You mean like the way Lars claimed that dude's girlfriend as intellectual property? I guess he's not going to be earning any royalties from her evening with Lars. Poor old Lars, we all know how he ended up too - broke, destitute from unlicensed peer-to-peer mp3 sharing.

Unfortunately, maybe we just have more than enough fine art, particularly of the historical kind. It's always sitting there waiting to be accessed by anyone who isn't sufficiently distracted. Mountains of it. If it's undervalued, perhaps that's only because we have such easy access to multiple human lifespans worth of top quality content; we're desensitised to it.

But meanwhile, what's going on TODAY? Social media engagement algorithms encourage churn. Whoever can crank out the most content the fastest and keep it up relentlessly wins. Don't write an album, just release something crappy filmed on your phone every damn day forever and measure its worth in viewer numbers. You can't win by being better than great art but you can be faster, noisier and constantly distracting people with your presence, and that is what cuts through so that's what we see.

DaveA wrote: Sat Feb 05, 2022 2:33 pm Am finding it hard to believe that N.Y. quote is real.

Confirmed by Snopes, with the full context. If I were a bitcoin millionaire I'd like to get Clint Eastwood to recreate this story: Pegi nagging Neil to go and get some potatoes. Neil (Clint) narrows eyes, mutters and grumbles. Cut to Neil (Clint) driving down dirt track in his pickup, '"morning again in America' sticker on the back. Cut to Neil (Clint) coming into town. He sees a fading poster for Mondale on the side of a laundromat. He (Neil (Clint)) cackles, then curls his lip as he sees a tired woman with children in there. Next we watch him pushing a trolley away from the veg aisle. His casts his eye down to the bag he has just picked up. Surely not? The potatoes are from Mexico. More muttering, the barely audible suggestion of racial slur? He clutches the Regan '84 pin on his threadbare denim jacket for support, but pauses as he sees the other name there: 'Bush'. [ Casting: check whether Clint can convey cognitive dissonance ]

The 'handling his potatoes' scene can be as literal or metaphorical as Clint is comfortable with.

pldms wrote: Mon Feb 07, 2022 5:37 am

DaveA wrote: Sat Feb 05, 2022 2:33 pm Am finding it hard to believe that N.Y. quote is real.

Confirmed by Snopes, with the full context. If I were a bitcoin millionaire I'd like to get Clint Eastwood to recreate this story: Pegi nagging Neil to go and get some potatoes. Neil (Clint) narrows eyes, mutters and grumbles. Cut to Neil (Clint) driving down dirt track in his pickup, '"morning again in America' sticker on the back. Cut to Neil (Clint) coming into town. He sees a fading poster for Mondale on the side of a laundromat. He (Neil (Clint)) cackles, then curls his lip as he sees a tired woman with children in there. Next we watch him pushing a trolley away from the veg aisle. His casts his eye down to the bag he has just picked up. Surely not? The potatoes are from Mexico. More muttering, the barely audible suggestion of racial slur? He clutches the Regan '84 pin on his threadbare denim jacket for support, but pauses as he sees the other name there: 'Bush'. [ Casting: check whether Clint can convey cognitive dissonance ]

The 'handling his potatoes' scene can be as literal or metaphorical as Clint is comfortable with.

This is almost as good as Scharpling's Grown Ups 3 or Welzein's ROADHOUSE: PAIN STILL DON'T HURT, starring Guy Fieri scripts.

The best thing you can say about Joe Rogan is that he was the 8th most interesting character on News Radio.

Anthony Flack wrote: Unfortunately, maybe we just have more than enough fine art, particularly of the historical kind. It's always sitting there waiting to be accessed by anyone who isn't sufficiently distracted. Mountains of it. If it's undervalued, perhaps that's only because we have such easy access to multiple human lifespans worth of top quality content; we're desensitised to it.

I don't doubt this statement at all. One of the reasons I've gotten so obsessed with classical music over the past 20 years. Why do I feel like I need "contemporary" art? Is it this youthful need to feel relevance in one's place and time? To be part of an active community regardless of the qualitative aspects of what it produces, even if what that community produces is so completely derivative, i.e.: "Oh, great, a fourth generation of a band that's inspired by the bands that were inspired by Television and Wire. Like we don't have enough music that sounds like that filtered through a few different pedals and voices?" The ever tightening cycles of recent nostalgia and rejection of anything more than 30-40 years old has only driven me further into the past, to find appreciation in those things that have become timeless and obscure outside of the facade of intentional obscurity.

