Modern "art"

[A Son of Liberty]

While I do not disagree that there are vast expanses that are empty, not used etc. I do not agree with the rest of what you imply. Instead of having that argument directly, is it a goal to have more population always ? Isn't it inherently better for every human being if there's more earth available per person ?

I'm sure at some point, there will be a diminishing return in terms of the number of humans on the planet, but we are nowhere near that number. Humanity benefits from more humans on the planet, because that means that there is more brain power alive (again, in the scenario in which we can sustain this expanding number of humans) on the planet to drive innovation. This is, frankly, inarguable. So, no, I completely disagree with the idea that the more earth per person is a better situation for humanity as a whole. I think that is an absurd postulation. If that were true, the best scenario for humanity would be if there were only one person on the planet, and that is CLEARLY not the correct assumption; while granting that the opposite - that there were the maximum number of people on the planet in a sustainable situation would be the ideal. Clearly there is a ideal maximum, and we are also nowhere near that ideal.

 

[ClaytonB]

The funniest part of the discussion on Wagner was a girl who angrily questioned the professor, "are we talking about Wag-ner or Vaug-ner?!"

One of those...

The professor really focused on Wagner, and that stood out to me. I have forgotten about the others that followed in his footsteps. Mahler comes to mind maybe?

Wagner is generally recognized as kind of the "watershed" composer between the high romantic era and the late-romantic/early-modern era. There is no one single thing you can point to in respect to his compositional techniques, but I like to think of it as he had figured out how to break the rules to any arbitrary degree he wanted, without the end result sounding like an obnoxious cacophony of noise. I think part of the motivation of the later "music-hating" modernism was the result of the fact that the "leading composers" in that era simply weren't on a par with Wagner and they had the composers' equivalent of peen-envy. They couldn't figure out how he did what he did, they couldn't figure out the "rules" he was following, so instead, they just trashed music itself and declared "there are no rules". Of course, there were many talented composers after Wagner who carried on the tradition of later-romantic era composition and extended it with the more "mathematical" modernist techniques you mentioned, as well as impressionism, jazz-classical fusion, and many more.

Enjoyers of Western music tradition may enjoy this documentary, bookmark for a rainy Saturday afternoon...

 

[osan]

Yes, First Presbyterian Church.

The old man was at "The Manor" rehab and nursing home.

Both on West Main in Freehold about a half a mile apart.

Rte 9 and 33 run in between them both.

My, how small the world.

 

[osan]

I'm sure at some point, there will be a diminishing return in terms of the number of humans on the planet...

I think we may have passed that point, but it is difficult to say. The world is angry and grasping, but is the population density a factor in it, or is it the atmosphere generated by the various cultures?

but we are nowhere near that number.

I cannot definitively say that you are mistaken, but neither can I say you are not. The question involves large non-linear systems, so an answer may evade us moving forward.

Humanity benefits from more humans on the planet,

Under conditions, yes. Under others, clearly not.

because that means that there is more brain power alive (again, in the scenario in which we can sustain this expanding number of humans) on the planet to drive innovation. This is, frankly, inarguable. So, no, I completely disagree with the idea that the more earth per person is a better situation for humanity as a whole. I think that is an absurd postulation. If that were true, the best scenario for humanity would be if there were only one person on the planet, and that is CLEARLY not the correct assumption; while granting that the opposite - that there were the maximum number of people on the planet in a sustainable situation would be the ideal. Clearly there is a ideal maximum, and we are also nowhere near that ideal.

Where, oh where, is the sweet spot?

 

[Anti Federalist]

Click through for all the pictures.


PUBIC ART

https://peachykeenan.substack.com/p/pubic-art

Contemporary Public Art Isn’t Just Bad; It’s Obscene

Peachy Keenan
Jan 15 2023

“Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts,” declared the famously hideous Serge Gainsbourg.

(snip)

To help erase the memory of our problematic public statuary, an array of new sculptures are going up outside every courthouse, outhouse, henhouse, and longhouse in America.

You can no longer stroll onto a university campus, approach a lonely windswept corporate plaza, or dodge unmedicated feces-smeared psychotics on your way into the subway without encountering a gleaming eyesore daring you not to laugh.

Whatever you do, do not roll your eyes at these sculptures! Facial recognition software is watching. Any derisive expressions are punishable with a fine or prison.

But if you’re a big city dweller in an advanced first-world nation, you are used to ignoring terrible art in public spaces.

(snip)

Richard Serra’s 1981 Tilted Arc was a 12-foot-tall, 120-foot-long, 15-ton steel slab in front of New York City’s Javitz Center. It bisected a giant plaza, thereby forcing overweight federal employees to walk all the way around it to get to work on time. Maybe it was originally intended as a government weight loss program.

