Random Thoughts Thread

[Ideofago]

do you want me to make a mostly unqualified essay on the subject? because i fucking will

[Comun]

Yes, we want.

[Ideofago]

Okay so this is a profoundly personal take by an overly arrogant 18 year old
you asked for this

The problem with talking about 'shitty' art is that you're taking a very deep discussion with roots in aestheticism and the collective of the history of art, something that is elaborated from concept upon concept; you go in and skip like 3 layers of discussion without properly structuring everything that came before it and is necessary to talk about it, and you just turn out with something quite bland and aimless because you never knew what the fuck you were doing from the beginning.

Contemporary art is currently trying to figure out what the fuck to do after the post modern. Post modern came after the modern, defining itself as the antithesis to the modern, and its many ideological connotations - the post WWI german idealism, and general european idealism, as a means of escape from the cruel and harsh realities of the war and its lasting effects on the continent. It sought to evade itself from social, cultural, political, and fundamentally subjective divides by searching the common ground to all of us, the objective truth that lay underneath everything.

This of course, as we now know it, was wrong, because there is no way to attain an objective with a human point of view. Post modernism does this to the extreme, as its only goal is to not be the modern. So we get things such as "Art has no definition", which is more a statement against the necessity to define and confine things, people, and concepts, than it is to mistify and envague the artistic.

How this relates to quality, is very simple. At the root of this divide between the modern and the post modern is the relationship between objective and subjective, the idea of universalism, common grounds, points of reference, and consensus.

The concept of quality in a social sense is profoundly rooted in public consensus, and universalism as the logical conclusion to such a frame of thought.

Yet, art is indulgent. It focuses on the inside flowing outward. We value the artist and his experiences, in his attempts to synthesize personal and intimate experiences and ideals into a meaningful work. This many times can completely go against the grain, and go against the public consensus. Thus, in a very simple way because my brain is toast and I am having a very hard time parsing this together, we come to the subjective.

Thus, the standstill as it remains:

The post modern argues for the erradication of the universal, as this attempt at universalism is a profoundly arrogant subjectivism. In turn however, by this extreme valoration of the subjective, it inhibits any common ground, and forgets one of the principal cores of art: whilst indulgent, it is not individual.

However, to simply go back to the modern is, quite frankly, fucking stupid. That's what the post modern was there for (and largely failed at): fixing the wrongs with the zealous idealism of the modern.

Therefore, any art installation that is still stuck in a post modern paradigm (many of them) will completely avoid any notion of quality, as this necessitates public consensus of some kind, and the post modern can't have none of that unsubjective bullcrap.

This is not as good as I would like but I would not bother were I to wait any longer to write this, and my head is getting toasted trying to write this down.

[Snow]

While I think the goal of postmodernism isn't really to eradicate the universal (rather, postmodernism in at least the parts of culture I'm informed on aims more to question existing paradigms and institutions and sometimes the outcome of that questioning can be retaining aspects rather than throwing the whole box out), I enjoyed reading your post and can't say my thoughts on the subject were nearly as elaborate at that age.

Talking about 'the definition and meaning of Art' is an inexhaustible topic and always fun to discuss with normal people but also something I've learned to fear in recent years with how many people act like Pollock came to their house and shot their mother to death personally.

[Dullahan]

Post modern came after the modern, defining itself as the antithesis to the modern, and its many ideological connotations - the post WWI german idealism, and general european idealism, as a means of escape from the cruel and harsh realities of the war and its lasting effects on the continent. It sought to evade itself from social, cultural, political, and fundamentally subjective divides by searching the common ground to all of us, the objective truth that lay underneath everything.

This of course, as we now know it, was wrong, because there is no way to attain an objective with a human point of view. Post modernism does this to the extreme, as its only goal is to not be the modern. So we get things such as "Art has no definition", which is more a statement against the necessity to define and confine things, people, and concepts, than it is to mistify and envague the artistic.

