I was a steve in high school, and I fully agree with you. Literature class teaches you that "X work from Y author is about Z" and you're expected to write that down in a test under a time constraint. It doesn't teach kids to appreciate art at all. You're supposed to ripen your tastes on your own terms in your own tempo, not because the curriculum has decided that the average 16 year old must be ready for shakespeare by now. If school rams a child through understanding the meaning behind romantic era english poetry when their favorite work is still the fourth harry potter book it'll just make them grow frustrated and teach them the opposite of appreciating art.
This brought to mind two different Shakespeare classes I took during my education: Once as a dual enrollment during my senior year of high school, and once during my senior year of college. In my high school class, Shakespeare was taught as metaphorical but strictly in a sense of what the 'right' interpretation of the text was supposed to be, akin to a standard High School literature text. In college however, I was taught by an older gentlemen who had made Shakespeare the focus of his profession. He taught us about the way Shakespeare's plays were presented, how directors would omit or rearrange some lines to make their own interpretations of the work. He also showed us two versions of Hamlet, a Soviet production in black and white and a more modern BBC rendition. He showed us the two versions of the scene where Hamlet confronts his father's ghost, and I personally found the Soviet version to be more interesting. In the Soviet version, the father is entirely clad in darkness, save for the look of his eye just before he vanishes at dawn's light. It creates ambiguity, about whether it truly is the specter of his father or the shadows playing with Hamlet's imagination. In the BBC version, his father appears tangibly before him and even physically grabs his shoulders, erasing all ambiguity. Needless to say I greatly preferred that college class, despite it being an 8 AM. Rather than emphasizing a correct interpretation, he welcomed varying student interpretations, even ones he personally disagreed with. In fact, Hamlet act one scene five was the basis of my final thesis for his class, arguing it to be the most important scene in terms of impact on the rest of the play's themes depending on how it is depicted. To end this massive wall of text, I want to bring up a different education meme, the one that goes "another beautiful day without using sin cos and tan". Like you said, the American education system teaches you a yes or a no, how to press a button but not much more in a critical sense. The existence of sin cos and tan is a perfect example, as unless you are going into some major robotics or physics career, that information is doomed to be rendered mute. In contrast to this, my college English professor didn't teach me to give a yes or no, but rather to encourage us to explore the text and find our own interpretations. I really value that encouragement of critical thinking in an educator. This was an amazing video Bopper, I'll be looking forward to your future videos!
you may think of me a specter of your past, a fading fragment of knowledge lodged deep within some neglect crevice of your mind you may think of me as someone you have escaped, a harrowing experience in some cluttered classroom that you've long since put behind you but i am not gone i am merely *_inverted_*
Similarly, the point of learning sine and cosine and tangent is not to have tools to use in the future, but to understand that the triangle as an object has internal relationships that can be quantified in ways that themselves are related, and then those relationships can be remixed into different shapes, like sinusoidal waves or unit circles or modeling rates of change. Mathematics is a humanities subject, and it is a travesty that it is taught as if it were a weapon for shaping the human mind into a logical machine or an algorithm to be processed computationally. Proofs are simply poems that reference themselves so deeply that reality itself struggles to show them wrong, using symbols that are more abstract that words in an effort to reach for transcendent universality. But the beauty of a poem is invisible if you don't understand the language.
Personally I always took the meme as "*sometimes* the curtains are just blue", not necessarily that there is no greater meaning, but that not every single thing necessarily has a greater meaning. You can have symbolism and metaphor and mere prose to make the scene a bit more vivid in the same scene or work. Sometimes the curtains represent depression, sometimes they are just blue, and sometimes the author just thinks that some specific detail is cool. Great video btw! I love it when a video makes me think, seems like they are harder to find nowadays
Yeah. I think it's best mostly as a moment to touch earth whenever one may get lost in a sort of navel-gazy spiral getting increasingly abstracted from the text. A lot of mental legwork to what end? Sometimes missing the forest for the trees and just focusing in on a single tree kind of intellectual exercise. It can yield interesting fruit, not gonna lie. It's just not the end-all-be-all takeaway from the text. (I think at times the sunk costs of it is one reason why people can get precious about their interpretations, their "head canons" to the point that they prescribe it to be the only truth to glean from the text. If anyone walked away from it differently, it's simply inconceivable... rather at least a moment to be at least a little bit curious about.)
