Thank you, I've been bothered by this for years, both in art and general social media "discourse". The race towards purity, the competition to be more extreme and perfect, is just so tiring. Human life is a mess of compromises, living with yourself, and the rest of the disaster we call our fellow persons. We can have ideals we don't live up to. We can make art that terrifies. We can make art we don't agree with but articulates a thought, feeling, or idea we think is interesting. We can make art that expresses our traumas in stark, painful, disgusting relief for anyone that's curious enough to look. Expression is not perfect, and human language is fundamentally a failed approximation of conveying our imaginations. To make someone empathize with what you feel, with that thought scratching at your brain, you just might have to go insanely over the top to get it across. Django Unchained I think is one of the most accessible examples: Is it over the top to the point of absurdity? Yes. Is it deeply fictional and absurd in its liberties with that fictionalizing of history? Yes. BUT, does it convey the visceral dehumanizing violence of American chattel slavery? Yeah I'd say it manages to get some of the vibe across! It's still a self-indulgent Tarantino schlockfest, but I kinda respect it for matching Tarantino's self-indulgence to a topic that needs something absurd and insane to smack the modern consumer over the skull with.
It's really frustrating when people don't realize an unreliable narrator, antagonistic character, or even a protagonist can be written as a criticism of the type of thinking that character epitomizes.
I'm a recovering political conservative, and the main reason I walked away from that is the moral purity applied to media, the whole notion that movies/tv shows/books/songs/etc. Have to be "family friendly" or it shouldn't exist at all and the creator thereof must be a criminal. Now the progressive side of the aisle has started displaying the same censorious behavior, but substitute "socially aware" for "family friendly" . And this has alienated me from the progressive side of the aisle.I have no plans to return to being conservative, rest assured. But I do feel alienated as a creator. I write supernatural horror, and I honestly feel like either side of the aisle has me I under a microscope each, and I hate it.
What are you writing about that has you feeling under a microscope? Is this actual feedback you've received for your work or are you anxious of the feedback/criticism you might receive?
I suspect they are saying they feel politically homeless, nowhere to go. I enjoy the anti-woke, non-PC lefty spaces like Sublation Media and This Is Revolution. For what it's worth.
I just want to say, while I've been missing these videos for personal life reasons (something I don't intend to be permanent given my interest in the topics), I am extremely, extremely happy to see you making these kinds of videos. I think it's a fairly scary time in the US and in the world as a whole, and there's a general aversion to "talking politics" from a lot of people, especially people who make videos on the internet. I found your channel through your Webfiction videos, and I know that sticking with that style would have been, if not "easier" by any means, more consistent and better for "content creation" purposes. I think the fact you've been posting these videos shows you care, and seeing that people care right now is important. I want you to keep making what ***you*** want to make. Current events, Webfiction, historical analysis, whatever. You make good things. Please keep doing it as long as you like.
I'll piggyback on this and say I've been seeing all the notifications for the 3D Workers Island vids and am just too batshit insane with work and having just relocated that I'm saving them all up for a week off I have coming up. So there's some delayed views out there for those, we're just being ground up by The Man, man!
@@JakAttack12345 Ha I may be in the same boat. I got hit by a double whammy of my dog dying and Trump winning that made depressing political content pretty difficult to watch lately, but I'm trying to keep these videos in mind for days when I'm feeling like I can handle it.
From an artistic standpoint I agree, and from a moral and sociological standpoint I *tend* to agree for the most part. From my perspective as a trans person, writer and voice actor I'll have to throw in though that much of the pressure from progressive and leftist artists is a direct response to the growing threat of right wing bigots and the normalization of hate speech. Many people who are lgbt (not necessarily part of the community but part of this spectrum), and many other minority groups are *directly* threatened by political ideologies that want to culturally (and sometimes physically) erase the existance of them/us. People crying "woke" whenever there's a black person or lesbian woman featured in a game or movie is the tip of the iceberg - it quickly gets dark and pretty frightening. So many in these circles become hyper aware for any and all signs of bigotry, which can obviously lead to mistrust. As conservative thought leaders use dog whistles and pervert and appropriate terms and phrases to gain ground over their "enemies" there's less ground to stand on and feel ... save. I don't believe art must always be a "safe space" - not at all. But I do think that people have to feel secure and stable enough to engage with a challenging piece of art. You have to be in the right headspace for complex truths and deep discussions about morality. And from my experience this feeling of security and stability has been eroded away so much that many simply want a safe space without fear of constant attacks. It's a real shame. It's the same with "dark" or "edgy" humour. Looking back at trauma and dark times, laughing about it can be a very healing experience ... but healing can only commence once you can actually sit down and rest - once you're not constantly attacked by the right and instrumentalized by opportunists. I don't subscribe to the idea of the "culture war", but I have to say it most certainly feels like a war at times; and in war art always gets reduced to propaganda.
As a trans gal, I definitely agree with this perspective. It wasn’t something I was thinking about nearly enough for how much it affects me. There’s sooo many things I just cannot engage with because of hate speech, and not just because it’s trans-related.
@@LouisECoyote Yeah from my experience hanging out and working with Trans people they tend to be extremely sensitive to how specifically things are worded, more than most people, to the point I have to try to remove casual use of some habitual words and phrases from my vocabulary to avoid hurting them. Things I could say to a cis woman with no issue might be deeply hurtful to a Trans woman. And though that can be difficult to navigate, I recommend lots of sincere apologies when a misstep is made, I totally understand that sensitivity comes from living in a society that is constantly treating them with intense disrespect, forcing them to be hyper alert for signs of disrespect.
12:47 This is really deep. I think many artists recently have been relegated into creating the type of art that fans tell them to create. Which is unfortunate because it doesn’t allow for artist to tell the stories that they want. You tend to see this in things like pro wrestling where fan participation can affect how a story gets told or rather which performer gets placed in a specific place on the show. Sometimes you can see where a story is going and if the fans hate it, it can in affect put a premature end to that story.
One of the things that really endeared me to Homestuck was that, despite the extreme level of fan control over the direction early on, the creator very often trolled and subverted every single little thing the fans asked for, and it really kept the work honest and his own, while still engaging the community. I felt it was a great balance that's difficult to replicate.
I fully agree, I am what people would call a "woke" type. With the beliefs and unconventional pronouns to go with it. what else is true about me, A Clockwork Orange is my all time favorite film. Watching/enjoying fictional content is not an endorsement of the activities in that content. Now there is some nuance when it comes to creatives who engage in moral questionable or even evil behavior. But that's more of a separation of art and artist issue.
I'm very much like you and still deeply love and appreciate Fight Club. I think people misunderstand some of its messages, but if I'm being honest with myself, I'd probably still like it despite that.
I remember a post on Twitter saying something like, ''if you meet a guy who likes Walter White and Alex DeLarge, RUN!'' I definitely think some people don't understand those characters are evil and support them without question but those characters are compelling and well written nonetheless.
As someone that lived through the 80's, your word "cartoonish" to describe satanic panic described it perfectly for what it felt like to watch happening around me..super weird...I was age 8 in 1981 and thought the Reagans were robots
(Making a comment before finishing) I think it would have been better for that person to say "art CAN console" rather than "art is made to console" art is a lot of things. It's a message. A vision brought from mind to media. And that idea can be anything, mean anything and be for any purpose. Theres plenty of art I turn my nose up at, things that I can't accept morally despite agreeing that art shouldn't be judged w a strictly moral lense. But it is still art, whether I like it or not. Just really shitty art, lol. A lot of the art I consume is comforting to me, a fantasy to ignore my problems for a little while. Like most. People just get caught up in it, unable to release themself from it. And any other form of media is a threat to their fantasy. Or something like that. Also I think a lot of this moral panic is stemming from this echochamber social media is creating. I see it happening a LOT on tiktok, personally. Someone says something. It spreads. It becomes law for many. ESPECIALLY young people that refuse to have their own opinion. It is very concerning.
