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An artist doesn’t owe the world anything. If he didn’t want to be associated with it, then leave it alone. Have some respect for the way a person chooses to pre

An artist doesn’t owe the world anything. If he didn’t want to be associated with it, then leave it alone. Have some respect for the way a person chooses to present themselves to the world. The greediness of the contemporary public is really off-putting. It reminds me of how we dig up mummies and place them in museums; completely disregarding the actual human beings that lived and their cultural-religious beliefs, all so that we can stare at them in a museum for 30 seconds.

jonny_eh 5y ago
> all so that we can stare at them in a museum for 30 seconds So that we can study them, learn from them, and let them tell us their stories, so that they truly live on after death.
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  From their perspective, none of that would be relevant. They had certain beliefs and rather than respect them, we treat them like objects to gawk at.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - anbende 5y ago
    Except that the mummy in the museum isn’t a person. It’s a collection of inanimate organic matter. There are no beliefs there to respect. They ended with the person’s life thousands of years ago. I could see an argument made for modern remains as there are living people/descendants who have a strong connection with the burial beliefs and practices. But make no mistake, even in that case it is about the living and not the dead.
    - ceilingcorner 5y ago
      Sorry, but this is a modern anachronistic statement. To the people that lived, their remains were extremely important. They even built dozens of pyramids to house them, which again, have been reduced to a tourist attraction. The modern world has no respect for anything.
      - anbende 5y ago
        Those people are also gone and no longer have any beliefs or ideas that can be violated. Nothing we do today affects those people or their beliefs in any way. Those people no longer exist and cannot be harmed or protected. Ideas about respect and proper behavior around their landmarks only affects people who are alive. It is only important to the extent that it is important to us. It is clearly important to you but not others. So why should it matter to others if it doesn’t?
        ceilingcorner 5y ago
        Because it’s a simple matter of recognizing other human beings and respecting their cultural achievements and desires. Just because they don’t exist anymore doesn’t mean they weren’t humans worthy of our empathy. I hate to use this example, but your argument would also basically say a genocided people is completely unimportant and unworthy of respect, as they no longer exist either.
        anbende 5y ago
        Thanks for your response. I'm trying to understand your position here, and I'm really not getting it. Aside from the obvious problem of their being living people who experienced the holocaust (so they still exist), this example seems to imply that I'm saying that there's no need for empathy and respect for the people who came before us. I don't think that anything I've said implies that. Instead what I'm saying is that the dead need no protection and can receive no pain or insult. Anything we do for "them" is really for "us", because they do not exist. >Because it’s a simple matter of recognizing other human beings and respecting their cultural achievements and desires. Just because they don’t exist anymore doesn’t mean they weren’t humans worthy of our empathy. You seem to be implying that not honoring the wishes of the dead is an empathic failure. How so? I can empathize with someone's wishes, understand where they are coming from, and even respect who they were. None of that implies that I owe their desires a place in the world now. And in fact as modern people we MUST make choices about what pieces of the past to revere, revise, or pave over. Otherwise the world becomes a mausoleum to the past.
- ResearchCode 5y ago
  Societies with high human capital respect the dead and won't seize upon the first opportunity to rob their graves (rationalizing as "learning" or whatever doesn't cut it). There's plenty of other material that was willfully published to learn from.
  - riversflow 5y ago
    I disagree. I have extremely high respect for human capital, and genuinely feel disgusted that especially western society isn't working hard to improve the human condition at it's most basic level, i.e. Automation first. To me the long dead are meaningless, and the recently dead are mostly so. I have the utmost respect for the living, and those who are recently dead have people who care about their legacy. But the farther you go back you go, the less direct connection the dead have with the present, and the simple fact is that the dead are gone.
    - ceilingcorner 5y ago
      Pretty much the entirety of the modern world is built on the accumulation of ideas and knowledge acquired over thousands of years. Unless you are a hunter gatherer, you have a direct relationship to the long dead.
      - riversflow 5y ago
        Oh I agree 100%, I'm fully of the belief that we stand on the shoulders of giants, and that Social contract theory has merit; we owe society for the world we are born into. But owing society isn't the same as owing respect to individuals. We can't be burdened by the wishes of those long dead, they no longer exist and as a society we have to move on.
  - bredren 5y ago
    They respect _their_ dead. There is relatively minuscule respect paid to dead native people that lived in their land before they arrived.
- exikyut 5y ago
  What does "them" refer to here though? Our preferred projection of them in our own image? Or a meeting-in-the-middle between you and an individual's preferred presentation of themselves? One of the reasons the Git version control system caught on is that it lets you rewrite history...
curtis3389 5y ago
What about Kafka?