I try not to be too judgemental of people who repeat this meme, because it is a reaction to big problem in our education system- in that, we are bogged down with pointless, unchallenging, understimulating busy work. When you've had worksheet after worksheet of bland repetition, being told to consider the meaning of the curtains can feel like more pointless BS. A lot of English teachers don't exactly do a great job of explaining it either. I remember the difference between two years of English where one teacher was really into Old English poetry and she got into detail with the history and the meaning of the work, and it was a really fascinating class. Then one year I had a teacher who could barely pronounce the author's names and just played movies instead of teaching the material since she couldn't engage the students enough to get them to read the assignments. (Yes, I was literally the only student to read the books, but that's neither here nor there.)
X2, I also saw that happened with songs on the internet, where even the artist them shelf would say that "x" doesn't mean anything but some people would still insist there's a deeper meaning behind it for example Banana Man by Tally Hall, i even expirincid myself since a lot of times i would draw something meaningless and my mother would still be asking me for the meaning even though I already told her there's non (Idk if I wrote that right I'm spanish)
There was that "conservativecore games" list going around on Twitter a while back that everyone dunked on. One of the games on there was Silent Hill 3, which is, through the thinest possible layer of horror-metaphor, about a teenage girl who's trying to get an abortion against the wishes of religious fundamentalists. It really stuck with me when someone pointed this out and the guy who'd made the list answered "no, it's a game about running away from monsters". I approach art pretty "functionally", as you put it, but even still, it really struck me as this moment of... Wow, you really JUST take what's literally on screen into account, huh? It was this really weirdly sad moment for me, because I honestly could not imagine enjoying art if I saw it the way that person did, completely refusing to take any deeper meaning that's not explicitly, literally given to me.
Explains why a lot of conservatives miss the entire point of Star Trek. Or the X-Men. Missing out on the metaphors speaking about racism, being othered, and ideals like working together to create a better future. Understanding schisms in society, and being able to freely speak and add nuance to the context we live in, is paramount in healing those schisms. Some time ago, I realized that american schools ingrain sort of an assembly line worker mentality. And I'm glad that I grew up on the other side of the world.
In high school I had to read the book Unwind. I did not like the book, and for my final paper on the book I described why. I got a D on the paper because how I’d felt was apparently incorrect, or not what was expected. I remember very clearly my teacher telling me “It doesn’t matter what you thought, you’re supposed to write what happened” I quickly lost interest in reading for school and began using sparknotes to do the work on books, and it actually improved my grades in English. I think the frustration around the blue curtains can come from how the ‘blue curtains’ are expected to be interacted with in school. It’s not presented as art meant to be pondered and understood, but like a scan from sheet, like a math equation with correct and incorrect answers. The question stops being “what do the curtains mean” and becomes “what does the teacher want you to think the curtains mean” it can make it feel pointless. Why would they write in metaphor if I’m being told the meaning overtly. In high school I remember heavily agreeing the blue curtains meme, in retrospect I was just frustrated, but unaware what it was that was frustrating me
I remember in Year 11 (that's the school year from 15-16 years old) my English teacher had us analyse William Blake's poem The Clod and the Pebble. It's a very short poem about a clod of mud being positive about love and a pebble in a stream retorting by being very negative. It's part of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, and we had to analyse it under that lens. We spent a class discussing the poem, and the teacher was very much of the opinion that the pebble - with its cynical perspective, hardened exterior, shaped by the stream - represented experience, and the clod represented innocence. He argued Blake was saying that as you're hurt in love, you become more cynical about it. As an annoying teen contrarian, I had the exact opposite reading - the clod is specifically described as having been trodden on by cows, where the stream the pebble sits in is described in pleasant terms. I saw (and still see) the clod as representing experience, as someone who's gone through hard times and made it out unscathed, and the pebble as innocence, as someone protected from the danger of being tread on by cows by a coddling, nurturing stream. The clod is positive about love BECAUSE it is aware of the hardships of life, because it's experienced them and seen how love improves his life, where the pebble's cynicism comes from a lack of hardship, from a lack of need and opportunity for love to, as the clod says "build a Heaven in Hell's despair". Having known only the Heaven of the stream it fears love, and thinks it can "build a Hell in Heavens' despite" My teacher gave me an A+ on that paper, and wrote a note that he completely disagreed with my reading but that it was compelling and well reasoned. It was such a great approach, and the fact he always encouraged and respected readings other than his own was phenomenal. I really think I owe him a lot of the passion I have for art and storytelling - he was a truly brilliant teacher.