I've gotten pretty sick of social media myself. There's a lot I agree with when it comes to politics and the world in general but seeing the same ideas copy and pasted constantly is draining and uninspiring.
i think the 'logic' this particular malaise runs on is 'you are what you eat'- under consumerism art is framed as content, as something you *consume*. and so people jump to that idea, that if you 'consume' certain things you will become bad and conversely, that one could become a good person only by 'consuming' good things. Thus people are lured in by the attractive lie that they could ensure their morality only though 'content consumption'. I suppose thats not a new falsehood- its basically the same as people thinking they can ensure their goodness by subscribing to a specific religion or ideology. But in this case it seems to have, impossibly, become even more anti-intellectual.
Media-illiterate audiences think "X does/thinks bad things → X must be bad guy → but X is in good guy role → Writer must endorse X's actions/thoughts → Writer must be bad guy" This makes many creators hesitant to write 'problematic' protagonists who start with unlikable character flaws and grow over the course of the story through character development.
@EvdogMusic The more charitable way to frame their argument is that it "normalizes" problematic behavior, even if that wasn't the writer's intentions. But even this framing is incredibly shallow.
@@EvdogMusic I write satire and though we have a lot of discussion during writing about how to make sure we're punching up and getting the right messages across, ultimately we just have to accept that plenty of people will read our intentions wrong .
That's how I feel too, a lot of modern media just doesn't have teeth anymore. And when an intellectual property does decide to explore those unattractive ideas, they either butcher it so badly that it looks like a caricature or cover it so superficially it felt like a check box.
me: "thinking of art critically is required payment in order to find enjoyment beyound the technical aspect. Its better to redirect when at all possible, push back only when necessary, and only disallow when the art and artist have direct harmful effects to the community." also me: "the enlightened gooner is freed from any chains"
I always want to comment on your videos, but often feel I'm not learned enough to make insightful observations or add anything to the discussion. But please accept my experience: when I see a video of yours on my feed I feel glad. When you're not on my feed for a bit, and I check the channel and see an unexpected new upload, I feel double glad. Maybe I need to work on improving my algorithm, but I feel like you're the only youtube creator dicussing what you do. I've had plenty of surface level plot analysis videos, now I'm hungry for more of ~this~. Yeah, okay, I often have to look up economy/political jargon to grasp certain concepts. But it feels good to be learning stuff again dude!
The culture of the internet has become so prude and the complete opposite of what the ethos of the internet was built up in mind with. I'm not saying the "wild west" browsing days of the 2000's was perfect or completely ideal, but the freedom to express yourself without having illiterate attention seekers smashing their iphone screens to tell you you're an awful person for creating art that isn't posh is jarring. Back then, you could draw crude, obscene and violent art without being labeled as a crude, dangerous, evil individual. The discretion to separate the art from the artists was almost a given by the viewer, but now it's become the complete opposite. Viewers are now expecting the artists to cater to them and are reprimanded socially for not doing so.
I'm not saying your wrong, but the world was VERY different back then and so was the access for artist to even exist. For the most part, the freedom of art hasnt changed. it's where we learn about art and artist that have changed. Art back then required money upfront, either though mainstream channels or self hosting costs. Today, it costs nothing as long as it's "ad friendly". Today, the art and artist are the same package, and access to one means you get access to the other. Buying a CD from someone back in '01 didn't give you access to their Bandcamp/insta/Twitter for example. You had to make some sort of work to find the artist again in the future. Likewise, we didn't have a single social media hub like today. The artist could of been the next aldof but not having a social media presence makes a huge difference in both visibility and audience reaction. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the longing for the old Internet forgets that we didn't have the same access to running water and trash pickup like today's internet has.
Thanks for putting into words why I disagree with so many leftists/"progressives" when it comes to the topic of art in general and challenging works in particular.
I've seen a lot of criticism of the game YIIK and the character Semi Pak who drew parallels to Elisa Lam. After reading the creator's explanation on the topic and seeing the story it seemed clear that it was done to criticize how people online romanticize and obsess over mysterious deaths and missing people. There was also a harsh criticism on the main character being a self insert among other things. I'm not calling the game a masterpiece but it's obvious people go out of their way to bash something for petty reasons to show either how smart or moral they are. It sucks when critique becomes so normalized you can't escape or question it without backlash.
totally agree. If your sesne of morality is SO fragile it cant even LOOK at anything different, thats pathetic and so shallow lol - like are you person, or a robot?
It's just as much the fault of the artists of the now as it is the consumers everything that is created MUST cater to audiences and MUST be sellable fuck that, I make art and I don't sell it and I never ever will
I think some folks unknowingly seek the certainty of a holistic "good" in the stories they consume in much the same way addicts seek dopamine fixes. In a way, it really is escapism at its most unhealthiest. I've since learned not to idolize the artist behind the work, but I've also learned that no single peace of art will deliver a perfect message that envisions "goodness" and aiming to pressure creators - and criticism- under that scope is a lost cause. Don't get me wrong, some of my favorite films are unashamedly bold and delivers powerful messages that resonate to today's political climate. But it's funny seeing look-alikes chase the same message to an obtuse extent; often trying too hard to achieve in-offensive messages to 'everyone'. I think experiencing discomfort in our stories is a sorely missed technique; Putting readers/audiences beside themselves just long enough to reflect, if only briefly, is both terrifying and delightful.
Unrelated, do you happen to have a bandcamp or something that I can purchase? If not, I suppose I can take the time to figure out patreon and make a donation, eitherway. Your petscop investigations OST has been so memorable that I can't help but associate that music with the ARG itself. I frequently return to it while working.
People criticize romance stories that depict relationships that would be unhealthy in real life based on this idea that women who enjoy them will be hypnotized into letting their partners abuse them, which is not only misogynistic for assuming that women are stupid, but it ignores the fact that people deserve education about what constitutes a unhealthy relationships and assault outside the context of fiction. Fiction shouldn't be held responsible for that kind of education because it functions better as a cathartic outlet, even if that means it will make its audience uncomfortable sometimes
I loved Contrapoint's video defending Twilight and making a similar point. I have no interest in the franchise but I grew to better understand the appeal of the stories.
Yes, please give recent examples! This feels like the RUclips equivalent of a subtweet or vaguepost, so please let us know what inspired you to post this!
When did "protagonist" come to mean "someone who is morally pure and good"? It's interesting how easily this kind of performative moralizing is easily co-opted and absorbed by the culture industry. I had to point this out recently to the insufferables in the comments section who objected to the Kipling poem used in the "28 Years Later" movie trailer. My comment was deleted. What a suprise.
For some reason I get into a conversation with a lot of people on line about the platonic art triangle. What this is is Plato came up with the idea that there are three things that all art must have. Those things are truth, goodness and beauty. Plato also believes that if art has any one of these traits then it must necessarily have all three. I hate this idea with a passion. OP didn't exactly touch on this idea in his video but I feel like "platonic art triangle bad" is a good summary of their point which I also agree with. The platonic art triangle completely removes the subjectivity from art and tries to make it into an objective field which in my mind already is a bad idea but I also find it self refuting. The platonic triangle shaves off genres of art that a minority of people would like that go against the main stream and calls those genres bad. This gets rid of all the subversive components of art which largely gets rid of its value in general. Also I myself would ask if the platonic art triangle itself is art and according to its own definition it is not because to me it is inherently ugly. Therefore by its own definition it is neither good nor true.
It seems like this comes from audiences having the same expectations for art created by an artist versus a product created by a corporation. When you're accustomed to getting everything pleasant and nothing upsetting or challenging from the products you consume, and you believe that art is meant to be a product, you're not going to be happy when a work "blindsides" you with something unpleasant. The power of marketing has blotted out the hard skills of media analysis with reactionary behaviors that terminate any possibility of deeper thought. I'm practicing recognizing and disengaging with these people when talking about my own work, or art I care about. There is no convincing them that it's their own choice to both read something as an allegory for real-life immorality, and to ascribe that immorality to the artist. They don't actually care if the art is "morally good" - they're just chasing the dopamine of "winning" by hurling accusations from what they see as an unassailable high ground.