If that wasn't enough, but so much of what is contemporary art is just so absolutely fucking joyless. I'm talking about the pure unrestrained joy of something like a Mozart piano concerto or rondo allegro, Rosenthal/Offenbach's Gaite Parisienne, or a number from Oklahoma! Seth MacFarlane had an interesting quote to that effect of why he focused on big band and showtunes from the Great American Songbook rather than contemporary rock or pop music, and his response was also along the lines of none of it was as fun or joyful as what was produced then, and given the state of the world, why obsess on moods and music that don't offer that kind of escape.

But meanwhile, what's going on TODAY? Social media engagement algorithms encourage churn. Whoever can crank out the most content the fastest and keep it up relentlessly wins. Don't write an album, just release something crappy filmed on your phone every damn day forever and measure its worth in viewer numbers. You can't win by being better than great art but you can be faster, noisier and constantly distracting people with your presence, and that is what cuts through so that's what we see.

So long as our culture is being driven by the business of advertising and the low bar of people expecting to get something for seemingly nothing, I don't see any of this changing. When people pass of the risk that comes with paying or contributing to their own engagement and entertainment to others', it's no surprise that everything becomes a shit feast of quantity over quality. It'll be interesting to see how that evolves as the generations born into it either assimilate or reject it having cultivated an ennui from day one.

Geiginni wrote: Mon Feb 07, 2022 1:58 pmso much of what is contemporary art is just so absolutely fucking joyless.

Bah. I have yet to hear a single variation of any "Things were better when..." idea that doesn't amount to "I am incurious about the present."

Either your joy detector is broken, or you're looking in the wrong places.

I've been living in the past a lot lately too. Well, don't we all? Anybody who believes in the idea that something can have lasting value must believe in carrying the past with them. I've been finding myself in the company of dead people a lot more these days - somebody ought to. It all gets swept away though. Bands I still think of as current are a decade older than last I noticed.

Is there a place for art that isn't disposable in a life lived in the continuous present? But then everything is disposable, it's just a question of degree.

. . .

I've been saying this a lot lately, but people have not had an internet for very long and it's a big change to adjust to, socially. Civilisationally. We don't actually know very well what hooking everybody onto internet does to humans. And we've allowed these under-regulated tech companies to take it all over, just like the tech hippies warned we mustn't back in the 90s.

I'm also fond of comparing social media to a super-intelligence, because it seems to me that it operates like one. A self-organising neural network with individual humans as the neurons, deciding which information to discard and which to pass on. But thanks to the aforementioned under-regulated tech companies, it's a dysfunctional super-intelligent crackhead whose reward centres have been wired to reinforce destructive behaviour. Sadly, being super-intelligent only guarantees the ability to process huge quantities of information, it doesn't grant super-wisdom.

Christopher wrote: Mon Feb 07, 2022 3:46 pm

Geiginni wrote: Mon Feb 07, 2022 1:58 pmso much of what is contemporary art is just so absolutely fucking joyless.

Bah. I have yet to hear a single variation of any "Things were better when..." idea that doesn't amount to "I am incurious about the present."

Either your joy detector is broken, or you're looking in the wrong places.

I'm probably looking in the wrong places, or rather, stopped looking when my patience for such things had worn pretty thin.

Why go searching for Wilderness in Indiana or Illinois when it's pretty easy to find in Washington and Oregon? Yeah, there's a few thousand acres in the Shawanee, but there's literally millions of acres here.

This attitude has also carried over to music.

I guess I fail to see the advantage to being persistently obsessed with the current when the past has so much to offer as well.

Geiginni wrote: Mon Feb 07, 2022 4:01 pm
This attitude has also carried over to music.

I guess I fail to see the advantage to being persistently obsessed with the current when the past has so much to offer as well.

I'm going to out myself as both an optimist and a humanist here: the time something was made is not the most important detail to me, it's merely an interesting piece of trivia. The idea that human genius has expressed itself in so many musical forms over so many points in history, cultures, genres, locations, schools of thought is thrilling.

My present is an arbitrary point on a timeline and doesn't speak to the quality of what's happening on either side. What's interesting is philosophical, aesthetic and compositional connections that have points from now reaching into the past. The game of listening is being open to finding them. The challenge is engaging to discover them anew in mutated forms. I might find Ravel in Russian Circles? Can I hear The Carter family in Pavement?

Tom Wanderer wrote: Mon Feb 07, 2022 1:17 pm The best thing you can say about Joe Rogan is that he was the 8th most interesting character on News Radio.

Yeah, I think the writers got stuck with him and just let him do his schtick. Like all the great moron comedians, he smirks a lot on camera at how funny he thinks he’s being.