Apart from not teaching students how to properly read art and literature, I think one of the major failings of the US education system is not teaching students how to make art. If students were more well versed in writing, perhaps when reading a book they would be more understanding of what went into the creation of it. They may realize that the author mentioned that the curtains were blue for a reason, even if they don't entirely realize what the reason is, because at the very least they wanted the reader to know about it. Every word in a book is there because the author thought it was worth the time to put it in. If it didn't matter that the curtains were blue, and they just were and it meant nothing, the author *would not have mentioned it.* But because students are not taught how to write, or what the creative process is like, and because they're so removed from the people that create the works that their teachers are trying to get them to read, they don't realize that an actual person made a conscious choice to tell them this detail for a reason. It's the real idea behind Chekhov's Gun: it's not just about foreshadowing or telegraphing, it's about economy of description. You don't put something in that you don't mean to "use" in some way. But you won't understand that unless you're familiar with the process, either by doing or by being familiar with someone who does it regularly.
This also reminded me of how plot twists are revered on a literal level removed of implications; it's because many audiences would rather be shocked than enlightened. The discussion starts and ends with "it was crazy that that happened" with very little discussed between
This is exactly why I say "a good story cannot be spoiled". Not because twists shouldn't occur or anything like that, but if your entire story is only good because you have a plot twist. You just didn't write a well written story in my opinion. An example of what I mean from Dune, as well as all the sequels, the opening narration for every chapter literally tells you "this is what's gonna happen", like how the opening paragraph tells you the entire plot to Romeo and Juliet. That doesn't stop either story from being well told
@@aaronwishard7093 It's well-trodden ground but I concur with the common opinion that _subverting audience expectations_ isn't in and of itself worth anything. If the plot point the audience _expected_ would've been more coherent and satisfying, it's no sin to meet their expectations. Surprise isn't inherently valuable, it's what you _do_ with that surprise. And for every brilliant twist in fiction there's many more that fall flat.
My personal perspective on "the curtains are blue" is that it also represents a failure of the fundemental stucture of the education system. The curtains are blue because they represent depression as an interpretation given by an english teacher is testable. Its multiple choice, its the same for everyone because it is presented as a truth. There is no discussion and thought, no room for other perspective. No child who is encouraged to wonder for themselves what the blue curtains represent. We cannot put in our test answer "maybe the soft rippling shape of the blue curtains is meant to call to mind the sea, or a longing for the sea." or "the blue curtains could represent an artificial barrier to the outside world, a division from the blue sky by an almost mockingly blue obstacle, the place he lives is his world in itself, with blue curtains representing a perversion of the blue sky that lies outside the scope of his isolation." the curtains are blue, and heres whats on the test about them.
I think that's why in hindsight i was lucky i was assigned so many reports and discussion assignments in school. It was frustrating but I think it did help me grow some thinking muscles. Ofc most of highschool was "here are 5 classics, here are the correct interpretations, don't blow your SAT/IB/Tawjihi".