Our approach to art is TOO UTILITARIAN. You’d love “Against Interpretation” by Susan Sontag. She talks about how most art critics analyze art from a moralistic, utilitarian lens, always extracting some kind of meaning from art in order to gauge its moral value which, in their eyes, affects its aesthetic value. What’s missing in art criticism is formalism and an emphasis on how art impacts one emotionally.
To your point about progressivism mostly being about tidying up society, I’d call that reformism. A lot of leftists in the US still cling onto authoritarianism and puritanism and the Protestant Work Ethic. Most believe in working within the system, hoping that it’ll wither away, instead of straight up attempting to destroy it. Spontaneity is replaced with mundane bureaucracy, and labor is placed above personal freedom. There are few leftists/anarchists in this country who think outside of the prison of authoritarianism and “purpose”. For a lot of moralists, art can only be beautiful if it is ethically or morally righteous, a belief known as moderate moralism, which stems from religion.
Yeah. Just a note to say I'm playing the video game '1000xResist' (about 3 hours in), and, so far, it strikes me as the very kind of art that challenges and provokes established 'norms' in artistic efforts. Its form helps, being a video game whose poetry and visuals are wonderfully esoteric. But I'm not here to write a review. I do agree that David Foster Wallace's prognosis on art's ability to console was inadequate. Sadly, it was much in concert with Mark Fisher's almost impossible if laudable attempt to mitigate capitalism's systemic enforcement of mental distress upon the working-class, the disenfranchised and the poor. Personally, I think something of Derrida's proposition of aporia helps to address both progressive and reactionary works of art. There is always a structural break in logic somewhere in even the best efforts of expression, and it is in identifying those breaks we open a gate to further expression that both undermines and celebrates new forms. Not that I'm saying 'logic' is the keystone of great (or bad) art. But that to open a gate is to invite a perspective that suggests endless possibilities. Sorry, it's sort of an ill informed take on my part, but I'm still working on it. Enjoy your work by the way. Thanks.
I feel like the reason why people hyper intensively read morality as a proxy for whether a movie is good or bad. Might have started with creators using movies as a platform to discuss morality, with later creators misinterpreting that as criticism of the morality, and running with it.
I agree with you but i think the root of it is the commercialization of art. Art as a corporate venture has to sell, and therefore must appeal to as many people as possible. Therefore more and more editors abd executives will rush to sand down anything cinrroversial. The moral purists online can be annoying, even sometimes harmful, byt they are a symptom of a society that caters to the largest market and have become maladjusted to challenging art. The internet or the 2000s abd early 10s was more open to provacative art if anything though, so maybe this is just a phase we will get through too, a reaction to the openess of art we enjoyed just a decade or so ago.
I would rather take a film like Megalopolis with wildly contradictory but obviously sincerely heartfelt themes from one of our greatest living filmmakers over a film that's technically saying all the right things politically but in turn isn't saying anything genuine or sincere. Art made by real people is contradictory and messy because people are messy and contradictory. Is art made to fit a brand of Woke any different from a film made to fit a brand of Marketability? Not saying Woke in the right wing brain damage sense. I kinda detest the meme culture on Letterboxd. An ideal vessel for meaningful film commentary, reduced to yet another social media cesspool, but kinda sorta focused on films. I try my best with my film reviews on there not to do that, but I'm also not very good at it yet. No training, you know. Just doing the best I can, as we all do. Might post a review later of Roger Corman's Frankenstein Unbound, which I'm watching right now as I write this. Fun movie let down by a no-effort home video release. A no menu, no bonus features, no nothing DVD in Anno Domini 2013 - cringe. It's just cringe. Anyway I digress. Good video as ever, David.
I'm divided on whether this opinion is insightful or stupid. On one hand, I dislike Gramscian hegemony politics, and have to agree with the first two sections that the binary way people check things for compliance with Gramscian-tinted movements is overly restrictive. On the other hand? If philosophy could be considered art, then I must as a matter of free expression say the framework you're using to explain and critique all this seems unbelievably ineffective. You are probably a member of the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition (abbreviated "Existentialism" or "ES"). This tradition started in the early days of lowercase-e existentialism with people like Sartre, before winding its way through structuralism, poststructuralism, Foucauldianism, post-Marxism, Lacanianism and schizoanalysis (rather ironic when those are opponents), and a great number of seemingly unrelated philosophies that really kind of encompass most of French philosophy. It only notably excludes Liberalism. Here's the problem with that: one of Existentialism's typical central principles is entirely self-contradictory. Existentialism often bases itself on the concept of freedom for individuals from so-called totalizing groups or totalizing formations, but it is impossible to both have a principle or idea to express and not end up with totalization. Any idea that somebody wants anyone else to accept is in effect totalizing. If you got everyone to accept that art was about free expression, you'd have put them all into a totalizing formation, because it is impossible to practically distinguish people asserting the freedom to not believe art is about free expression from people asserting the freedom to free expression. Everyone believing anything is an individual, no matter how much philosophers and artists want to believe only they are individuals, and this means any belief whatsoever can hijack Existentialism to argue it is okay for anyone to believe just anything up to and including burning Existentialist books and purging everywhere of Existentialists. On the flip side, somebody who is explicitly not an Existentialist might realize that all social connections and interactions have requirements. Every single time someone wants to interact with someone else, social connections themselves censor people. Imagine I was entirely mean and brutal in this comment - you might have the urge to delete it, because no comment is just an expression, and all comments are social interactions with either audience members or creators. The act of moderating comments is an act of keeping social groups (Social Systems or SGS) intact. In most Social Systems, people must either accept the consensus requirements of all the contained individuals or leave the Social System; no amount of talking about free speech or free expression takes away this inherent ability to enforce etiquette and norms. Gramscianism has taken this non-partisan observation and hypothesized that society can weaponize Social Systems to get rid of fascism: if every graph of people fills up with people who believe in a particular form of inclusivity there is no room for fascists to build up social graphs into a toxic backwater that prohibits everything except fascism. I have problems with this model because in real life, Tories and fascists always go retreat to their own graphs and build up their own toxic backwaters anyway, and those can easily get very big. But at the same time, I do feel that what Gramscians say is partially correct, and a lot of counterpart things Existentialists say are much less correct. Gramscians are correct in that every Social System performs moderation and it is impossible to not do it. It is impossible to integrate Tories and fascists into an Existentialist Social System and let them express just anything freely if all they want to do is be mean and be completely socially incompatible with the people there. The nature of social groups and being human prevents certain kinds of free expression and freedom from ever existing in practice, because the ability for any individual to arbitrarily break social connections is the actual everyday regulator of freedom. Artists and art critics seem to almost never understand this. Artists are not exempt from society. Every single art creator exists as part of society. This means that for art to actually affect anyone, it must conform to the social standards or rules of at least one person, or nobody looks at it. Every single time artists try to escape totalization and some group of people telling them what to do, they risk their sentiment being seen by absolutely nobody and challenging nothing. The more you assert your own freedom, the more you risk breaking your bonds with other people because your will has overpowered theirs in the sphere of interaction with you, and in effect you have totalized them. Freedom within society is an illusion. Every single act of releasing art is an act of compromise where you have to compromise on what you will put out in order for it to ever be accepted by others as interesting, insightful, or subversive. The process is not optional, nor is that an ideologically-partisan statement; arbitrary individual connections must form for society to exist. The only real question is, how can we unify people together into a society without society messily devolving into separate rival societies (Social-Philosophical Systems or SPS) as soon as there are Gramscians, Existentialists, and Stalin followers? That's not an easy or trivial question; that may take another century to answer. I personally think we must accept the reality of Social-Philosophical Systems: a group of Tories exists, a group of Trotskyists exists, a group of Gramscians exists, a generic group of inclusive-history anti-racists exists, and we have to deal with them as material entities as if we were talking to material individuals. People might all learn to coexist and tolerate free expression once we all accept that a society is a federation of small ideological societies (SPSs) doing diplomacy and that each Social-Philosophical System will only let in expressions from other Social-Philosophical Systems when they match its own local rules. It might also be that some of the Social-Philosophical Systems we have today wouldn't exist by then; maybe there would be Trotskyism and Gramscianism but no Toryism, maybe there would be Gramscianism but no Trotskyism or Stalin Thought. Maybe each country would be one Social-Philosophical System and the countries would link together, or maybe many tiny SPSs would federate into countries, but that distinction doesn't matter. What matters is that stuffy insufferable individualist artists have to tolerate Gramscians and agree to coexist with them if they don't want Tories and fascists to decide that individual freedom and free expression mean the freedom to reject the right of Gramscians to exist and to express that rejecting, banning, or destroying Gramscians is a good idea without being censored. It is inevitable in an almost strictly deterministic way that if heterogeneous Social-Philosophical Systems do not band together to preserve expressions of progressive morality rather than asserting that limited instances of it are unacceptably totalizing, Gramscians will be banned and eliminated by the spontaneous assembling of large Social-Philosophical Systems that consider Gramscians having freedom a limitation on freedom. Any large Social-Philosophical System including these Tory ones or a large Gramscian one can ban whatever open-minded challenging pure art-philosophy expression it likes. This fact is material, not ideologically-partisan. You are never guaranteed the right to both say whatever you want and be relevant or noticed or not crushed under the forces of history. If you want to express just-anything, then you must ally yourself with a Social-Philosophical System that happens to tolerate and defend that specific kind of just-anything, which must come from the set of Social-Philosophical Systems that either exists or is possible. The more I hear about artists, art criticism, and art philosophy, the more I can't stand any of them and feel like they all have their heads up their asses. I'm sorry, I know that's a rude thing to say. But I am really frustrated and done with the whole way people have been thinking about art for the past two centuries. Individuals don't have the right to defy physics, and because of this, they don't have the inherent right to successfully influence society as individuals without studying and understanding society and the social physics of sorts that it runs on.
