Weird Studies/F for Fake

30 May 2024 - 20 Jun 2024
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    • Kubrick and Welles both artists of post-WWII "contingency".
      • Have to push The Trial (Welles version)
    • sincere irony. The discord mentioned Ricky Jay but Penn and Teller might be better ref points for postmodernish stage magic.
      • Also MNM, "the skilled revelation of skilled concealment"
    • Horror hosts. I would guess that the EC comics ones preceded the TV ones?
    • PF: the film is fun, but it's not all light-hearted ha-ha nothing means anything. There's a serious core, something about the sacral nature of art. We wouldn't be so obsessed with fakes and authenticity if the art object didn't play this sacred role.
      • And realize that for a secular like myself, I still prostrate myself before Art, or try to.
    • Interesting take on Sokal hoax – that in faking a hermeneutical interpretation of quantum physics, he had to actually put himself in that mindset and he doesn't get the final interpretation on what it means (if anything). Idea of founding a religion on it is amusing.
    • Art markets as a kind of parody of commodities. Art objects are unique and singular in their nature, they aren't commodities, their nature and value lies in their resistance to commodification.
    • JFM: every postmodern essay (or creative act of any kind) has an element of fakery, a sort of aspirational kind. Every edit (in a documentary) is a tiny lie. Deception in order to get to the truth.
    • JFM: every creative act is an acausal leap, a cheat (cheating causality). Committing a crime. In a deterministic cosmos, but all good things (art) comes from those crimes.
      • I can't say how much I hate this particular trope (is it a trope? it seems deeper than that. A dualistic move). Not even sure why. The split into natural and supernatural, with all the good stuff on the supernatural side.
      • Hm. I don't think he's any kind of naive dualist. Still something going. on that I am just opposed to. That mind is an intrusion on the material and causal, a force from outside rather than an eruption from within.
    • The truth of Stage magic, because the experience is real (oh man I want to fight with this).