May. 31st, 2017

undeleterious: two sambal oelek chili paste jars filled with black and pink paper stars, in front of some animorphs books on a shelf (Default)
via http://ift.tt/2rSu3zD:
gotosweep:

bachelorbat:

gotosweep:

zombiegraves:

shadeddaxion:

goomba-oasis:

poison-liker:

gotosweep:

new ebbits! new site!

this is probably my favourite comic of all time jsyk

can someone explain this to me?

Sure thing! For convenience I’ll refer to the guy with his arms in his pockets as SG (shorter guy) and the one on the computer as TG (taller guy).

In the first panel, SG sees TG playing on the computer and is disappointed. SG puts a lot of value in the idea of “making things,” specifically “art,” and thinks TG is just wasting their time

So he asks them if they wouldn’t rather be “making something” instead of just playing games and listening to music, implying that TG isn’t doing anything worthwhile or creative with their time

But TG replies that “interpreting is generative,” meaning that even if they spend their time just doing fun stuff, the mere act of enjoying something is creating an experience and an interpretation. Talking about something, dancing to music or sharing a piece of art with your friends IS “making something,” and each of those can be worthwhile and artistic.

SG leaves, complaining he “can’t be an auteur of [interpretation].” Auteur is a movie term that refers to a filmmaker with artistic control and vision enough to be considered essentially the singular creator of the resulting work of art. Turns out, SG doesn’t just want to “make things,” he wants to make things he and others see as “important.” He wants to make art not for the sake of art, but for the sake of being recognized and praised for his art.

This comic really speaks to elitism within the artistic community, the idea that art needs to meet certain standards to be considered art. SG’s viewpoint is really traditionalist, that art need to be “approved” and validated in order to be considered “really art;” while TG recognizes that art can be as little as just talking about what you love.

TLDR: Art is for everyone, not just some sort of social “artistic elite.”

This is an interesting perspective that I’ve never considered before. I’m not sure I agree with it though. I agree that once art leaves the hands of it’s creator it’s free to be interpreted however the viewer sees fit, and sending said art to other people is helping to create an experience for them, and that all generates new ideas, but I think this conversation is a subtle difference between “creating” and “curating”. Museums are a traditional example of this. Museums create experiences for their patrons, but I wouldn’t consider the museum itself art. Maybe it’s designed well, that would be art. But I don’t agree that the museum itself is art just because it has organized art that other people created. I think that’s a broad over generalization of the term. It’s like calling a waiter a chef just because they physically served you the food. While their part might be generative in your taste experience and worthwhile, I wouldn’t call it artistic. This definition isn’t about artistic control, but rather categorization.

@zombiesgraves creating is curating! when you go to make anything, from an utterance to an opera, you are curating an expression: you are making a pastiche of elements of your lived experience. good luck drawing a single line or writing a single phrase that does not borrow from the cultural mileau. human beings are channels thru which art generates itself! when you’re reblogging an image or participating in an MMO you are still instrumentalizing yourself to the same collective force that produced the image or the game in the first place. you’re still doing the same basic thing, it’s just the vanity of our age that tells us it’s only a real object of art if we can sign our names on it and distribute it for profit. duchamp proved that with his urinal thing
and the waiter is not a chef any more than the museum curator is a painter, but the waiter and the curator are still engineering an aesthetic experience; they are still crafting a piece of art by their decisions

Clear delineation between related but distinctly separate concepts, like creating media and consuming media, is not a form of elitism. It’s a very useful distinction between separate things, like distinguishing between blue and purple or carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.

Clear delineation is definitely useful, but expecting that delineation to stand in for the essential nature of the concepts is total logocentric nonsense. An act of creation is always constituted by nested acts of consumption and vice versa. They are structurally interpenetrative. Of course observing the distinction serves us in making sense of the world, but only as long as we recognize the deeper ambivalent nature of either pole.
But what I was getting at above is that the conscious decision to separate those concepts and insist that only one of them is present – that judgment is always limited by the ego’s awareness. The other aspects of psyche, of which the ego is a mediating vehicle, could very well be engaged in generative processes while the ego-witness is only registering an activity which it judges to be “consumption.” Creation and consumption do not have a lightswitch relationship where one is halted and the other engaged.

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undeleterious: two sambal oelek chili paste jars filled with black and pink paper stars, in front of some animorphs books on a shelf (Default)
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