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but I think you’re over intellectualizing what was intended to be a fairly straightforward argument. You’re inferring a much more specific philosophical argument than what I’m actually presenting here. It seems like you’re projecting this existentialist structuralist framework onto me, which is a distraction from the central point. I’m not laying out a grand unified theory of everything; I’m critiquing the way art has historically been approached through reductive, binary moral categories. My argument is cultural and pragmatic, and frankly you seem to value esotericism for its own sake. If anything, this comment feels like a strawman designed to rebut a very specific philosophical position I’m not even invoking. But for the hell of it, let me entertain what it is you're really arguing here. First, you seem to be begging the question when it comes the way we use the word freedom. Freedom doesn’t mean the absence of all constraints-humans are inherently social beings, and we negotiate freedom within constraints all the time. Also, you’re conflating "totalizing" with "influencing," which leads you to some fairly bizarre conclusions. Simply having an influence on someone’s perspective isn’t the same as imposing a totalizing framework. Totalization is about erasing all difference, subsuming individuals into a monolithic system. Influencing someone, or even provoking discomfort, doesn’t strip them of agency per se; it invites them to grapple with something on their own terms. By your logic, any act of communication could be considered totalizing because it inevitably shapes perception, and I think we both know that’s reductive.
I'm sympathetic with what I take to be your intentions, but I'm afraid this is a very poor argument. Throughout the video, you are again and again vague and ambiguous, so it's very hard to figure out exactly what you're trying to say. For the first half of the video you focus solely on progressivism, but the bounds of your claims about it remain unclear. You criticize two quotations from Jane Addams and David Foster Wallace, but you don't provide enough evidence to say for certain whether or not they actually, consistently believed the things you attribute to them. Did they explicitly attack all forms of art that did not fulfill the positive moral function they advocated? I have no idea, and I'm not sure you do either. Instead you apparently just assume that that's what they meant. But is it possible that art sometimes _does_ have a function of moral reform, without that necessarily negating its other qualities? You never address the issue. When you do talk about what you think art is for, your words are not very consistent with one another. But you do seem to leave open the possibility that art can have a positive social function, that it can challenge fixed and unexamined ideas and thus contribute to social improvement. Is that really so far from the progressivism you attacked earlier in the video? You discuss the conservative approach to art by focusing solely on the satanic panic, as if that's when conservative attitudes towards art first came into existence. But surely you do know that art, and philosophies of art, existed before the twentieth century. Why don't you mention them? Why doesn't it occur to you that the relationship between art and morals has been a topic of reflection since at least Plato and Aristotle? Why are you unable to acknowledge that the moral role of art was taken for granted for most of history? The fact that art before the twentieth century usually had an explicit moral function is surely significant, isn't it? Finally, I am unable to figure out exactly what inspired this rant. You seem to have a problem with certain moralistic and progressive responses to art on social media, but you don't provide any specifics. So who knows what you're really upset about. Strangely, you don't mention any current far-right attacks on art, or the fascist philosophy of art that is currently seeing a resurgence in popularity. Do you approve of them? It doesn't seem likely, but you don't say. In any case, if you're upset about progressives on social media, I would just say there are a few things to keep in mind: 1. A large number of these people are children. 2. A large number of these people are completely uneducated. 3. Social media algorithms are designed to actively promote rage and stupidity. 4. Very few of these people have read Jane Addams, or even heard of her. 5. The assumption that art must have a positive moral message is almost universal in human history; it takes experience and education to grow beyond it. In short, these opinions are often not worth taking seriously.
This sort of concern trolling vis a vis my apparent inability to sufficiently historicize strikes me as pedantic. You seem to be suggesting that because I chose not to explain the history of moral perspectives on art going back to Plato--a feat that would require several hours as opposed to 30 minutes--this somehow negates my basic point, which by the way, you fail to acknowledge much less refute despite the fact that it is emphasized throughout the video. So do you have a listening problem or are you being purposefully obtuse?
gotta say, as one of your fans, the first 4 minutes is kind of infuriating so far since I don't have a clear example of what you mean and, at this point, you could either be saying something banal or disgusting. like, did you mean "don't be upset about protagonists who do bad things"??? like is that it? I'm so confused Because I'm kind of hearing some dog whistles here, dog
@@NightmareMasterclass Okay, sick. Yeah, I'm actually writing a book with a character who fought in the civil war. He's, uh, as racist as a person would normally be from 1840-1880s. I want to touch on that later in the book, but I did have it brought up in the first chapter when he gets isekai'd to reverse America
Could you provide an example of the "Woke Mob" in effect? I'm asking because "woke" is a nebulous word that means something different for each person that uses it.
Thank you, I've been bothered by this for years, both in art and general social media "discourse". The race towards purity, the competition to be more extreme and perfect, is just so tiring. Human life is a mess of compromises, living with yourself, and the rest of the disaster we call our fellow persons. We can have ideals we don't live up to. We can make art that terrifies. We can make art we don't agree with but articulates a thought, feeling, or idea we think is interesting. We can make art that expresses our traumas in stark, painful, disgusting relief for anyone that's curious enough to look.
Expression is not perfect, and human language is fundamentally a failed approximation of conveying our imaginations. To make someone empathize with what you feel, with that thought scratching at your brain, you just might have to go insanely over the top to get it across.
Django Unchained I think is one of the most accessible examples: Is it over the top to the point of absurdity? Yes. Is it deeply fictional and absurd in its liberties with that fictionalizing of history? Yes. BUT, does it convey the visceral dehumanizing violence of American chattel slavery? Yeah I'd say it manages to get some of the vibe across! It's still a self-indulgent Tarantino schlockfest, but I kinda respect it for matching Tarantino's self-indulgence to a topic that needs something absurd and insane to smack the modern consumer over the skull with.
It's really frustrating when people don't realize an unreliable narrator, antagonistic character, or even a protagonist can be written as a criticism of the type of thinking that character epitomizes.
