7 ms·

Argh. Wrong on dozens of levels, and arguably nothing more than a ridiculous and repetitive summation of Modernist industrial / capital ideology. In short, the

Argh. Wrong on dozens of levels, and arguably nothing more than a ridiculous and repetitive summation of Modernist industrial / capital ideology. In short, the author shouldn't be so quick to dismiss Postmodern artwork because it eloquently dismisses his reduction of culture to commodity. Culture _is_ aesthetics. If you need a tell, glimpse at late Modernist aesthetics that sought to separate symbology from it. Form vs. Function is precisely such an ignorant axis model. Culture communicates via its symbology, and some of that ethic / ideology is inexpressible via commodification; hence the need for late Modernists to attempt to exorcise such an emergent phenomenon. If anything, the aesthetics of a culture (and important symbology) needs to be emancipated from the late Modernist industrial complex.

orasis 12y ago
foolrush - you seem well studied on the subject. Are there any books you'd recommend?
- foolrush 12y ago
  Not well studied beyond a BFa at a rather liberal / avant-garde school. And of course a lifelong fascination with the subject that carried on long past postsecondary education. Hard to suggest one book, or even a few to be honest. The hardest thing about much of these sorts of topics is to find the willpower and passion that can carry you through study. That and the extremely difficult act of extending a humility to believe there may be some substance to difficult texts; all too common (and easy) for people to dismiss difficult texts as meaningless / confusing. Any recommendation would have to start with you and what you understand, what you have been exposed to, what interests you, and so on.
  - llamataboot 12y ago
    I'll bite. I'd start with Ways of Seeing by John Berger http://www.amazon.com/Ways-Seeing-John-Berger/dp/014103579X http://www.amazon.com/Ways-Seeing-John-Berger/dp/014103579X
- potatolicious 12y ago
  I tried to self-study my way into art - futilely for the most part. Your mileage may vary of course, but art didn't really "click" for me until I decided to create some of it myself. Once you start creating art you start realizing that you're walking the same learning path others have taken before you, and this allows you to better contextualize art you see out in the wild. It's a feedback system for me - art I create helps me better understand the how and why of other artists/art, and in turn feed back into the development of my own work, and further understanding, etc ad infinitum (hopefully).
cousin_it 12y ago
Maybe we'd benefit from having a discussion in simpler terms? The main points of the article, as I understand it, are that society shouldn't encourage the creation of new art, because we already have more than enough good art to last anyone a lifetime, and because artists are mostly motivated by social status anyway. It seems to me that your comment didn't offer any arguments against these points. Maybe I'm missing something?
- foolrush 12y ago
  Way back when, in fine arts school, a wise university professor taught us a unique trick to reframe statements regarding art. The trick was to replace all instances of “art” with “language”. Let's try it... “The main points of the article, as I understand it, are that society shouldn't encourage the creation of new [language], because we already have more than enough good [language] to last anyone a lifetime, and because [language manipulators] are mostly motivated by social status anyway.” Interesting I would say. Not to pick on your statement, but rather to illustrate how ideological underpinnings frame our concepts. Art exists as nothing more (or less) than language, yet our ideological pressures force framing. It strikes me that if that is the premise of the article (I read a little more under the hood) then even then, the framing is questionable.
  - cotsuka 12y ago
    Do we need more languages? I certainly enjoy being able to travel to most countries and be able to speak English as a relative standard across all.
    - schoen 12y ago
      I think language was meant in the sense of 'text, utterances'. In that sense, your reply (and my reply to your reply) have created more language.
      - ploxiln 12y ago
        ok then, we probably didn't need that language either
ploxiln 12y ago
The only part of this comment which I understood was "Wrong on dozens of levels". The rest of it, is just, not using concepts I have a concrete understanding of. But I suspect most of it to be bullshit. I agreed with the original essay to a large extent. I'll have to admit that I don't know what the title had to do with it. Basically, should we subsidize or protect the economic interests of creators of fiction and entertainment? No, we shouldn't, we really have no need to sustain the volume of what they produce. I think they should be free to create such things if they want, the suggestion of banning new books is pretty silly. But if unchecked piracy "squashes" commercially motivated books, movies, and music, that would be fine. We would all be quite fine. People can still create media in their free time, if they want, and they might have more free time, if society as a whole spent less money on it.
- foolrush 12y ago
  I apologize for not speaking with concepts you have a concrete understanding of. I sincerely do, this is not a snipe. "People would be happier reading only the best fiction" "It’s easier to figure out what the good old fiction is, than it is new fiction there’s also more good old fiction than good new fiction" "people write too much new fiction. they also read too much" "Society shouldn’t subsidize economically inefficient things like new fiction" "We might go so far as to suggest a Pigovian tax on new works because they encourage their own consumption" "The uses of fiction are much less than one might think, and many of those uses are propagandistic, dangerous, or both" "Subsidizing the nonfiction market may be justifiable" Those are the final summations, in order. Seven statements, each of which I find entirely delusional. So by "dozens of levels", the above represents at least seven out of twelve of them. I cannot think for a brief moment that a large chunk of Hacker News would rest easy with any, or even a few, of those statements. It is, of course, entirely plausible that his entire piece is a work and to be read contextually as a clever bit of sarcasm or an attack, at which point it simply fired right over my head.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    All those statements seem pretty well-founded. Fiction is dangerous because it has an overly powerful way to change thoughts as it isn't constrained by what's true. The other points seen very straightforward and are pretty much what I've run into while trying to find SF to read. The only complaint I'd have is that good new SF tends to be more accurate and believable, due to the surgeries authors actually seeing how tech and science has progressed. Older works tend to feel dated because the tech surpasses what they've envisioned. Yet, only sometimes. E.g. reading Asimov's Robot series, I didn't feel the effect of things being so dated. So given I'd probably be more content with the top works from time past, he's correct that creating new works is simply not as valuable as it used to be. Even if this is an uncomfortable conclusion (I want Culture novels and loved Altered Carbon), it seems accurate.
deleted 12y ago
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orasis 12y ago

foolrush - you seem well studied on the subject. Are there any books you'd recommend?