I hate literary analysis because my teachers would tell me I'm wrong for having different interpretations of a story. The grading is super subjective! Why would teachers mark you wrong just because they don't disagree with your interpretations? That's the problem. I heard my former classmate said that when she was analyzing a poem, her English teacher disagreed with her, thus she earned a low grade. There was a time when the author of the poem came. My classmate asked if her analysis made sense, and the author said that her interpretations are correct. So the teacher changed her grade because of that. But if we are talking about students dismissing the meaning of symbols in literature, why don't you analyze John Lennon's "I Am The Walrus" to tell me what that song means? And while you're at it, explain why Ralph's name is literally "Ralph". This is another problem students face. The teachers would just pick up random details from the text for students to analyze when there's really no hidden meaning. As Mr. Hippo says, "Sometimes uhh, you know, sometimes a story is just a story. You try to read into every little thing and find meaning in everything anyone says, you'll just drive yourself crazy."
On the point about "plot-holes" and Hamlet, I think there are 2 things to consider there: 1) you can fill them in with your brain however you want, and 2) you can consider these inconsistencies to be *part* of the narrative, rather than a hole in it. On Hamlet, I think the timeline incongruence genuinely adds to the sense of madness and contributes to overarching themes of truth, deception, and the (at times) ambiguity between the two that are so present in the play. Prince Hamlet spends the entire play ranting and raving to such an extent that other characters in the play are uncertain of his lucidity on a scene-to-scene basis, and realistically, that same sense *should* be present in the audience, and yet there's such an obsession with consistency and reliability of narration among modern audiences under capitalism that I recall several of my classmates balking at the notion that virtually every occurrence off-screen may be complete cock-and-bull, and that 3/4 of the cast should only be trusted as far as you can see them. I think that the inconsistent timeline of Hamlet, while it may very well have been a series of small oversights in the writing processes as the play has been written and re-written in a long game of telephone, ends up adding to the play, as this can very well be interpreted as the fragile foundation of lies upon lies within the court of Denmark comes collapsing in on itself at the end of the play. Tl;dr, "plot holes" should be *engaged with as part of the text* rather than rejected, as they so often are in modern online criticism.
As a new High School English teacher, this video filled me with an existential dread that is particularly brutal and soul crushing given that it is a Sunday afternoon as I watch this. Thanks Booper, I'm going to get ready for Monday now. Maybe I can get one student to see that the curtains aren't just blue, that'll be enough for me.
In my experience, the Blue Curtains analogy isn't a metaphor for the worthlessness of analyzing stories as metaphor, but the incompetence of the teachers trying to teach in that way and failing spectacularly. The blue curtains example is generally used to describe a sentence like "Samuel moved his rook, the light passing through the pale blue curtains faintly illuminating the chessboard." prompting an English teacher to conclude that the reason that the curtains are described as blue is that Sam must be feeling depressed in this scene. As the author of this sentence, I can confirm that I described the curtains as blue for the same reason I described them as pale: it sounded good. That's it. Now, there IS meaning you can find in this sentence. I described the light as "faintly" illuminating the chessboard in order to create a sense of quiet atmosphere, accentuating the subtle intensity of a chess game. The problem the Blue Curtains analogy highlights is that most educators have no idea how to identify that intended meaning, so they spend their class time analyzing the insignificant details and wasting everyone's time. That's been my experience throughout high school and even college, English teachers going on and on about details I can tell are not the focus of this scene. TLDR: The Blue Curtains analogy is not indicative of an emphasis of functional storytelling in education, but a commentary on how rare it is for poetic storytelling to be properly understood, even among those whose job it is to teach it.