Reminds me of "People are more concerned with doing nothing wrong than doing something right."
I'm a recovering political conservative, and the main reason I walked away from that is the moral purity applied to media, the whole notion that movies/tv shows/books/songs/etc. Have to be "family friendly" or it shouldn't exist at all and the creator thereof must be a criminal. Now the progressive side of the aisle has started displaying the same censorious behavior, but substitute "socially aware" for "family friendly" . And this has alienated me from the progressive side of the aisle.I have no plans to return to being conservative, rest assured. But I do feel alienated as a creator. I write supernatural horror, and I honestly feel like either side of the aisle has me I under a microscope each, and I hate it.
Very true and well put. Neither side is capable of looking into a mirror and seeing how utterly hypocritical they are.
I assure you that the freaky leftie queers are on your side with this. The one with buckwild fixations and kinks making genuinely transgressive art.
What are you writing about that has you feeling under a microscope? Is this actual feedback you've received for your work or are you anxious of the feedback/criticism you might receive?
I suspect they are saying they feel politically homeless, nowhere to go.
I enjoy the anti-woke, non-PC lefty spaces like Sublation Media and This Is Revolution. For what it's worth.
Seeing depth and complexity around you just means you have depth and complexity within you. So take a breather, you're smart for getting this far.
I just want to say, while I've been missing these videos for personal life reasons (something I don't intend to be permanent given my interest in the topics), I am extremely, extremely happy to see you making these kinds of videos. I think it's a fairly scary time in the US and in the world as a whole, and there's a general aversion to "talking politics" from a lot of people, especially people who make videos on the internet.
I found your channel through your Webfiction videos, and I know that sticking with that style would have been, if not "easier" by any means, more consistent and better for "content creation" purposes. I think the fact you've been posting these videos shows you care, and seeing that people care right now is important.
I want you to keep making what ***you*** want to make. Current events, Webfiction, historical analysis, whatever. You make good things. Please keep doing it as long as you like.
I'll piggyback on this and say I've been seeing all the notifications for the 3D Workers Island vids and am just too batshit insane with work and having just relocated that I'm saving them all up for a week off I have coming up. So there's some delayed views out there for those, we're just being ground up by The Man, man!
@@JakAttack12345 Ha I may be in the same boat. I got hit by a double whammy of my dog dying and Trump winning that made depressing political content pretty difficult to watch lately, but I'm trying to keep these videos in mind for days when I'm feeling like I can handle it.
From an artistic standpoint I agree, and from a moral and sociological standpoint I *tend* to agree for the most part.
From my perspective as a trans person, writer and voice actor I'll have to throw in though that much of the pressure from progressive and leftist artists is a direct response to the growing threat of right wing bigots and the normalization of hate speech. Many people who are lgbt (not necessarily part of the community but part of this spectrum), and many other minority groups are *directly* threatened by political ideologies that want to culturally (and sometimes physically) erase the existance of them/us.
People crying "woke" whenever there's a black person or lesbian woman featured in a game or movie is the tip of the iceberg - it quickly gets dark and pretty frightening.
So many in these circles become hyper aware for any and all signs of bigotry, which can obviously lead to mistrust. As conservative thought leaders use dog whistles and pervert and appropriate terms and phrases to gain ground over their "enemies" there's less ground to stand on and feel ... save.
I don't believe art must always be a "safe space" - not at all. But I do think that people have to feel secure and stable enough to engage with a challenging piece of art. You have to be in the right headspace for complex truths and deep discussions about morality. And from my experience this feeling of security and stability has been eroded away so much that many simply want a safe space without fear of constant attacks.
It's a real shame. It's the same with "dark" or "edgy" humour. Looking back at trauma and dark times, laughing about it can be a very healing experience ... but healing can only commence once you can actually sit down and rest - once you're not constantly attacked by the right and instrumentalized by opportunists. I don't subscribe to the idea of the "culture war", but I have to say it most certainly feels like a war at times; and in war art always gets reduced to propaganda.
As a trans gal, I definitely agree with this perspective. It wasn’t something I was thinking about nearly enough for how much it affects me. There’s sooo many things I just cannot engage with because of hate speech, and not just because it’s trans-related.
@@LouisECoyote Yeah from my experience hanging out and working with Trans people they tend to be extremely sensitive to how specifically things are worded, more than most people, to the point I have to try to remove casual use of some habitual words and phrases from my vocabulary to avoid hurting them. Things I could say to a cis woman with no issue might be deeply hurtful to a Trans woman. And though that can be difficult to navigate, I recommend lots of sincere apologies when a misstep is made, I totally understand that sensitivity comes from living in a society that is constantly treating them with intense disrespect, forcing them to be hyper alert for signs of disrespect.
12:47 This is really deep. I think many artists recently have been relegated into creating the type of art that fans tell them to create. Which is unfortunate because it doesn’t allow for artist to tell the stories that they want. You tend to see this in things like pro wrestling where fan participation can affect how a story gets told or rather which performer gets placed in a specific place on the show. Sometimes you can see where a story is going and if the fans hate it, it can in affect put a premature end to that story.
Ah, the sequel trilogy effect
One of the things that really endeared me to Homestuck was that, despite the extreme level of fan control over the direction early on, the creator very often trolled and subverted every single little thing the fans asked for, and it really kept the work honest and his own, while still engaging the community. I felt it was a great balance that's difficult to replicate.
@@adammaher403 I was thinking more of Lex Luger’s failed WWF main event push in the 90s. But yeah, the whole sequel thing was just a hot mess.
I fully agree, I am what people would call a "woke" type. With the beliefs and unconventional pronouns to go with it.
what else is true about me, A Clockwork Orange is my all time favorite film.
Watching/enjoying fictional content is not an endorsement of the activities in that content.
Now there is some nuance when it comes to creatives who engage in moral questionable or even evil behavior. But that's more of a separation of art and artist issue.
I'm very much like you and still deeply love and appreciate Fight Club. I think people misunderstand some of its messages, but if I'm being honest with myself, I'd probably still like it despite that.
I remember a post on Twitter saying something like, ''if you meet a guy who likes Walter White and Alex DeLarge, RUN!'' I definitely think some people don't understand those characters are evil and support them without question but those characters are compelling and well written nonetheless.
@@JohnVance People don't realize Fight Club was written by a flamboyantly gay man.
As someone that lived through the 80's, your word "cartoonish" to describe satanic panic described it perfectly for what it felt like to watch happening around me..super weird...I was age 8 in 1981 and thought the Reagans were robots
(Making a comment before finishing) I think it would have been better for that person to say "art CAN console" rather than "art is made to console" art is a lot of things. It's a message. A vision brought from mind to media. And that idea can be anything, mean anything and be for any purpose.
Theres plenty of art I turn my nose up at, things that I can't accept morally despite agreeing that art shouldn't be judged w a strictly moral lense. But it is still art, whether I like it or not. Just really shitty art, lol.
A lot of the art I consume is comforting to me, a fantasy to ignore my problems for a little while. Like most.
People just get caught up in it, unable to release themself from it. And any other form of media is a threat to their fantasy.
Or something like that.
Also I think a lot of this moral panic is stemming from this echochamber social media is creating. I see it happening a LOT on tiktok, personally. Someone says something. It spreads. It becomes law for many. ESPECIALLY young people that refuse to have their own opinion. It is very concerning.
I've gotten pretty sick of social media myself. There's a lot I agree with when it comes to politics and the world in general but seeing the same ideas copy and pasted constantly is draining and uninspiring.
i think the 'logic' this particular malaise runs on is 'you are what you eat'- under consumerism art is framed as content, as something you *consume*. and so people jump to that idea, that if you 'consume' certain things you will become bad and conversely, that one could become a good person only by 'consuming' good things. Thus people are lured in by the attractive lie that they could ensure their morality only though 'content consumption'. I suppose thats not a new falsehood- its basically the same as people thinking they can ensure their goodness by subscribing to a specific religion or ideology. But in this case it seems to have, impossibly, become even more anti-intellectual.
