3 ms·

The culture is here, it's just not evenly distributed. My own view as a writer and artist, is that there's a relatively consistent amount of creative innovatio

by dbspin 4y ago

The culture is here, it's just not evenly distributed. My own view as a writer and artist, is that there's a relatively consistent amount of creative innovation being done at any given time. It's access to it and promotion of it that varies. Whats happened since the 90s is that rents have consistently risen - meaning physical scenes are enormously less likely to emerge, and (as the author rightly points out) algorithmic recommendations have both isolate people in their own bubbles of past preference and privileged big content. Big content has been selling the transmedia vision of wholly owned and diversified 'media properties' pretty consistently since then. However - artists gonna art. Brilliant writing is out there, unpublished by the narrow coterie of MFA grad, politically unipolar editors running grant funded publications. Brilliant filmmaking is out there - and actually experiencing a renaissance thanks to cheap tools; but getting a mid budget opportunity, the pathway from zero / microbudget to mainstream director is now close to impossible. Incredible new music is out there, but spotify doesn't pay, and a social media audience is by definition drawn to repetitious, unchallenging, immediately accessible soothing or shocking material. It's not the culture thats stuck, it's the media. Also enormously relevant to all this is the spaces artists can display their work, and engage with one another. In Dublin in the early 2010s this played out rapidly. After the financial crisis there was a period of about four years where rents dropped precipitously. The explosion of art shows, participatory art spaces and public creativity was extraordinary. A city of 500k people had more than 40 open active public art spaces. It's all since disappeared - but the artists, performers and organisers who made it happen were alive before and lived on after. They just don't have the affordances necessary to create / promote that kind of work. Namely physical public facing spaces located in the city.

prohobo 4y ago
Can you share some of that stuff? Where are these great movies I've never heard of? Where are the great books - can't people publish on their own nowadays? I can attest to good music being made, but it's still very slow to evolve compared to the 2nd half of the 20th century.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  > It's not the culture thats stuck, it's the media. Movies, books and widely played music are all closed avenues for 99.9% of artists. There's no way you'd get any kind of distribution worth the effort to produce such a large artifact. The most creative writing I've seen in the past 15 years has all been done as a series of posts or articles. The best genre bending music all seems to fly under the radar of most people because it only gets hosted on SoundCloud, obscure YouTube channels, and sold on indie online commerce sites, the same for short films which seem to be exclusively on YouTube or social media sites. Everything has to be DTC now, due in large part to the increase in gatekeeping by some of the platforms I mentioned like YouTube. You won't just show up in someone's feed because you're a good match for their interests anymore, at least not unless you've heavily monetized and sanitized your content to be acceptable to ad sales. So instead it all has to work on the indie model where you build your community along with your art. You have to be your own PR, run your own Discord, build your following, host your own events, etc. It's a struggle and it means your reach is just as limited as it would have been pre-internet when you were trying to do the same in your city using flyers, gigs, and word of mouth.
  - dbspin 4y ago
    Completely agree with this take. Promotion is orthagonal to creation, both as a talent and an activity.
- dbspin 4y ago
  Re: publishing, sure you can self publish. But your job at that point is no longer as a writer. Your job is now marketing. The potential for people to see your work is directly related to your ability to sell it and arguably not at all related to your capacity to create it. It's not that good work isn't self published, its that there's nothing to make it stand out from the literary equivalent of drop shipping. The audience can't find it if it isn't being promoted. You're not just competing with every other self published work - from AI generated texts to the branded writing mills of 'authors' who pay drones to push out texts at scale under their name. You're also competing with the entire industry of online entertainment. Every brilliant thing made throughout history available instantly for streaming, purchase or pirating, and sold with every penny big content has to promote it. As for my own work, I have a small group of friends that I write with in person, and I perform in person occasionally (most recently in the fantastic writers cafe Laidak in Neukoln in Berlin). I'm utterly terrible at marketing, and my work doesn't fit the demographic criteria for contemporary publishing, so you can't find much it anywhere online or off. That's likely true of a whole generation of writers who aren't creating didactic autobiographical morality tales. I don't want to dump stories or books that take months to write into the void of self publishing, but I'm a writer so I still write. In terms of music - I just spent a few days in Berlin listening to live work at venues like Trixxter. If you're open to experimental live performance there are a whole bunch of scenes in small live venues. Again, not sure how you'd pick it out from the both the dross and the heavily promoted work online. In terms of film, again my reference is Berlin - there's a whole scene right now that you might call antifilm (I have no idea if it has a formal name). Small films shot verite from life, without a budget, and wilfully rejecting any kind of formal aesthetics (think Dogma on steroids). Wilfully horribly shot on bad cameras, but often incredibly interesting in terms of their engagement with life as its lived now, hauntology, post internet art etc. In terms of specific filmmakers Jean-Michel Brawands work is interesting. There's a whole community around Sputnik Kino and similar small events.
te_chris 4y ago
Auckland had the same thing with art and a fun party and music diy scene from the late 2000’s through early 2010’s. Extinguished by the property bubble by about 2015. Lots of fun at the time. Bit of a wasteland now.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  Even more so in the mid 70s to mid 80s.
- dbspin 4y ago
  That's heartbreaking. I volunteered at a place in Templebar called Exchange Dublin from 2010 - 2013, forcibly closed by the council on spurious grounds (along with dozens of other spaces) in 2014. We hosted literally thousands of DIY gigs, exhibitions, storytelling events, interest groups, hardware and software hackathons each year. All donation based, often free. People - tourists and locals alike loved it. The city came alive because of such places, and now they're gone Dublin is a pretty grim environment. Hate to hear about the same happening in other places - and for exactly the same causes. One of many reasons we need to decommodify housing, before we recreate serfdom.
- goalieca 4y ago
  The housing bubble in Vancouver had a similar effect around that time. Some of the legendary venues got torn down for condos. The condos are largely vacant as they were investment vehicles and money laundering tools for foreign residents. The real shame was that neighbourhoods died without foot traffic as no one lived in these areas.

