art is a waste of time; reducing suffering is all that matters

Are you David Gilmour’s nephew y/n

No.

People should have fewer opinions.

quit being part of the problem

controversial opinion: making art that celebrates suffering is definitely a waste of time

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/20/uzbekistan-islam-karimov-to-be-memorialised-by-british-sculptor-paul-day

People should have fewer opinions.

― brimstead, Sunday, 17 December 2017 22:00

quit being part of the problem

― bob lefse (rushomancy), Sunday, 17 December 2017 22:14

That might be one of Brimstead's few opinions.

so we are born with no consent as to what body we are born into, what biology we will have to contend with for our time on this planet, what physiology and mental issues will weigh on our daily decision making and sensory experiences, sexual makeup, pigmentation, hair, geographic location, socio-economic status, demographic status, inherited credit card debt, inherited tax debt, etc. on and on and on. we should do our best to respect this non-consent and not blame people for things factually and materially beyond their control.

as for opinions, people also have no choice as to where they are born, what education system they will go to, how all the above factors will play into their education, thus we cannot consider that language is a 1:1 translation for every person who uses it. because understand and performative factors can be at play, what a person is thinking can be different from what a person is speaking. for that matter what the receiver is hearing can be influenced by all manner of factors (perhaps temporal such as it being a rainy day & them being in a bad mood) in addition to their own birth lotto experience of reality.

as such their interpretation is a temporal first attempt at interpreting what was said, into attempting to know the truth of what the other person was thinking. humans are imperfect beings, they cannot 100% everything digitally like a computer, so mistakes are made and you could argue the entire concept of discussion is a tug of war battle against meaninglessness. since time is not a static thing but certainly experienced linearly we can imagine these opinions on a line stretching infinitely long. the more opinions you add the less they are in control of defining a narrative. by this logic the more time you spend attacking someone's opinion or ego the more you are watering down your own. each opinion defines a truth and people will be more open to perhaps adopt parts of yours if you aren't being aggressively possessive of it. imo the best way to encourage discussion is with positive and creative opinions.

crows are too smart for their own good. they get bored and do things like play games of 'chicken' with approaching autos as they languidly pick at road kill carcasses in the street.

^ was meant for the controversial opinions thread

http://johnlutheradams.net/global-warming-and-art-essay/

https://atomikaztex.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/how-is-the-artist-or-writer-to-function-survive-and-produce-in-the-community-outside-of-institutions/

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/03/22/the-time-for-art-is-now/

I'm in Vienna btw ^_^

ty for that article

https://newrepublic.com/article/120363/bertolt-brechts-love-poems-review

Think of Bertolt Brecht and you do not think of Eros. A fervent Marxist playwright with a handful of masterworks—Drums in the Night, The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and Her Children, Life of Galileo, The Good Person of Szechwan—Brecht was also the most revolutionary drama theorist of the twentieth century. His misnamed “epic theater” posited a smashing of theater’s fourth wall and a dispelling of the emotional abracadabra drama casts over its audience. A round-the-clock communist for whom literature was the manifestation of socio-historical pressures, Brecht believed that art should function as the instigation for revolt. Art must be useful, must serve the gritty aims of practicality. No self-important prettiness, no “willing suspension of disbelief,” no Aristotelian catharsis. Brecht would rather you not be so bourgeois as to feel anything; instead, think about what you’re seeing and then go depose your tranquilized leaders.

https://thepointmag.com/2018/examined-life/switching-off

Brodsky was invited to give a speech to a class of graduating seniors at an East Coast liberal arts college. Unsurprisingly, he avoided the inspirational pabulum that normally stuffs commencement speeches, opting instead for a commentary on the practice of “turning the other cheek” as a means of combating social evil. The speech does not give clear directives—it barely qualifies as advice—but it does complicate Gessen’s picture of the late Brodsky as a mere “propagandist for poetry.”

Brodsky gives an account of the standard interpretation of the lines of scripture that inspired this doctrine of passive resistance and then goes on to mention the ending, which is less commonly quoted. The idea is not just to turn the cheek to the person who strikes you—you are also supposed to give him your coat:

No matter how evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human; and although incapable of loving another like ourselves, we nonetheless know that evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another. (This is why you’ve been hit on your right cheek in the first place.) At best, therefore, what one can get from turning the other cheek to one’s enemy is the satisfaction of alerting the latter to the futility of his action. “Look,” the other cheek says, “what you are hitting is just flesh. It’s not me. You can’t crush my soul.”

The moral stakes of this struggle are high precisely because they are personal. The objective isn’t to appeal to your bully’s sense of compassion or pride or guilt (for these are all easy to suppress), but to “expose his senses and faculties to the meaninglessness of the whole enterprise: the way every form of mass production does,” and emerge with your spirit intact.