Media-illiterate audiences think "X does/thinks bad things → X must be bad guy → but X is in good guy role → Writer must endorse X's actions/thoughts → Writer must be bad guy"
This makes many creators hesitant to write 'problematic' protagonists who start with unlikable character flaws and grow over the course of the story through character development.
@EvdogMusic The more charitable way to frame their argument is that it "normalizes" problematic behavior, even if that wasn't the writer's intentions. But even this framing is incredibly shallow.
Yes, this is it. It's baby-brained stuff.
@@EvdogMusic I write satire and though we have a lot of discussion during writing about how to make sure we're punching up and getting the right messages across, ultimately we just have to accept that plenty of people will read our intentions wrong .
That's how I feel too, a lot of modern media just doesn't have teeth anymore. And when an intellectual property does decide to explore those unattractive ideas, they either butcher it so badly that it looks like a caricature or cover it so superficially it felt like a check box.
"Good art persists in its mesiness, and its contradictions..." Mauler has entered chat.
me: "thinking of art critically is required payment in order to find enjoyment beyound the technical aspect. Its better to redirect when at all possible, push back only when necessary, and only disallow when the art and artist have direct harmful effects to the community."
also me: "the enlightened gooner is freed from any chains"
I always want to comment on your videos, but often feel I'm not learned enough to make insightful observations or add anything to the discussion. But please accept my experience: when I see a video of yours on my feed I feel glad. When you're not on my feed for a bit, and I check the channel and see an unexpected new upload, I feel double glad. Maybe I need to work on improving my algorithm, but I feel like you're the only youtube creator dicussing what you do. I've had plenty of surface level plot analysis videos, now I'm hungry for more of ~this~. Yeah, okay, I often have to look up economy/political jargon to grasp certain concepts. But it feels good to be learning stuff again dude!
The culture of the internet has become so prude and the complete opposite of what the ethos of the internet was built up in mind with. I'm not saying the "wild west" browsing days of the 2000's was perfect or completely ideal, but the freedom to express yourself without having illiterate attention seekers smashing their iphone screens to tell you you're an awful person for creating art that isn't posh is jarring. Back then, you could draw crude, obscene and violent art without being labeled as a crude, dangerous, evil individual. The discretion to separate the art from the artists was almost a given by the viewer, but now it's become the complete opposite. Viewers are now expecting the artists to cater to them and are reprimanded socially for not doing so.
I'm not saying your wrong, but the world was VERY different back then and so was the access for artist to even exist.
For the most part, the freedom of art hasnt changed. it's where we learn about art and artist that have changed. Art back then required money upfront, either though mainstream channels or self hosting costs. Today, it costs nothing as long as it's "ad friendly". Today, the art and artist are the same package, and access to one means you get access to the other. Buying a CD from someone back in '01 didn't give you access to their Bandcamp/insta/Twitter for example. You had to make some sort of work to find the artist again in the future. Likewise, we didn't have a single social media hub like today. The artist could of been the next aldof but not having a social media presence makes a huge difference in both visibility and audience reaction.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the longing for the old Internet forgets that we didn't have the same access to running water and trash pickup like today's internet has.
i am enjoying these short venting sessions
youve been cooking with these lately
I'm thinking of the game "Mouthwashing"
Being a Mouthwashing fan on Tumblr is like being in the media literacy trenches
Twitter too 😔
wut. I've only ever seen unequivocal praise for that game.
@@dillon1037same honestly
@@dillon1037 I meant when it comes to fandoms, the creator had tweeted not to harass artists for their fan works.
Funny that soviet realism tried to control art when ppl praise the animation from that country fir being experimental.
Thanks for putting into words why I disagree with so many leftists/"progressives" when it comes to the topic of art in general and challenging works in particular.
I've seen a lot of criticism of the game YIIK and the character Semi Pak who drew parallels to Elisa Lam. After reading the creator's explanation on the topic and seeing the story it seemed clear that it was done to criticize how people online romanticize and obsess over mysterious deaths and missing people. There was also a harsh criticism on the main character being a self insert among other things. I'm not calling the game a masterpiece but it's obvious people go out of their way to bash something for petty reasons to show either how smart or moral they are. It sucks when critique becomes so normalized you can't escape or question it without backlash.
totally agree. If your sesne of morality is SO fragile it cant even LOOK at anything different, thats pathetic and so shallow lol - like are you person, or a robot?
It's just as much the fault of the artists of the now as it is the consumers
everything that is created MUST cater to audiences and MUST be sellable
fuck that, I make art and I don't sell it and I never ever will
I think some folks unknowingly seek the certainty of a holistic "good" in the stories they consume in much the same way addicts seek dopamine fixes. In a way, it really is escapism at its most unhealthiest.
I've since learned not to idolize the artist behind the work, but I've also learned that no single peace of art will deliver a perfect message that envisions "goodness" and aiming to pressure creators - and criticism- under that scope is a lost cause.
Don't get me wrong, some of my favorite films are unashamedly bold and delivers powerful messages that resonate to today's political climate. But it's funny seeing look-alikes chase the same message to an obtuse extent; often trying too hard to achieve in-offensive messages to 'everyone'.
I think experiencing discomfort in our stories is a sorely missed technique; Putting readers/audiences beside themselves just long enough to reflect, if only briefly, is both terrifying and delightful.
Unrelated, do you happen to have a bandcamp or something that I can purchase? If not, I suppose I can take the time to figure out patreon and make a donation, eitherway.
Your petscop investigations OST has been so memorable that I can't help but associate that music with the ARG itself. I frequently return to it while working.
Yep!
nightmaremasterclass.bandcamp.com/
People criticize romance stories that depict relationships that would be unhealthy in real life based on this idea that women who enjoy them will be hypnotized into letting their partners abuse them, which is not only misogynistic for assuming that women are stupid, but it ignores the fact that people deserve education about what constitutes a unhealthy relationships and assault outside the context of fiction. Fiction shouldn't be held responsible for that kind of education because it functions better as a cathartic outlet, even if that means it will make its audience uncomfortable sometimes
I loved Contrapoint's video defending Twilight and making a similar point. I have no interest in the franchise but I grew to better understand the appeal of the stories.
What are some recent examples of this type of engagement with media?
Yes, please give recent examples! This feels like the RUclips equivalent of a subtweet or vaguepost, so please let us know what inspired you to post this!
When did "protagonist" come to mean "someone who is morally pure and good"?
It's interesting how easily this kind of performative moralizing is easily co-opted and absorbed by the culture industry.
I had to point this out recently to the insufferables in the comments section who objected to the Kipling poem used in the "28 Years Later" movie trailer.
My comment was deleted. What a suprise.
For some reason I get into a conversation with a lot of people on line about the platonic art triangle. What this is is Plato came up with the idea that there are three things that all art must have. Those things are truth, goodness and beauty. Plato also believes that if art has any one of these traits then it must necessarily have all three. I hate this idea with a passion. OP didn't exactly touch on this idea in his video but I feel like "platonic art triangle bad" is a good summary of their point which I also agree with.
The platonic art triangle completely removes the subjectivity from art and tries to make it into an objective field which in my mind already is a bad idea but I also find it self refuting. The platonic triangle shaves off genres of art that a minority of people would like that go against the main stream and calls those genres bad. This gets rid of all the subversive components of art which largely gets rid of its value in general.
Also I myself would ask if the platonic art triangle itself is art and according to its own definition it is not because to me it is inherently ugly. Therefore by its own definition it is neither good nor true.
It seems like this comes from audiences having the same expectations for art created by an artist versus a product created by a corporation. When you're accustomed to getting everything pleasant and nothing upsetting or challenging from the products you consume, and you believe that art is meant to be a product, you're not going to be happy when a work "blindsides" you with something unpleasant. The power of marketing has blotted out the hard skills of media analysis with reactionary behaviors that terminate any possibility of deeper thought.
