Weird Studies/Art for Art's Sake

04 Feb 2023 10:52 - 17 Jun 2023 08:29
Open in Logseq
    • The uselessness of art, or rather, its independence from normal ideas of utility. Very opposed to the modern trend of trying to justify art by its economic impact, or character-building, or whatever. Art is beyond all that! It is transcendent and self-justifying, or it is nothing.
      • All art is quite useless.
        • – Oscar Wilde
      • Poetry makes nothing happen.
        • Auden (they didn't use this, it's my own contribution!)
    • I have to admit I was not that down with this episode and its thesis, probably because I'm not an art-person and don't feel the same social forces they do. Is art really on the skids like they say, being ground down by neoliberal utilitarianism? I don't see it but I'm not in a position where I would. I imagine it is tough to be in the arts these days, but is it tougher than it was, say 30 ot 60 years ago?
    • At some points this veers close to anti-intellectualism. They are opposed to, say, anthropologists who try to come up with material reasons why cultures engage in art, because it's reductive. This is very analogous to people who disbelieve in the possibility of AI because a machine following the rules of mechanical causation obviously can't produce the lofty phenomena of human consciousness.
    • I just reject this kind of thinking utterly; its based on a dualism that is very baked in to the culture but I say fuck it. As I said in Introduction to Inventive Minds
      • [Minsky's] big trick was to face squarely the mechanical nature of the human mind and not be alarmed by it. Indeed, he found it rather delightful and intriguing. This put him at odds with standard-issue humanists, which suited him just fine.