It ended up causing such distress that the government tore it down in 1989. Serra sued the city claiming his free speech rights had been violated, and there was even a ludicrous trial.

Serra saw his work as “as a way to expose and criticize the surrounding public space, not to beautify it.” At least he was honest about his intentions. The New York Times art critic agreed with him, calling it “an awkward, bullying piece that may conceivably be the ugliest outdoor work of art in the city.”

Your visceral disgust, as Serra himself admits, is a feature of contemporary public art, not a bug.

The art wants you to hate it!

 

[ClaytonB]

Click through for all the pictures.

PUBIC ART

https://peachykeenan.substack.com/p/pubic-art

Contemporary Public Art Isn’t Just Bad; It’s Obscene

Peachy Keenan
Jan 15 2023

Just wait until we have sex robots standing around on the street-corners like hookers...

 

[Anti Federalist]

When you consider that the original show, and dialog and characters were all created on a shoestring budget by a bunch of chain smoking old white men, working in the Hanna Barbera sweatshops for peanuts, because they could not get on with Disney or Warner Brothers, it becomes shockingly clear how utterly useless woke millennials are.

With millions of dollars and a battalion of writers, this dog vomit is the best they can come up with, mostly because their own lives are so shallow and meaningless that "The Struggle" and nonstop preaching and "discussions" about it, is all that "animates" them, all they know, a bunch of redditards with expense accounts.

 

[Anti Federalist]

 

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/status/1677620757025751042

 

[Occam's Banana]

 

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/oldbooksguy/status/1696503039308526058

 

[Anti Federalist]

https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/status/1677620757025751042

And the crying sad part of this is that we've past the point where it can be fixed.

Our enemies will drag humanity into a 1000 year dark age, and nobody will lift a finger to stop them.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1697620809320370550

 

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/status/1708938529097593065

 

[Occam's Banana]

 

[Occam's Banana]

Much of "modern art" is not art - it's a nihilistically intentional mockery of the idea (and ideal) of art.

https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/status/1710040573535490102

 

[Occam's Banana]

Article:

Modern art was CIA 'weapon'
Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War
{22 October 1995}
​

---

https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/status/1719808831943799085
{Culture Critic @Culture_Crit | 01 November 2023}

Reminder that modern art was a CIA psy-op.

Former CIA officials came clean on this during the '90s, confirming that the agency used abstract art by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and others to promote American culture during the Cold War.

The intent was to portray America as a bastion of intellectual and creative freedom. This was to rebut Soviet assertions that the U.S. was "culturally barren", and to contrast the cultural confinement of the Soviet empire, where artists had been restricted to painting Soviet realism since the 1930s.

Abstract Expressionism was seen as the most free and extreme form of artistic expression - the antithesis of Soviet rigidity. Modern art therefore became a weapon in the cultural war against communism.

Beginning in the 1950s, the CIA secretly funded a group called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, through which it funnelled money to international art shows, literary magazines and operated dozens of offices around the globe - all with the explicit goal of promoting American Abstract Expressionism.

These efforts, coined operation "long leash", were meant to demonstrate to disaffected Soviets and European intellectuals that American painters were free to invent, and offend; unlike under tyranny, where "artists are made the slaves and tools of the state", as Eisenhower once said.

Paradoxically, at the time the works of Pollock and de Kooning were not even broadly popular with the American public, and earlier, more open attempts to promote new American art by the State Department had been widely mocked. Even President Truman famously said, 'If that's art, I'm a Hottentot'', when visiting an exhibit purchased by the DOS.

Because of this, and because it would have been impossible to attain support for such a project through Congress, the CIA's covert operation was necessary to push Abstract Expressionism in secret.

Do you think this had a meaningful impact establishing abstract art as a legitimate movement, or would it have flourished anyway on its own merits?

 

[ClaytonB]

 

[Sonny Tufts]

The fact that some people think that works resembling a house painter's drop cloth or a kindergartener's attempt at fingerpainting are great art and are willing to spend millions to acquire them verifies the following observations:

"There's a sucker born every minute." (Anonymous, although usually attributed to P.T. Barnum)

"A fool and his money are soon parted." (Dr. John Bridges, 1587)

 

[Valli6]

breakin my heart

Look at this €1.8 million fountain they just shit onto Vienna... VIENNA!
https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/st...nnas-brand-new-19-million-public-art-travesty

"FAREWELL TO VIENNA" Anton Karas 1949
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVTiX9yfpyo


(Why youtube videos sometimes not show up in posts? Any solution?)

 

[acptulsa]

(Why youtube videos sometimes not show up in posts? Any solution?)

It's there. Like tweets, sometimes they take a moment to pop up--or a refresh.