4 ms·

I am very interested in your take. When Michelangelo sculpted the Pietà, the pain it expressed was a feeling that many people had shared, so it became culture.

I am very interested in your take. When Michelangelo sculpted the Pietà, the pain it expressed was a feeling that many people had shared, so it became culture. But when a teenager makes a tiktok about the pain of being rejected by their crush, and it's a feeling many people have shared, and many people like it, that's basic, vague and shallow.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
What makes the tiktok vague and shallow isn't the topic itself, but the awareness that there's already a hundred thousand identical tiktoks expressing the same or similar feelings in roughly the same way. What makes it "not culture" is that everyone is watching one or few of those hundred thousand fully exchangeable tiktoks. A thing which is basic, vague and shallow can become an important cultural work too - it just must become known to approximately everyone in a society. It must somehow become the one representative work in its class, so that when someone makes a reference, everyone knows exactly which work is being talked about, and that everyone else knows it too. Being unique is not strictly necessary, but is highly helpful.
- monknomo 3y ago
  There are an awful lot of sculptures/paintings, etc. about the sixth sorrow of mary, and most are pretty interchangeable, imo. I wonder if the difference with tiktok is that there are thousands of videos about the same thing, everyone sees a few of those thousands, but they see a different few. So even though we're sharing the feeling, culturally, we're not sharing the same artifact. Like maybe the trouble is that tiktok puts each user into their own custom bubble, and the bubble the user finds themself in is completely opaque - you can't readily compare what you're seeing to what your friends are seeing?
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Yeah, this shared artifact - aka "social object" - is the key. It's why the Internet culture is defined by things that "went viral" - because those are the ones everyone saw, and everyone can expect everyone else saw them too. As for the sculptures and paintings of Mary, etc., I'd say they are all boring and entirely interchangeable, but that's because I have no connection to any of them. Each such work is meaningful to the community that had a personal connection. But I'd say none of them are culturally important, except those individual ones that for some reason (like being very old) become widely known among people outside artifact-adjacent community. Side point: culture always has a scope. Something may be important cultural object for the city I live in, unremarkable for anyone else in my country, and entirely unknown the rest of the world. With the Internet enabling arts and entertainment on demand, there is little overlap between communities we live in and the entertainment choices of individual community members. We end up having communities with no culture.
jklinger410 3y ago
> When Michelangelo sculpted the Pietà, the pain it expressed was a feeling that many people had shared, so it became culture. So, first, any art that is funded by the church or a patron is not really in this conversation. The entire economics of that art is outside of the eyeball conversation. If art that is pre-funded strikes a chord with people, it is the same thing as I said about artists in the past. Like Coltraine or Hendrix, they expressed something unique or personal that it was discovered that all people shared, and it therefore became culture. There are mounds upon mounds of crappy pre-funded religious art that impacted no-one whatsoever. So Pietra is precisely the opposite of pop art, although that is what it became. Which is what makes it culture.
pixl97 3y ago
How many times can a joke be told before it gets worn out? How many times have you seen an 'old tired' joke that's been told by an expert storyteller and it's funny yet again?

TeMPOraL 3y ago

What makes the tiktok vague and shallow isn't the topic itself, but the awareness that there's already a hundred thousand identical tiktoks expressing the same or similar feelings in roughly the same way. What makes it "not culture" is that everyone is watching one or few of those hundred thousand fully exchangeable tiktoks. A thing which is basic, vague and shallow can become an important cultural work too - it just must become known to approximately everyone in a society. It must somehow become the one representative work in its class, so that when someone makes a reference, everyone knows exactly which work is being talked about, and that everyone else knows it too. Being unique is not strictly necessary, but is highly helpful.

monknomo 3y ago
There are an awful lot of sculptures/paintings, etc. about the sixth sorrow of mary, and most are pretty interchangeable, imo. I wonder if the difference with tiktok is that there are thousands of videos about the same thing, everyone sees a few of those thousands, but they see a different few. So even though we're sharing the feeling, culturally, we're not sharing the same artifact. Like maybe the trouble is that tiktok puts each user into their own custom bubble, and the bubble the user finds themself in is completely opaque - you can't readily compare what you're seeing to what your friends are seeing?
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Yeah, this shared artifact - aka "social object" - is the key. It's why the Internet culture is defined by things that "went viral" - because those are the ones everyone saw, and everyone can expect everyone else saw them too. As for the sculptures and paintings of Mary, etc., I'd say they are all boring and entirely interchangeable, but that's because I have no connection to any of them. Each such work is meaningful to the community that had a personal connection. But I'd say none of them are culturally important, except those individual ones that for some reason (like being very old) become widely known among people outside artifact-adjacent community. Side point: culture always has a scope. Something may be important cultural object for the city I live in, unremarkable for anyone else in my country, and entirely unknown the rest of the world. With the Internet enabling arts and entertainment on demand, there is little overlap between communities we live in and the entertainment choices of individual community members. We end up having communities with no culture.

jklinger410 3y ago

> When Michelangelo sculpted the Pietà, the pain it expressed was a feeling that many people had shared, so it became culture. So, first, any art that is funded by the church or a patron is not really in this conversation. The entire economics of that art is outside of the eyeball conversation. If art that is pre-funded strikes a chord with people, it is the same thing as I said about artists in the past. Like Coltraine or Hendrix, they expressed something unique or personal that it was discovered that all people shared, and it therefore became culture. There are mounds upon mounds of crappy pre-funded religious art that impacted no-one whatsoever. So Pietra is precisely the opposite of pop art, although that is what it became. Which is what makes it culture.

pixl97 3y ago

How many times can a joke be told before it gets worn out? How many times have you seen an 'old tired' joke that's been told by an expert storyteller and it's funny yet again?