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me_irl @lemmy.world
irelephant [he/him]🍭 @lemm.ee

me_irl

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  • Only if you let them. I do all these things without regard to skill. Maybe surround yourself with more laid back people?

  • It's even worse when the point isn't even to get good at them, but rather to make money off of them.

  • I think I get the point they're making, but eeehhh? I don't think "art is something inherently human" and "you can (and maybe even should!) be improving your abilities in art" are in conflict with each other. Humans have been able to make art for as long as we've been human, but we've also had an implicit understanding of seeing two pieces of art and picking which ones we preferred in the moment. Capitalism didn't really change that, we've had masters and apprentices since antiquity.

    Couldn't we say that the desire to make better art and the anxiety that comes with examining your own progress just as easily be called a behaviour unique to humans?

    (Edit: writing that last part made me come up with the image of bees that have imposter syndrome about how they build their hives and I don't know how to feel about that)

    • Also just as an observation: monotony is boring and I think aversion to boredom is a big reason people seek different things (maybe even things that require more skill to perform). Who wants to dance the same dance their whole life?

      I feel like people in the past were as susceptible to being bored that we are -- maybe even more because there were a lot fewer things to actually do back then.

  • As someone who loves to sing and make music, as someone who loves to dance and to be crafty, and as someone who inherently sucks at it - especially the music part, I can't tell or hold a rhythm, let alone a note - this post really got me. I often feel like I am not allowed to sing or join or like I have to hide that I used to play guitar and write songs for hours when I was a teen and young adult. Because I was never good at it. Because the chords were just strummed. The chords didn't fit the melody in my head and I could not sing the melody as it was in my head. And I just suck at it. And still, it brought me so much joy. It was such a big part of my life. I loved it.

    I now sing songs to my daughter when we are in public. I pretend it is because she wants to hear them. It's a great alibi. (She often doesn't like my singing.) Sometimes she joins in. This is the best. There is no better sound in the world.

    I'm ok at writing. But even this - I am a biomedic, not a writer. I didn't study linguistics or literature or politics or journalism, I am absolutely not in the writing world. I can't write professionally, so why should I even write. There are tons of more talented people who actually learned how to write out there. I leaned out of the window and got a side gig while I was on mat leave and wrote for a blog 2-4 times a month for a year. It was the best. I was paid peanuts but these were the tastiest lil' peanuts I've ever devoured.

  • Before late capitalism forced most everyone to make their art more "commercial", there was this thing in modernity called symbolic capital, and in the artistic fields this brought the cons of competitive spirit, but a pro - in my view, at least - was enabling approaches to art which are more sophisticated, albeit requiring specialization also on the part of the reader (for the pleasure of "writerly" texts see Roland Barthes; for why many people want to passively consume elite art rather than participate in democratic art, "The Weak Universalism" by Boris Groys is some food for thought). More exactly, modern artists placed their bets on getting recognized by critics and historians for their efforts at innovating art without the pressure to always meet halfway the audience.

    Downsides included the possibility - in bourgeois capitalist societies, not so much in, say, Yugoslavia - to starve before receiving due recognition, being dependent on the critics' whims or agendas... and being dependent on there being an infrastructure for the art world, gatekeepers - which suffered from more or less systemic biases such as sexism, though sometimes sexually transgressive authors got away with upholding the idea that somehow art is never moral, but instead quintessentially aesthetic - and all... And, of course, in the background should still lie classical education of sorts, in the lack of which today some might end up believing they're reinventing the wheel or that it's nonconformist to be conformist, aka hip to be fash square...

    At least these are my (more than) two cents as a writer from Eastern Europe who witnessed the fall of the traditional literary system - which in other circumstances could have been enabled me to secure a modest but content existence through a stable job in one of their state-funded magazines - and read Pierre Bourdieu and Pascale Casanova to make some sense of all this. As a lower middle class person, I was privileged to have been supported by my parents to pursue literature for years without the pressure of making it on the job market - now I work almost 7 days out of 7, leaving me in no mood to read or write books... Alas, I was looking forward to UBI or negative income tax, but it seems like we have to fight a techno-feudal dystopia first.

66 comments