I’ve often seen many a (mostly conservative) joke online mocking people who talk about their “feelings” on art. This hypothetical person cares about how a painting or novel made them personally feel, rather than what the art objectively shows. Many people hold the belief that feelings should be separate from art because feelings aren’t a valid way to interact with art because feelings aren’t objective and thus shouldn’t be taken intellectually seriously. But feelings, especially the complex, are an essential part of intelligence. We interact with art, we feel, our feelings shape our thoughts, consciously or not, and our thoughts give rise to ideas, theories, and new art. Many of history’s greatest scientists loved art and literature because both art and science ultimately stem from the weird enigma that is the human brain. TLDR: facts DO care about your feelings. Great video Bopper
Conservatives: FACTS dont care about FEELINGS Librul. Russian composers: I am deeply depressed. My dog died, my family died, my wife cheated on me, I have cancer, I have aids, I am forced to repress my sexuality, I am old. Words cannot express the depth of my sufferings, so I will translate my emotions to music. Actors: Well, to really prepare for this part, I murdered my family so i could really get the feelings of loss that the character experiences in the second act.
whats funny is that conservatives entire worldview revolves around their FEELINGS about eurocentric culture. that its objectively beneficial for the human species. but a little bit of mathematical and scientific analysis shows its only caused net harm to 99% of the human species and killed at least 75% of the wildlife it comes into contact with lol. its objectively unsustainable in every measurable way, but because they were raised to perpetually glorify eurocentric culture (and monarchy/feudalism, as a side effect, since its still the main mode of economic/political distribution) with stuff like disneys pro european propaganda, and since they arent taught that they COULD be wrong about anything, cognitive dissonance takes over their brains and stops any potential critical introspection about the mathematical and scientific results of their worldview. objectively, conservatives care more about feelings than they do about undeniable facts.
I wanna thank you for making this video. Not only did it give me a lot to think on, but it also helped me recenter my priorities on a project that’s been giving me trouble lately. Definitely needed that.
I got a fnaf movie ad in the middle of this which felt incredibly poignant 😂😭 I don't exactly know how to say this -- I really appreciate how your means of analyses go against the grain and make me think about my own perspective and manner of critique 🙏 because yeah we live in a really binary-focused society....... people fall into it whether they mean to or not Anyway I trust that you make plenty of chuds mad with this video 💖💖
I only just found your channel today, but this video is phenomenal. I'm between jobs right now, but when I'm able I intend to subscribe to your patreon to support more work like this. Truly superb work.
Listening to this whilst writing fanfiction. and boy does this make me feel a whole new type of depression. But I do believe that what you say is.. interesting. I tried many words to describe it but this is the only one i felt comfortably saying. thank you for the this weird feeling.
A cool metanarrative of this video is that you are presumably mostly funded by patrons. Giving up the video by video profit analysis can give more freedom to create interesting and thought provoking art.
I see quite a few people in this comment section talking about how they read Shakespeare in school, and I have come to realize that in addition to the problems regarding how literature is taught (or is failed to be taught) is the problem that many English classes treat reading Shakespeare's works in the same way they treat reading a short story or novel. Shakespeare wrote PLAYS, not novels, and you end up losing a lot of the context when you reduce it to just text. His works are meant to be watched or performed, not just read. Plays are meant to be interpreted not just by the audience but by the directors, actors, set and costume designers, and musicians if there are any, and this can change how it is perceived. While a book is only written one way, and cant really be changed very much between publications, each performance is going to be different. The way the actors happen to say their lines or simply how they move on stage, the colors and shapes of the costumes, the lighting, the musical accompaniment, the pacing of each scene, all of this can have an impact on how the story and characters are perceived. A whole extra level of symbolism is lost when it is reduced to mere lines on a page for high schoolers to flatly read through. Imagine if when you went to the movie theater or a video store (do they still have those?) and the guy there just plops the script down in front of you.