No. Almost everything you attribute to the "postmodern" is in fact true of the "modern" in reaction to the bourgeois high culture of 19th century Europe as consolidated after the failed revolutions of 1848. Against the Victorians in a word. "Modern" art movements such as the Futurists, Surrealists, Cubists, etc. - as well as Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Proust, Kafka, Musil, the paradigmatically "modern" writers - were certainly not trying to "evade" "subjective divides" in pursuit of a "common ground" or "objective truth". They were reactions against what the pursuit of "objective truth" - as manifested in the modern natural sciences - had done to human beings and human society in general: among other things producing the industrialised killing-fields of World War I and, in peacetime, an increasingly "alienated", massified social formation. "Postmodern" really is advertiser's talk. There is no hard discontinuity between modern and "postmodern." There are only increasingly protracted and decadent forms of modernism.

[Ideofago]

Post modern is just part of the modern anyways, as it still seeks to define itself by being its antithesis. I wouldn't disagree with putting it all into the same group.

Also, there definitely was some evasion of the subjective in design centers, specifically Bauhaus. The Gropius Bunch sought many things, such as their new typography, in order to fulfill their universalist world view. Unfortunately, I don't know enough to base my argument any further.

[Ideofago]

While I think the goal of postmodernism isn't really to eradicate the universal (rather, postmodernism in at least the parts of culture I'm informed on aims more to question existing paradigms and institutions and sometimes the outcome of that questioning can be retaining aspects rather than throwing the whole box out), I enjoyed reading your post and can't say my thoughts on the subject were nearly as elaborate at that age.

Eradicating the universal comes as a progression of questioning existing paradigms, as it questions existing paradigms in order to oppose the modern, and the modern paradigm as I know it is largelly universal. This seems to vary wildly among groups though, so it may be that the 20th century is a bit too diverse for such a wide ranging description.

[Deathhappens]

No. Almost everything you attribute to the "postmodern" is in fact true of the "modern" in reaction to the bourgeois high culture of 19th century Europe as consolidated after the failed revolutions of 1848. Against the Victorians in a word. "Modern" art movements such as the Futurists, Surrealists, Cubists, etc. - as well as Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Proust, Kafka, Musil, the paradigmatically "modern" writers - were certainly not trying to "evade" "subjective divides" in pursuit of a "common ground" or "objective truth". They were reactions against what the pursuit of "objective truth" - as manifested in the modern natural sciences - had done to human beings and human society in general: among other things producing the industrialised killing-fields of World War I and, in peacetime, an increasingly "alienated", massified social formation. "Postmodern" really is advertiser's talk. There is no hard discontinuity between modern and "postmodern." There are only increasingly protracted and decadent forms of modernism.

Art has always been about revolution
/tips beret

[Snow]

No it's about getting laid just ask da Vinci Bernini and FLW

[Ideofago]

get your brush wet and your dick will follow

[Five_X]

Very literally in the case of Renoir.

[Sesto]

alcohol

[Laserman]

[Mattias]

Browsing through a fanfic forum.
See a Fate/Naruto crossover.
First line of summary "Shiki Tohno wakes up in Konoha years after Arcueid's route as a child".
WHAT PART OF THAT IS FATE?!
aashsdvksjdn sadckjcjksckwlcsmd.

Also he's completely fine with the lines, sees them everywhere, no glasses, and isn't being slowly driven insane.

[Ideofago]

browsing through a fanfic forum

[Deathhappens]

Browsing through a fanfic forum.
See a Fate/Naruto crossover.
First line of summary "Shiki Tohno wakes up in Konoha years after Arcueid's route as a child".
WHAT PART OF THAT IS FATE?!
aashsdvksjdn sadckjcjksckwlcsmd.

Also he's completely fine with the lines, sees them everywhere, no glasses, and isn't being slowly driven insane.

That only sounds like a 6 on the cringe scale. I think all the Fate/Harry Potter crossovers my buddy used to send me may have broken my scale entirely, though.

[Five_X]

you're a magus killer now harry

[Deathhappens]

Emiya Hari

- - - Updated - - -

I bet I could find some of them if I dug up message logs old enough, but I don't think anyone else here needs their IQ rating dropped a couple points.

[Mattias]

I dunno, a good trash fire can be pretty mesmerizing some times. As long as it's grammatically fine, at least. Needing to spend time deciphering a sentence is a real buzzkill.

[LegalLoliLover]

I didn't realize that people actually think "appeal to numbers" is a legitimate means to win an argument: https://darksouls.fandom.com/wiki/Gr...00000014826430 Refreshing. I haven't seen that level of idiocy since high school. Witches who burn down the stupid peasants' villages as retaliation for the attempted execution did nothing wrong.