foolrush 12y ago
Not well studied beyond a BFa at a rather liberal / avant-garde school. And of course a lifelong fascination with the subject that carried on long past postsecondary education. Hard to suggest one book, or even a few to be honest. The hardest thing about much of these sorts of topics is to find the willpower and passion that can carry you through study. That and the extremely difficult act of extending a humility to believe there may be some substance to difficult texts; all too common (and easy) for people to dismiss difficult texts as meaningless / confusing. Any recommendation would have to start with you and what you understand, what you have been exposed to, what interests you, and so on.
- llamataboot 12y ago
  I'll bite. I'd start with Ways of Seeing by John Berger http://www.amazon.com/Ways-Seeing-John-Berger/dp/014103579X http://www.amazon.com/Ways-Seeing-John-Berger/dp/014103579X
potatolicious 12y ago
I tried to self-study my way into art - futilely for the most part. Your mileage may vary of course, but art didn't really "click" for me until I decided to create some of it myself. Once you start creating art you start realizing that you're walking the same learning path others have taken before you, and this allows you to better contextualize art you see out in the wild. It's a feedback system for me - art I create helps me better understand the how and why of other artists/art, and in turn feed back into the development of my own work, and further understanding, etc ad infinitum (hopefully).

cousin_it 12y ago

Maybe we'd benefit from having a discussion in simpler terms? The main points of the article, as I understand it, are that society shouldn't encourage the creation of new art, because we already have more than enough good art to last anyone a lifetime, and because artists are mostly motivated by social status anyway. It seems to me that your comment didn't offer any arguments against these points. Maybe I'm missing something?

foolrush 12y ago
Way back when, in fine arts school, a wise university professor taught us a unique trick to reframe statements regarding art. The trick was to replace all instances of “art” with “language”. Let's try it... “The main points of the article, as I understand it, are that society shouldn't encourage the creation of new [language], because we already have more than enough good [language] to last anyone a lifetime, and because [language manipulators] are mostly motivated by social status anyway.” Interesting I would say. Not to pick on your statement, but rather to illustrate how ideological underpinnings frame our concepts. Art exists as nothing more (or less) than language, yet our ideological pressures force framing. It strikes me that if that is the premise of the article (I read a little more under the hood) then even then, the framing is questionable.
- cotsuka 12y ago
  Do we need more languages? I certainly enjoy being able to travel to most countries and be able to speak English as a relative standard across all.
  - schoen 12y ago
    I think language was meant in the sense of 'text, utterances'. In that sense, your reply (and my reply to your reply) have created more language.
    - ploxiln 12y ago
      ok then, we probably didn't need that language either

ploxiln 12y ago

The only part of this comment which I understood was "Wrong on dozens of levels". The rest of it, is just, not using concepts I have a concrete understanding of. But I suspect most of it to be bullshit. I agreed with the original essay to a large extent. I'll have to admit that I don't know what the title had to do with it. Basically, should we subsidize or protect the economic interests of creators of fiction and entertainment? No, we shouldn't, we really have no need to sustain the volume of what they produce. I think they should be free to create such things if they want, the suggestion of banning new books is pretty silly. But if unchecked piracy "squashes" commercially motivated books, movies, and music, that would be fine. We would all be quite fine. People can still create media in their free time, if they want, and they might have more free time, if society as a whole spent less money on it.

foolrush 12y ago
I apologize for not speaking with concepts you have a concrete understanding of. I sincerely do, this is not a snipe. "People would be happier reading only the best fiction" "It’s easier to figure out what the good old fiction is, than it is new fiction there’s also more good old fiction than good new fiction" "people write too much new fiction. they also read too much" "Society shouldn’t subsidize economically inefficient things like new fiction" "We might go so far as to suggest a Pigovian tax on new works because they encourage their own consumption" "The uses of fiction are much less than one might think, and many of those uses are propagandistic, dangerous, or both" "Subsidizing the nonfiction market may be justifiable" Those are the final summations, in order. Seven statements, each of which I find entirely delusional. So by "dozens of levels", the above represents at least seven out of twelve of them. I cannot think for a brief moment that a large chunk of Hacker News would rest easy with any, or even a few, of those statements. It is, of course, entirely plausible that his entire piece is a work and to be read contextually as a clever bit of sarcasm or an attack, at which point it simply fired right over my head.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  All those statements seem pretty well-founded. Fiction is dangerous because it has an overly powerful way to change thoughts as it isn't constrained by what's true. The other points seen very straightforward and are pretty much what I've run into while trying to find SF to read. The only complaint I'd have is that good new SF tends to be more accurate and believable, due to the surgeries authors actually seeing how tech and science has progressed. Older works tend to feel dated because the tech surpasses what they've envisioned. Yet, only sometimes. E.g. reading Asimov's Robot series, I didn't feel the effect of things being so dated. So given I'd probably be more content with the top works from time past, he's correct that creating new works is simply not as valuable as it used to be. Even if this is an uncomfortable conclusion (I want Culture novels and loved Altered Carbon), it seems accurate.

deleted 12y ago

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