by dbspin 4y ago

prohobo 4y ago

Can you share some of that stuff? Where are these great movies I've never heard of? Where are the great books - can't people publish on their own nowadays? I can attest to good music being made, but it's still very slow to evolve compared to the 2nd half of the 20th century.

throwaway4aday 4y ago
> It's not the culture thats stuck, it's the media. Movies, books and widely played music are all closed avenues for 99.9% of artists. There's no way you'd get any kind of distribution worth the effort to produce such a large artifact. The most creative writing I've seen in the past 15 years has all been done as a series of posts or articles. The best genre bending music all seems to fly under the radar of most people because it only gets hosted on SoundCloud, obscure YouTube channels, and sold on indie online commerce sites, the same for short films which seem to be exclusively on YouTube or social media sites. Everything has to be DTC now, due in large part to the increase in gatekeeping by some of the platforms I mentioned like YouTube. You won't just show up in someone's feed because you're a good match for their interests anymore, at least not unless you've heavily monetized and sanitized your content to be acceptable to ad sales. So instead it all has to work on the indie model where you build your community along with your art. You have to be your own PR, run your own Discord, build your following, host your own events, etc. It's a struggle and it means your reach is just as limited as it would have been pre-internet when you were trying to do the same in your city using flyers, gigs, and word of mouth.
- dbspin 4y ago
  Completely agree with this take. Promotion is orthagonal to creation, both as a talent and an activity.
dbspin 4y ago
Re: publishing, sure you can self publish. But your job at that point is no longer as a writer. Your job is now marketing. The potential for people to see your work is directly related to your ability to sell it and arguably not at all related to your capacity to create it. It's not that good work isn't self published, its that there's nothing to make it stand out from the literary equivalent of drop shipping. The audience can't find it if it isn't being promoted. You're not just competing with every other self published work - from AI generated texts to the branded writing mills of 'authors' who pay drones to push out texts at scale under their name. You're also competing with the entire industry of online entertainment. Every brilliant thing made throughout history available instantly for streaming, purchase or pirating, and sold with every penny big content has to promote it. As for my own work, I have a small group of friends that I write with in person, and I perform in person occasionally (most recently in the fantastic writers cafe Laidak in Neukoln in Berlin). I'm utterly terrible at marketing, and my work doesn't fit the demographic criteria for contemporary publishing, so you can't find much it anywhere online or off. That's likely true of a whole generation of writers who aren't creating didactic autobiographical morality tales. I don't want to dump stories or books that take months to write into the void of self publishing, but I'm a writer so I still write. In terms of music - I just spent a few days in Berlin listening to live work at venues like Trixxter. If you're open to experimental live performance there are a whole bunch of scenes in small live venues. Again, not sure how you'd pick it out from the both the dross and the heavily promoted work online. In terms of film, again my reference is Berlin - there's a whole scene right now that you might call antifilm (I have no idea if it has a formal name). Small films shot verite from life, without a budget, and wilfully rejecting any kind of formal aesthetics (think Dogma on steroids). Wilfully horribly shot on bad cameras, but often incredibly interesting in terms of their engagement with life as its lived now, hauntology, post internet art etc. In terms of specific filmmakers Jean-Michel Brawands work is interesting. There's a whole community around Sputnik Kino and similar small events.

te_chris 4y ago

Auckland had the same thing with art and a fun party and music diy scene from the late 2000’s through early 2010’s. Extinguished by the property bubble by about 2015. Lots of fun at the time. Bit of a wasteland now.

tuatoru 4y ago
Even more so in the mid 70s to mid 80s.
dbspin 4y ago
That's heartbreaking. I volunteered at a place in Templebar called Exchange Dublin from 2010 - 2013, forcibly closed by the council on spurious grounds (along with dozens of other spaces) in 2014. We hosted literally thousands of DIY gigs, exhibitions, storytelling events, interest groups, hardware and software hackathons each year. All donation based, often free. People - tourists and locals alike loved it. The city came alive because of such places, and now they're gone Dublin is a pretty grim environment. Hate to hear about the same happening in other places - and for exactly the same causes. One of many reasons we need to decommodify housing, before we recreate serfdom.
goalieca 4y ago
The housing bubble in Vancouver had a similar effect around that time. Some of the legendary venues got torn down for condos. The condos are largely vacant as they were investment vehicles and money laundering tools for foreign residents. The real shame was that neighbourhoods died without foot traffic as no one lived in these areas.