I'm practicing recognizing and disengaging with these people when talking about my own work, or art I care about. There is no convincing them that it's their own choice to both read something as an allegory for real-life immorality, and to ascribe that immorality to the artist. They don't actually care if the art is "morally good" - they're just chasing the dopamine of "winning" by hurling accusations from what they see as an unassailable high ground.
Our approach to art is TOO UTILITARIAN. You’d love “Against Interpretation” by Susan Sontag. She talks about how most art critics analyze art from a moralistic, utilitarian lens, always extracting some kind of meaning from art in order to gauge its moral value which, in their eyes, affects its aesthetic value. What’s missing in art criticism is formalism and an emphasis on how art impacts one emotionally.
To your point about progressivism mostly being about tidying up society, I’d call that reformism. A lot of leftists in the US still cling onto authoritarianism and puritanism and the Protestant Work Ethic. Most believe in working within the system, hoping that it’ll wither away, instead of straight up attempting to destroy it. Spontaneity is replaced with mundane bureaucracy, and labor is placed above personal freedom. There are few leftists/anarchists in this country who think outside of the prison of authoritarianism and “purpose”. For a lot of moralists, art can only be beautiful if it is ethically or morally righteous, a belief known as moderate moralism, which stems from religion.
I think people's issue is the inability to realize that they can like things while also criticizing aspects of it they disagree with or find harmful.
Me trying to enjoy the Hellaverse but Twitter telling me that I can't because impurities. 🙄
"Moral purity is killing art" title had me thinking this was about the ceo getting got by Luigi
I haven't heard anyone speak this sanely since the 90s.
Thank you for making this. This is excellent and I totally totally agree.
I hate that prager u is putting advertisements on this video
what's your letterboxd, if you don't mind sharing?
DeSade was right about everything.
Yeah. Just a note to say I'm playing the video game '1000xResist' (about 3 hours in), and, so far, it strikes me as the very kind of art that challenges and provokes established 'norms' in artistic efforts. Its form helps, being a video game whose poetry and visuals are wonderfully esoteric. But I'm not here to write a review. I do agree that David Foster Wallace's prognosis on art's ability to console was inadequate. Sadly, it was much in concert with Mark Fisher's almost impossible if laudable attempt to mitigate capitalism's systemic enforcement of mental distress upon the working-class, the disenfranchised and the poor. Personally, I think something of Derrida's proposition of aporia helps to address both progressive and reactionary works of art. There is always a structural break in logic somewhere in even the best efforts of expression, and it is in identifying those breaks we open a gate to further expression that both undermines and celebrates new forms. Not that I'm saying 'logic' is the keystone of great (or bad) art. But that to open a gate is to invite a perspective that suggests endless possibilities. Sorry, it's sort of an ill informed take on my part, but I'm still working on it. Enjoy your work by the way. Thanks.
Sent me down a Taylorism rabbit hole of all things
I feel like the reason why people hyper intensively read morality as a proxy for whether a movie is good or bad. Might have started with creators using movies as a platform to discuss morality, with later creators misinterpreting that as criticism of the morality, and running with it.
This was great!
I agree with you but i think the root of it is the commercialization of art. Art as a corporate venture has to sell, and therefore must appeal to as many people as possible. Therefore more and more editors abd executives will rush to sand down anything cinrroversial. The moral purists online can be annoying, even sometimes harmful, byt they are a symptom of a society that caters to the largest market and have become maladjusted to challenging art. The internet or the 2000s abd early 10s was more open to provacative art if anything though, so maybe this is just a phase we will get through too, a reaction to the openess of art we enjoyed just a decade or so ago.
My dude, it wasn't the "progressives" that have made a list of how woke games are and won't play any game that's "too woke"
@ErryKostala Tu quoque!
I would rather take a film like Megalopolis with wildly contradictory but obviously sincerely heartfelt themes from one of our greatest living filmmakers over a film that's technically saying all the right things politically but in turn isn't saying anything genuine or sincere.
Art made by real people is contradictory and messy because people are messy and contradictory. Is art made to fit a brand of Woke any different from a film made to fit a brand of Marketability? Not saying Woke in the right wing brain damage sense.
I kinda detest the meme culture on Letterboxd. An ideal vessel for meaningful film commentary, reduced to yet another social media cesspool, but kinda sorta focused on films. I try my best with my film reviews on there not to do that, but I'm also not very good at it yet. No training, you know. Just doing the best I can, as we all do. Might post a review later of Roger Corman's Frankenstein Unbound, which I'm watching right now as I write this. Fun movie let down by a no-effort home video release. A no menu, no bonus features, no nothing DVD in Anno Domini 2013 - cringe. It's just cringe. Anyway I digress. Good video as ever, David.
The real Nightmare Masterclass was film criticism all along....
I'm just being silly
love the vids, begging you to stop using the webcam mic
Mmm delicious cooking 🌱🌱
I'm divided on whether this opinion is insightful or stupid.
On one hand, I dislike Gramscian hegemony politics, and have to agree with the first two sections that the binary way people check things for compliance with Gramscian-tinted movements is overly restrictive.
On the other hand? If philosophy could be considered art, then I must as a matter of free expression say the framework you're using to explain and critique all this seems unbelievably ineffective.
You are probably a member of the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition (abbreviated "Existentialism" or "ES"). This tradition started in the early days of lowercase-e existentialism with people like Sartre, before winding its way through structuralism, poststructuralism, Foucauldianism, post-Marxism, Lacanianism and schizoanalysis (rather ironic when those are opponents), and a great number of seemingly unrelated philosophies that really kind of encompass most of French philosophy. It only notably excludes Liberalism.
Here's the problem with that: one of Existentialism's typical central principles is entirely self-contradictory. Existentialism often bases itself on the concept of freedom for individuals from so-called totalizing groups or totalizing formations, but it is impossible to both have a principle or idea to express and not end up with totalization. Any idea that somebody wants anyone else to accept is in effect totalizing. If you got everyone to accept that art was about free expression, you'd have put them all into a totalizing formation, because it is impossible to practically distinguish people asserting the freedom to not believe art is about free expression from people asserting the freedom to free expression. Everyone believing anything is an individual, no matter how much philosophers and artists want to believe only they are individuals, and this means any belief whatsoever can hijack Existentialism to argue it is okay for anyone to believe just anything up to and including burning Existentialist books and purging everywhere of Existentialists.
On the flip side, somebody who is explicitly not an Existentialist might realize that all social connections and interactions have requirements. Every single time someone wants to interact with someone else, social connections themselves censor people. Imagine I was entirely mean and brutal in this comment - you might have the urge to delete it, because no comment is just an expression, and all comments are social interactions with either audience members or creators. The act of moderating comments is an act of keeping social groups (Social Systems or SGS) intact. In most Social Systems, people must either accept the consensus requirements of all the contained individuals or leave the Social System; no amount of talking about free speech or free expression takes away this inherent ability to enforce etiquette and norms.
Gramscianism has taken this non-partisan observation and hypothesized that society can weaponize Social Systems to get rid of fascism: if every graph of people fills up with people who believe in a particular form of inclusivity there is no room for fascists to build up social graphs into a toxic backwater that prohibits everything except fascism. I have problems with this model because in real life, Tories and fascists always go retreat to their own graphs and build up their own toxic backwaters anyway, and those can easily get very big. But at the same time, I do feel that what Gramscians say is partially correct, and a lot of counterpart things Existentialists say are much less correct. Gramscians are correct in that every Social System performs moderation and it is impossible to not do it. It is impossible to integrate Tories and fascists into an Existentialist Social System and let them express just anything freely if all they want to do is be mean and be completely socially incompatible with the people there. The nature of social groups and being human prevents certain kinds of free expression and freedom from ever existing in practice, because the ability for any individual to arbitrarily break social connections is the actual everyday regulator of freedom.