This lecture reveals another dimension of Brodsky’s ethics of refusal. Switching off is not about wallowing in silence or withdrawing into blissful ignorance; it is about making sure that the static doesn’t deafen you to music.

That is a really good read, thanks for sharing! I particularly resonated with this:

In Brodsky’s view, politics was one level of human existence, but it was a low rung. The business of poetry, he thought, is to “indicate something more … the size of the whole ladder.” He held that “art is not a better, but an alternative existence … not an attempt to escape reality but the opposite, an attempt to animate it.”

At the same time, art can serve either function, right? Escapism or animation. Unless you want to be a snob about the definition of art and say that escapist art isn't "real" art. For my part, I think there's something to be said for a healthy dose of escapism.

Very into this, will be tracking down all the Brodsky to read now.

Whoever considers the maxim "life is suffering" to be pessimistic is in a serious state of denial. (I think this describes the majority of Western civilization tho)

joseph brodsky vs. jerry garcia

'Art is to console those who are broken by life'

Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh, L’Oliveraie, Saint-Rémy, 1889 pic.twitter.com/8eemtDF7gT

— esteban tara (@lespaul55_57) May 21, 2018

my daughter (last year of hs) had an assignment in her philo course recently, "do we need art in order to protect ourselves from the truth?" I am glad I didn't have to answer that question when I was 17.

do we need art in order to protect ourselves from memes?

memes ARE art u savage

Euler, do you know which texts (if any) she was assigned relating to that question?

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/06/the-generosity-of-innovation/564050/

Mark Applebaum, a decorated Stanford University professor of music composition and theory, opened his heady and playful talk about tradition versus progress with a piano improvisation of a tune, “Buffalo Wings,” that he’d written. His performance made for an electrifying crescendo of complexity, but afterward, he pointed out all the ways his “invention” relied on things that had come before. Others had dreamed up the piano, diatonic tonality, and the 12-bar blues riff. Which meant for Applebaum, a lot of jazz improv is itself traditional or any of the synonyms that word might take: conservative, conventional, customary.

Much of his career is, by contrast, progressive to a degree that verges on stuntwork. Applebaum’s achievements include building an electro-acoustic contraption called the Mousetrap that he alone knows how to play, composing a piece to be performed by three frantically gesturing orchestra composers without any actual musicians making sound, and inventing a notational system modeled on the Copenhagen subway map. He said that he feels acute tension every day between whether to devote his energy to tradition or to progress, and he argues that this same tension surfaces across not only art forms, but also spheres of public life: politics, consumer culture, parenting, and so on.

Which is more noble: the strange and new, or the familiar and tested? To help answer the question, Applebaum envisioned all of music as a grid of squares, with each square denoting a kind of composition: music with lyrical melodies, music that emphasizes syncopation, or music using a quarter-tone system, for instance. All of those examples, he’d say, are on one side of the grid, the “traditional” half. Music with lyrical melodies are plentiful already; the world doesn’t “need” more. By contrast, creating a concerto to be played by both instrumentalists and a florist—yes, a flower arranger—hadn’t been done before Applebaum did it. The world got something new.

And so, through this logic, the experimental is philanthropic. To prize progress over tradition is a form of generosity. A questioner in the audience raised the obvious counterargument: Isn’t truly experimental stuff kind of self-indulgent, rather than selfless? Absolutely, Applebaum replied, but so is all artmaking. And to say progress is giving and tradition is taking isn’t to say that one is better than the other. Unless you’re an aesthete, all of life necessarily must involve a balance between what you do for yourself and what you do for others.

A flautist and a florist and a falangist walk into a bar...

i would be shocked if some John Cage student didn't arrange something for flower arrangement 50+ years ago

declaring "Music with lyrical melodies are plentiful already; the world doesn’t “need” more" lol this guy is utterly clueless. art is at least 50% interpretation. i guess quantizing types of music out in a grid doesn't allow for such insight.

you should give stanford a call, let em know they got a dud

https://harvardmagazine.com/2012/11/writers-and-artists-at-harvard

“I tried each thing; only some were immortal and free,” wrote our graduate John Ashbery. He decided on the immortal and free things, art and thought, and became a writer who revolutionized the transcription of consciousness in contemporary poetry. Most art, past or present, does not have the stamina to endure; but many of our graduates, like the ones mentioned above, have produced a level of art above the transient. The critical question for us is not whether we are admitting a large number of future doctors and scientists and lawyers and businessmen (even future philanthropists): we are. The question is whether we can attract as many as possible of the future Emersons and Dickinsons. How would we identify them? What should we ask them in interviews? How would we make them want to come to us?

