Rec | EITHER/OR

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“There was something abstract and gentle about the experience of being ignored—a feeling of being spared, a known impossibility of anything happening—that was consonant with my understanding of love.” “The work of art she was creating was her own character: how she acted, how she was, how other people saw her. From this perspective, the aesthetic wasn't really the opposite of the ethical. The way Isabel wanted to be, and act, and seem, was generous and brave. Her main goal was to avoid meanness, jealousy, and cruelty—not because God said they weren't permitted, but because who even wanted to be like that?”

@johnluke

Feb 11, 2024

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Buying in

There's a thing that I notice at art museums sometimes. Someone wearing a slightly annoyed expression will be speeding through the exhibit like they are going down a long to do list. Or I'll be playing a board game with a group and there will be some guy with a strained face looking like they'd rather be anywhere else. Maybe another time we're leaving a movie and they start to complain about how it 'wasn't realistic', you get the picture. I swear to God it makes me want to pulpify their face. I'm not saying that you need to like every piece of art or that you should feel bad for not liking a movie, but, goddamn, at least give it a fucking second. Closing yourself off to The New, being automatically opposed to earnestness when it appears, is one of the most damaging defense mechanisms I can think of. It is, in turn, also one of the best ways to maximize your misery. The defense mechanism that is cynicism, turns its users into parasites of the Social; they are sold the idea (a lie) that damaging and denigrating <<something>> allows one to become independent of its power structure. On the contrary, just as a leech is the most dependent on its host, cynics are those that are most dependent on the power structures in our culture. I really want to emphasize the difference between criticism and cynicism, because I am in no way saying that we should not criticize bad or damaging art, but to successfully criticize something means to first buy in, to really allow yourself to be taken by a piece, to examine it as it comes. Buying in as a term (even one so bathed in capitalist sebum) is the right one in this case because to buy in requires one to make a sacrifice. You cannot experience art without opening yourself to the possibility that it will do damage to you. To fully allow yourself to be moved by a piece of art is to allow yourself to be cut. But inside that cut is what it means to be human. I think the single best way to combat cynicism is an unceasing curiosity of the world and the people in it. The normal and common of this world is absolutely fantasmatic if you take a moment to examine it; we see the world through have fluid filled orbs made of meat for fucks sake. The fact that there is anything at all, the fact that you and I exist for even a second is an absolutely unbelievable mind fuck, and to be unimpressed by any and everything doesn’t make you special or better than anyone, it just leaves you on a road to the pit of despair and leaves me really bummed out for the rest of the night.

@green_thumb_in_my_bum

Sep 20, 2024

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Process and experience

So vulnerable, I have to be sincere. European and American art galleries historically are not only promoters of great art, they are creators of markets. That may be where you could shift focus. Your worth is that you are young, eating rat, living a life of passion, filth, messiness, body horror (per my comment on such) unique and unknown to those with money. They crave you, not for your art. That's worthless to them. The art, as photographs per Sontag in my other rec, is simply a receipt that they owned a piece of your lifestyle for a moment. No one who will buy your art will likely give a fuck about your art. Stop seeking those. Find the Glengarry Glen Ross customers seeking life, escape from drudgery, a need to prove something to themselves. Let your art be that for them. Enough bs theory, now for implementation. You won't sell your art, but you can sell the frustration, bloodsweattears, dedication, sacrifice that drips from your post. You can do so by simultaneously reminding yourself you are not creating ART but CREATING art. Your work and worth is not on a canvas. It's not the art. It's in you, the artist.

@indianjones

May 11, 2024

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Realizing that your not always an ARTISTS target audience

i feel like internet culture has conditioned me to feel like I always have to have an opinion on something. And as a result I’m always judging an artist work as good or bad based on my own individual taste. But it’s absolutely bonkers to think that I’m the target audience for everything an artist that I like makes. Sometime, the song or the painting or the movie ect. Is not for me, and that’s fine. It doesn’t mean what they are producing is bad, it simply means it’s not resonating with me. And thinking this way allows me to respect an artists decision to experiment with their art form a bit more. Because I can only imagine how constricting it must be to feel pressure to create just for people approval and consumption. Maybe sometime the artists just wants to put out a funny little song that makes them happy. And sure, I may not get it and it may not be something I want to listen to, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad, just that it’s not for me, and that’s okay.