Artists and art critics seem to almost never understand this. Artists are not exempt from society. Every single art creator exists as part of society. This means that for art to actually affect anyone, it must conform to the social standards or rules of at least one person, or nobody looks at it. Every single time artists try to escape totalization and some group of people telling them what to do, they risk their sentiment being seen by absolutely nobody and challenging nothing. The more you assert your own freedom, the more you risk breaking your bonds with other people because your will has overpowered theirs in the sphere of interaction with you, and in effect you have totalized them. Freedom within society is an illusion. Every single act of releasing art is an act of compromise where you have to compromise on what you will put out in order for it to ever be accepted by others as interesting, insightful, or subversive. The process is not optional, nor is that an ideologically-partisan statement; arbitrary individual connections must form for society to exist. The only real question is, how can we unify people together into a society without society messily devolving into separate rival societies (Social-Philosophical Systems or SPS) as soon as there are Gramscians, Existentialists, and Stalin followers? That's not an easy or trivial question; that may take another century to answer.
I personally think we must accept the reality of Social-Philosophical Systems: a group of Tories exists, a group of Trotskyists exists, a group of Gramscians exists, a generic group of inclusive-history anti-racists exists, and we have to deal with them as material entities as if we were talking to material individuals. People might all learn to coexist and tolerate free expression once we all accept that a society is a federation of small ideological societies (SPSs) doing diplomacy and that each Social-Philosophical System will only let in expressions from other Social-Philosophical Systems when they match its own local rules. It might also be that some of the Social-Philosophical Systems we have today wouldn't exist by then; maybe there would be Trotskyism and Gramscianism but no Toryism, maybe there would be Gramscianism but no Trotskyism or Stalin Thought. Maybe each country would be one Social-Philosophical System and the countries would link together, or maybe many tiny SPSs would federate into countries, but that distinction doesn't matter.
What matters is that stuffy insufferable individualist artists have to tolerate Gramscians and agree to coexist with them if they don't want Tories and fascists to decide that individual freedom and free expression mean the freedom to reject the right of Gramscians to exist and to express that rejecting, banning, or destroying Gramscians is a good idea without being censored. It is inevitable in an almost strictly deterministic way that if heterogeneous Social-Philosophical Systems do not band together to preserve expressions of progressive morality rather than asserting that limited instances of it are unacceptably totalizing, Gramscians will be banned and eliminated by the spontaneous assembling of large Social-Philosophical Systems that consider Gramscians having freedom a limitation on freedom. Any large Social-Philosophical System including these Tory ones or a large Gramscian one can ban whatever open-minded challenging pure art-philosophy expression it likes. This fact is material, not ideologically-partisan. You are never guaranteed the right to both say whatever you want and be relevant or noticed or not crushed under the forces of history. If you want to express just-anything, then you must ally yourself with a Social-Philosophical System that happens to tolerate and defend that specific kind of just-anything, which must come from the set of Social-Philosophical Systems that either exists or is possible.
The more I hear about artists, art criticism, and art philosophy, the more I can't stand any of them and feel like they all have their heads up their asses. I'm sorry, I know that's a rude thing to say. But I am really frustrated and done with the whole way people have been thinking about art for the past two centuries.
Individuals don't have the right to defy physics, and because of this, they don't have the inherent right to successfully influence society as individuals without studying and understanding society and the social physics of sorts that it runs on.
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but I think you’re over intellectualizing what was intended to be a fairly straightforward argument. You’re inferring a much more specific philosophical argument than what I’m actually presenting here. It seems like you’re projecting this existentialist structuralist framework onto me, which is a distraction from the central point. I’m not laying out a grand unified theory of everything; I’m critiquing the way art has historically been approached through reductive, binary moral categories. My argument is cultural and pragmatic, and frankly you seem to value esotericism for its own sake. If anything, this comment feels like a strawman designed to rebut a very specific philosophical position I’m not even invoking.
But for the hell of it, let me entertain what it is you're really arguing here. First, you seem to be begging the question when it comes the way we use the word freedom. Freedom doesn’t mean the absence of all constraints-humans are inherently social beings, and we negotiate freedom within constraints all the time. Also, you’re conflating "totalizing" with "influencing," which leads you to some fairly bizarre conclusions. Simply having an influence on someone’s perspective isn’t the same as imposing a totalizing framework. Totalization is about erasing all difference, subsuming individuals into a monolithic system. Influencing someone, or even provoking discomfort, doesn’t strip them of agency per se; it invites them to grapple with something on their own terms. By your logic, any act of communication could be considered totalizing because it inevitably shapes perception, and I think we both know that’s reductive.
I'm sympathetic with what I take to be your intentions, but I'm afraid this is a very poor argument. Throughout the video, you are again and again vague and ambiguous, so it's very hard to figure out exactly what you're trying to say. For the first half of the video you focus solely on progressivism, but the bounds of your claims about it remain unclear. You criticize two quotations from Jane Addams and David Foster Wallace, but you don't provide enough evidence to say for certain whether or not they actually, consistently believed the things you attribute to them. Did they explicitly attack all forms of art that did not fulfill the positive moral function they advocated? I have no idea, and I'm not sure you do either. Instead you apparently just assume that that's what they meant. But is it possible that art sometimes _does_ have a function of moral reform, without that necessarily negating its other qualities? You never address the issue.
When you do talk about what you think art is for, your words are not very consistent with one another. But you do seem to leave open the possibility that art can have a positive social function, that it can challenge fixed and unexamined ideas and thus contribute to social improvement. Is that really so far from the progressivism you attacked earlier in the video?
You discuss the conservative approach to art by focusing solely on the satanic panic, as if that's when conservative attitudes towards art first came into existence. But surely you do know that art, and philosophies of art, existed before the twentieth century. Why don't you mention them? Why doesn't it occur to you that the relationship between art and morals has been a topic of reflection since at least Plato and Aristotle? Why are you unable to acknowledge that the moral role of art was taken for granted for most of history? The fact that art before the twentieth century usually had an explicit moral function is surely significant, isn't it?
Finally, I am unable to figure out exactly what inspired this rant. You seem to have a problem with certain moralistic and progressive responses to art on social media, but you don't provide any specifics. So who knows what you're really upset about. Strangely, you don't mention any current far-right attacks on art, or the fascist philosophy of art that is currently seeing a resurgence in popularity. Do you approve of them? It doesn't seem likely, but you don't say.
In any case, if you're upset about progressives on social media, I would just say there are a few things to keep in mind: 1. A large number of these people are children. 2. A large number of these people are completely uneducated. 3. Social media algorithms are designed to actively promote rage and stupidity. 4. Very few of these people have read Jane Addams, or even heard of her. 5. The assumption that art must have a positive moral message is almost universal in human history; it takes experience and education to grow beyond it. In short, these opinions are often not worth taking seriously.
This sort of concern trolling vis a vis my apparent inability to sufficiently historicize strikes me as pedantic. You seem to be suggesting that because I chose not to explain the history of moral perspectives on art going back to Plato--a feat that would require several hours as opposed to 30 minutes--this somehow negates my basic point, which by the way, you fail to acknowledge much less refute despite the fact that it is emphasized throughout the video. So do you have a listening problem or are you being purposefully obtuse?
stench of moralin. Cant stand 5 second of that (specially in art)
gotta say, as one of your fans, the first 4 minutes is kind of infuriating so far since I don't have a clear example of what you mean and, at this point, you could either be saying something banal or disgusting. like, did you mean "don't be upset about protagonists who do bad things"??? like is that it? I'm so confused
Because I'm kind of hearing some dog whistles here, dog
You answered your own question.
@@NightmareMasterclass Okay, sick. Yeah, I'm actually writing a book with a character who fought in the civil war. He's, uh, as racist as a person would normally be from 1840-1880s. I want to touch on that later in the book, but I did have it brought up in the first chapter when he gets isekai'd to reverse America
BRAVO! We need more liberal voices speaking out against the woke mob!
Could you provide an example of the "Woke Mob" in effect? I'm asking because "woke" is a nebulous word that means something different for each person that uses it.