They could start by lowering tuition to under a trillion dollars per class

Let's not get silly

It's beautiful to watch aesthetes imagine Art exists outside material reality

Doesn't this still seem like an standard at which to hold artists? As soon as the question shifts to art, we're immediately supposed to be thinking in terms of immortal geniuses, as though that's the timespan at which artists prove their worth.

* an odd standard

It's a dead standard which is why seeing it out in the wild is such an obvious reactionary alarm

Would pay good money to read a transcript of Emerson's responses to an interview with Harvard admissions.

https://www.vulture.com/2018/11/jerry-saltz-how-to-be-an-artist.html

Don’t use art jargon; write in your own voice, write how you talk. Don’t try to write smart. Keep your statement direct, clear, to the point. Don’t oppose big concepts like “nature” and “culture.” Don’t use words like interrogate, reconceptualize, deconstruct, symbolize, transcendental, mystical, commodity culture, liminal space, or haptic. Don’t quote Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida. Those guys are great. But don’t quote them. Come up with your own theory. People who claim to hate or have no theory: That’s your theory, you idiots!

lol

who is this cunt exactly

otm tho

the third policeman undertakes virtually the entire proceedings in a liminal space iirc

i would suppose it doesn't refer to it as such

'come up with your own theory' is otm but incommensurate with the nonsense list of banned words earlier vomited

That linked piece reminds me, it is time to repost a bit of advice I posted long, long ago and remains as fresh today as the day it was extruded.

How To Write Good

No one likes to be called "uninteresting", whether or not they know what that means. That's why so many people who might post here don't. If you think about how many people there are, and then you think of how many people post here, I think you'll see what I mean. Fear of being "uninteresting" keeps a lot of people from letting their light shine and that's a shame.

That's why I want to help all of you write things you can be proud of, things you want to show off to the whole wide world wide web. So, let's get started, ok?

First, use small words. No one likes big words, so use lots and lots of small words. Don't use any words that most folks can't figure out right off. With big words they have to read what you wrote more than once to see what you meant. If you put a lot of big words in there, there is a good chance they'll just get all balled up any way, even if they read it over and over. Then they'll just get mad at you or give up. Short words are easy. Every one likes them. They are good friends. Use them.

Make your sentences short, too. Lots of people run out of breath when a sentence is too long. Then they have to stop right in the middle for a while and that's not a good place to stop. They can lose their place or forget what came before. Using lots of short sentences lets their minds rest a tiny bit while they wait in between. This helps. I don't know about you, but my mind gets tired real quick and maybe yours does, too!

Don't be clever. Most folks like new ideas to be simple, the kind they can get a good grip on right off the bat. But what people really like is to read ideas they have already thought before. That makes it super easy to think them again. Thinking a thought for the first time is always the hardest. So keep those new ideas out of your posting if you can help it. This works out great for Reader's Digest and it will work for you, too.

By now you might be thinking, "Hey! This is easy!" And you'd be right! But if you want to write the best you can, keep reading because there's even more to come!

I bet you never stopped to think how much more exciting it is to read a posting where the writer is real excited about what they're writing. But it's true! Excited writers write exciting stuff. And the best way to let the reader know how excited you are is to use lots of exclamation points! They're cheap, so don't worry!

Here's another smart tip from the writing pros. Write about what you know best. That way you don't get all balled up with looking up new facts about things you don't already know all about. That's just hard work and you might even get mixed up and write it all wrong and not even know it! Why should you risk looking stupid, when you can write about something where you know all there is to know about it? That way you don't even have to think twice about what to say. You can just say it, and that's that.

Write like you talk. Good talkers just grab you by the ears and don't let go. The same goes for good writers, except they grab your eyeballs. If you write like you talk, you'll find the words will just come squirting out of you and onto the page. And right up into your reader's eye, too! That's what you want.

Use colorful words. It's hard to say what words are colorful, but I think you'll know them when you see them. They're the words that zap you and make your teeth hurt, that float as pretty as butterflies, that make your mouth water and your gums tingle. Think of as many colorful words as you can and fling and hurl them all over what you write. Your readers will be hypnotized.

The last thing I have to say is - have fun! Writing doesn't have to be so hard it makes you sweat like a pig. It can be a breeze! So, what are you waiting for? Let your juices flow and you'll write the kind of real good postings that won't be pushed off into the Dunce Corner of ILX. So, lick that pencil and get started today! I can guarantee, you won't be sorry.**

**The author of this piece does not actually guarantee that you won't be sorry.

short sentences is legit a good tip tho

dunce corner of ilx is a fuckin hallowed spot imo

there are horses for courses and sentence lengths that suit the thought to be expressed.

A few of those words are fine, but 'liminal' should be banned.

I also very much agree with "Don't quote Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida," although that's getting a little bit ideological for a question on writing advice.

it’s true tho that lots of bad writers try to hide in big words and long sentences