to their work, artists’ wishes notwithstanding.
True, but my broader point is that people are treating it SOLELY as a political matter, which is where a lot the hang-ups are occurring. I've spoken about this previously, there absolutely is no running away from messages and subtext in one's art, I've found myself subconsciously slipping material reflective of things happening in my life and in the world. The difference is that, in my mind at least, you are better off approaching your craft without imposing that baggage upon yourself. You must devote yourself to quality of work and let the other cards fall where they may. A lot of people don't have the faith in their intuition that they should. It feels like, because the radicals have gotten away with bludgeoning everyone with messages and overt pabulum, the only way to fight back is to be as loud and as obnoxious. When the true answer is to make better work, realize it with a deft hand, and weave these ideas to reach people in a broader way. Less worship music and more rock-n-roll as it were.
Ah yeah. If you’re making “political art” it’s (a) going to alienate a gigantic chunk of people and (b) probably going to suck. Just make art.
As an aside, in college a million years ago these kids I didn’t realize were gigantic hippies wanted to start a band with me. I later learned one song was called “Dick Cheney Is A Dinosaur” and all their songs were about Republican politicians. If kindly declined the offer on account of it being terminally lame.
Sounds like a bullet dodged to me lol.
Glad you enjoyed it! Nice to know like-minded folks are out there in the ether.
Well then, guess "going back in time and publishing Ravel's 'Jeux d'eau' in 1899" is now on the bucket list. I'd try and squeeze Vaughan Williams in there, but I'm not a miracle worker lol.
On the point of architecture: my dream home is a Fallingwater. As someone who's adopted mid-century America as his aesthetic anchor point, I've got lots of love for Art Deco, Streamline Moderne, Googie, and the overall utopian aspirations of Atomic/Space Age design. You'd have to lose some of the gaudier pop art elements, but I wouldn't mind living a city done up in that style so long as I could travel to the country and find antiquity in the small well-kept town. Like stepping out of a Syd Mead painting and into a John Constable.