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  Difficult case but I still think the rights of the creator are more important to respect. There’s also something kafkesque about the way his stories weren’t destroyed, which makes me think that the story isn’t as simple as it seems.
- tiahura 5y ago
  and Marcus Aurelius?
UncleOxidant 5y ago
As a huge Steinbeck fan, I do not want to read this book. I don't want to think of him as someone who wrote a warewolf novel - and he probably didn't want to think of himself that way either. At the time he would have written it he was very desperate for money so he would have written it in the hope that he might make a bit of money to keep going.
- dfxm12 5y ago
  Whether you read the book or not, whether the public gets the chance to read the book or not, he is someone who wrote a werewolf novel. You can choose to ignore that fact if you want, but it makes no difference; it doesn't make him any worse of a writer. It doesn't make Cannery Row any less of a novel.
  - UncleOxidant 5y ago
    People do things when they're desperate for money that they're not proud of. They certainly don't want to be remembered for those things. The fact that he wrote it under a pseudonym indicates that he didn't want to be associated with it.
    - shard 5y ago
      Writing under a pseudonym can be seen as brand management, so that the brand of one name does not leak to the brand of another. For example, Nora Roberts, the romance novelist, uses the pseudonym J.D. Robb when writing futuristic suspense novels. It may be as you said that he doesn't want to be associated with it, or it may be that he wants to keep the brands separate.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        Women also used to write under male pseudonyms in order to get published. https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/12-female-writers-who-wrote-under-male-pseudonyms/ https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/12-fem...
josephorjoe 5y ago
> The greediness of the contemporary public is really off-putting. Well put. This feels like some bizarre end game of "information wants to be free" where instead of railing against content owners expecting to be paid for content people are railing against the idea that content creators can have any control over their creations whatsoever.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  But they can't. Once the work is out there, any control that the author is given is an affordance. Trying to fight it is why we live in a world of draconian DRM and licensing-not-ownership To be clear: an artist's control of a work ends once it is in the hands of their audience.
  - sincerely 5y ago
    Well, the work in question is not "out there".
echlebek 5y ago
John Steinbeck is dead, and the world doesn't owe him anything either. No need to scold people who are interested in history.
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  If you don’t have any respect for the past, don’t expect the future to have any respect for you.
  - m00x 5y ago
    The only people for whom it really matters is their descendants or people who cared about them. The dead is gone, there is no difference for them if their image, or their bodies are disrespected.
    - ceilingcorner 5y ago
      Well, luckily the people who died fighting in World War 2 cared about their society’s descendants, otherwise why bother fighting and dying? If your future society doesn’t care about you, why risk anything for them?
      - watwut 5y ago
        A lot of them were nazi. Many nazi fought that war. They have seen themselves as fighting for future. Majority of people dying were civilians.
      - NineStarPoint 5y ago
        To care for the state of future generations is worthwhile, because it is to give hope and happiness to them while they are living. I want all of humanity to live in as ideal a world as possible, and it’s worth fighting in the present so that future humanity has a better world. And society should care for those who have sacrificed for it, while they are alive. Once I am dead though, there is no me here to respect any more. Death is complete separation from this world. The vast majority of people who have ever died are completely lost to memory, whether they wanted that fate or not. And for those we do still remember, they’re long past having the ability to care at all what happens to what they left behind. Whether through nothingness or an afterlife, they are no longer here.
tomc1985 5y ago
All the norms around burial culture are contrivances made up by humans and have little basis in the natural world. That the dead even deserve respect is similarly made-up. One's involuntary submission to the whims of the living is part of the process of death. If one does anything even remotely notable you can be assured that society will want something to do with it. There's no point in chastising the entire world because of it.
- Andrex 5y ago
  > All the norms around burial culture are contrivances made up by humans and have little basis in the natural world. That the dead even deserve respect is similarly made-up. Not sure elephants, among other species, would agree.
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    Culture rears its ugly head once again. The elephants might not agree but I'm certain that the cheetahs, tigers, hyenas, and all the other predators of the world would
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  If that’s your line of thought, then why stop at burials? All human culture has little basis in the natural world. Unless you’re a Nihilist and Darwinist, I assume you think some values are more important than others?
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    There are some such values, but I recognize their fragility in the face of actual human behavior. And indeed, I think a lot of aspects of culture are dumb and that society would be better off without. It would be better if the world returned to the basics instead of endlessly wrapping itself around an axle of contrivances.
duxup 5y ago
I suppose everyone wants to control how they're remembered / their public image. I'm not sure that is a right that anyone has.

jonny_eh 5y ago

> all so that we can stare at them in a museum for 30 seconds So that we can study them, learn from them, and let them tell us their stories, so that they truly live on after death.

ceilingcorner 5y ago
From their perspective, none of that would be relevant. They had certain beliefs and rather than respect them, we treat them like objects to gawk at.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- anbende 5y ago
  Except that the mummy in the museum isn’t a person. It’s a collection of inanimate organic matter. There are no beliefs there to respect. They ended with the person’s life thousands of years ago. I could see an argument made for modern remains as there are living people/descendants who have a strong connection with the burial beliefs and practices. But make no mistake, even in that case it is about the living and not the dead.
  - ceilingcorner 5y ago
    Sorry, but this is a modern anachronistic statement. To the people that lived, their remains were extremely important. They even built dozens of pyramids to house them, which again, have been reduced to a tourist attraction. The modern world has no respect for anything.
    - anbende 5y ago
      Those people are also gone and no longer have any beliefs or ideas that can be violated. Nothing we do today affects those people or their beliefs in any way. Those people no longer exist and cannot be harmed or protected. Ideas about respect and proper behavior around their landmarks only affects people who are alive. It is only important to the extent that it is important to us. It is clearly important to you but not others. So why should it matter to others if it doesn’t?
      - ceilingcorner 5y ago
        Because it’s a simple matter of recognizing other human beings and respecting their cultural achievements and desires. Just because they don’t exist anymore doesn’t mean they weren’t humans worthy of our empathy. I hate to use this example, but your argument would also basically say a genocided people is completely unimportant and unworthy of respect, as they no longer exist either.
        anbende 5y ago
        Thanks for your response. I'm trying to understand your position here, and I'm really not getting it. Aside from the obvious problem of their being living people who experienced the holocaust (so they still exist), this example seems to imply that I'm saying that there's no need for empathy and respect for the people who came before us. I don't think that anything I've said implies that. Instead what I'm saying is that the dead need no protection and can receive no pain or insult. Anything we do for "them" is really for "us", because they do not exist. >Because it’s a simple matter of recognizing other human beings and respecting their cultural achievements and desires. Just because they don’t exist anymore doesn’t mean they weren’t humans worthy of our empathy. You seem to be implying that not honoring the wishes of the dead is an empathic failure. How so? I can empathize with someone's wishes, understand where they are coming from, and even respect who they were. None of that implies that I owe their desires a place in the world now. And in fact as modern people we MUST make choices about what pieces of the past to revere, revise, or pave over. Otherwise the world becomes a mausoleum to the past.
ResearchCode 5y ago
Societies with high human capital respect the dead and won't seize upon the first opportunity to rob their graves (rationalizing as "learning" or whatever doesn't cut it). There's plenty of other material that was willfully published to learn from.
- riversflow 5y ago
  I disagree. I have extremely high respect for human capital, and genuinely feel disgusted that especially western society isn't working hard to improve the human condition at it's most basic level, i.e. Automation first. To me the long dead are meaningless, and the recently dead are mostly so. I have the utmost respect for the living, and those who are recently dead have people who care about their legacy. But the farther you go back you go, the less direct connection the dead have with the present, and the simple fact is that the dead are gone.
  - ceilingcorner 5y ago
    Pretty much the entirety of the modern world is built on the accumulation of ideas and knowledge acquired over thousands of years. Unless you are a hunter gatherer, you have a direct relationship to the long dead.
    - riversflow 5y ago
      Oh I agree 100%, I'm fully of the belief that we stand on the shoulders of giants, and that Social contract theory has merit; we owe society for the world we are born into. But owing society isn't the same as owing respect to individuals. We can't be burdened by the wishes of those long dead, they no longer exist and as a society we have to move on.
- bredren 5y ago
  They respect _their_ dead. There is relatively minuscule respect paid to dead native people that lived in their land before they arrived.
exikyut 5y ago
What does "them" refer to here though? Our preferred projection of them in our own image? Or a meeting-in-the-middle between you and an individual's preferred presentation of themselves? One of the reasons the Git version control system caught on is that it lets you rewrite history...

curtis3389 5y ago

What about Kafka?

ceilingcorner 5y ago
Difficult case but I still think the rights of the creator are more important to respect. There’s also something kafkesque about the way his stories weren’t destroyed, which makes me think that the story isn’t as simple as it seems.
tiahura 5y ago
and Marcus Aurelius?

UncleOxidant 5y ago

As a huge Steinbeck fan, I do not want to read this book. I don't want to think of him as someone who wrote a warewolf novel - and he probably didn't want to think of himself that way either. At the time he would have written it he was very desperate for money so he would have written it in the hope that he might make a bit of money to keep going.

dfxm12 5y ago
Whether you read the book or not, whether the public gets the chance to read the book or not, he is someone who wrote a werewolf novel. You can choose to ignore that fact if you want, but it makes no difference; it doesn't make him any worse of a writer. It doesn't make Cannery Row any less of a novel.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  People do things when they're desperate for money that they're not proud of. They certainly don't want to be remembered for those things. The fact that he wrote it under a pseudonym indicates that he didn't want to be associated with it.
  - shard 5y ago
    Writing under a pseudonym can be seen as brand management, so that the brand of one name does not leak to the brand of another. For example, Nora Roberts, the romance novelist, uses the pseudonym J.D. Robb when writing futuristic suspense novels. It may be as you said that he doesn't want to be associated with it, or it may be that he wants to keep the brands separate.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      Women also used to write under male pseudonyms in order to get published. https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/12-female-writers-who-wrote-under-male-pseudonyms/ https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/12-fem...

josephorjoe 5y ago

> The greediness of the contemporary public is really off-putting. Well put. This feels like some bizarre end game of "information wants to be free" where instead of railing against content owners expecting to be paid for content people are railing against the idea that content creators can have any control over their creations whatsoever.

tomc1985 5y ago
But they can't. Once the work is out there, any control that the author is given is an affordance. Trying to fight it is why we live in a world of draconian DRM and licensing-not-ownership To be clear: an artist's control of a work ends once it is in the hands of their audience.
- sincerely 5y ago
  Well, the work in question is not "out there".

echlebek 5y ago

John Steinbeck is dead, and the world doesn't owe him anything either. No need to scold people who are interested in history.

ceilingcorner 5y ago
If you don’t have any respect for the past, don’t expect the future to have any respect for you.
- m00x 5y ago
  The only people for whom it really matters is their descendants or people who cared about them. The dead is gone, there is no difference for them if their image, or their bodies are disrespected.
  - ceilingcorner 5y ago
    Well, luckily the people who died fighting in World War 2 cared about their society’s descendants, otherwise why bother fighting and dying? If your future society doesn’t care about you, why risk anything for them?
    - watwut 5y ago
      A lot of them were nazi. Many nazi fought that war. They have seen themselves as fighting for future. Majority of people dying were civilians.
    - NineStarPoint 5y ago
      To care for the state of future generations is worthwhile, because it is to give hope and happiness to them while they are living. I want all of humanity to live in as ideal a world as possible, and it’s worth fighting in the present so that future humanity has a better world. And society should care for those who have sacrificed for it, while they are alive. Once I am dead though, there is no me here to respect any more. Death is complete separation from this world. The vast majority of people who have ever died are completely lost to memory, whether they wanted that fate or not. And for those we do still remember, they’re long past having the ability to care at all what happens to what they left behind. Whether through nothingness or an afterlife, they are no longer here.

tomc1985 5y ago

All the norms around burial culture are contrivances made up by humans and have little basis in the natural world. That the dead even deserve respect is similarly made-up. One's involuntary submission to the whims of the living is part of the process of death. If one does anything even remotely notable you can be assured that society will want something to do with it. There's no point in chastising the entire world because of it.

Andrex 5y ago
> All the norms around burial culture are contrivances made up by humans and have little basis in the natural world. That the dead even deserve respect is similarly made-up. Not sure elephants, among other species, would agree.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  Culture rears its ugly head once again. The elephants might not agree but I'm certain that the cheetahs, tigers, hyenas, and all the other predators of the world would
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ceilingcorner 5y ago
If that’s your line of thought, then why stop at burials? All human culture has little basis in the natural world. Unless you’re a Nihilist and Darwinist, I assume you think some values are more important than others?
- tomc1985 5y ago
  There are some such values, but I recognize their fragility in the face of actual human behavior. And indeed, I think a lot of aspects of culture are dumb and that society would be better off without. It would be better if the world returned to the basics instead of endlessly wrapping itself around an axle of contrivances.

duxup 5y ago

I suppose everyone wants to control how they're remembered / their public image. I'm not sure that is a right that anyone has.