Now that I’ve dropped my joke comment, my main struggle with poetic art is not necessarily entirely within understanding the deeper meaning but rather just understanding the language. The passage from Hamlet at 20:53, for example, is a great example of my constant struggles with trying to understand what the fuck these sentences even mean. Nobody says shit like this but if I were to read a more simplified version of the plot I’d be missing out on potential meaning. I don’t mind spending time mulling over art and thinking about it in my spare time, but I really struggle with having to go line by line and translate it in my head to sentences that don’t sound like they were written by some deranged lunatic. Like you quoted in the video, the struggle IS the poetic art, but I’m pretty sure the struggle is supposed to be understanding what something represents not what it even means on a face level.
The worst part is that that's pretty tame as far as Hamlet goes. Sure, I have to figure out the bounds of the phrase and the rhythm of it, but once that's done I've got it, the sentence is comprehensible. There were segments that I just had to nod along to and accept that I'll never understand them as half the words are out of my vocabulary and the other half are in an order that's not conducive to intuiting the meaning. Combined with my inability to remember names or specific phrases I struggle a great deal with Shakespeare in much the same way you're describing.
one thing i would say with Shakespeare specifically is that when you are taught it in most high school classes you are either given it to read as a written text, or perhaps the teacher will have the class read it out loud or even perform it. Shakespeare plays are *plays* and they are much easier to comprehend when you watch one performed by actors who are familiar with the content and context of these plays. just the physical body language and verbal delivery of these actors does a lot to make Shakespeare more easy to understand, so if you ever would want to try getting into his stuff -- or if you happen to still be in high school and are studying him -- I think its much better to watch a performance (which can be done easily by searching on youtube)
I'm primarily a non-fiction reader (usually history) and an illustrator. I am often on the "the curtains are just blue" side when I read fiction. I appreciate the video, but personally, it has not really changed my viewpoint that much. Poetry is different of course, but when reading novels I feel like if you get stuck on descriptive details you can create a lot of meanings in the work the author simply did not intend on. If this is something you enjoy doing, of course go right ahead but presenting it as the right way to interact with art is a little redundant. As an artist, when I create something I create it because I think it's beautiful purely from an aesthetic point of view. If someone looks at my work and puts a different meaning on it than simple aesthetic pleasure, that is fine, but not the intended takeaway. I don't know, that is my two cents.
I guess my disconnect with this is the idea of intention being the end-all be-all when it comes to literature or any other art. I hold the view that once a work is published, its creator ceases to have any more authority on it than the work’s audience. That extends even to sequels that recontextualize the original work. How many people disregard Godfather Part 3 or the Matrix sequels when they were made by the same artists as the original? Obviously that doesn’t mean that any interpretation has equal value, but if someone can prove an author wrong about something in their novel using textual evidence, that carries a lot more weight for me than the latter saying “I’m right because I say so and I wrote the damn thing”.
@@DAHIESTABUNNE Also the author's interpretation of their own work is not static and they may have forgotten why exactly they decided to make the curtains blue, or they may since have decided that the blue curtains have a meaning to them they didn't at the time they wrote it. Circumstances in the author's life may colour their interpretation of their old works. They may begin to resent them and consciously avoid engaging with their legacy. Any number of things might have changed; unless you can travel through time and ask the author why the curtains were blue the very second they put pen to paper, you're not going to get an infallible answer. Even then the answer you get won't be definitive - one of the fascinating things about the human mind is we can do things for reasons we don't consciously understand.
I thoroughly enjoyed this, and I'm very glad you brought attention to this topic. I won't try to say that "this is what I've been saying all along", but I do think that this will speak to a wide variety of people with experience in creative fields, myself included. My "Steve said the curtains are just blue" moment is someone in middle school complaining about having to take music class, since they weren't going to use it in the future. While this sentiment is also commonly applied to subjects like math and science, it definitely exemplifies how the education system is teaching for job security over any form of actual self-enrichment. I'd say it's even more notable for the arts, because even though there are creative professions, they typically aren't well paying or well respected. Perhaps this is also circular though, with being not well paying making a profession (and the teaching to that profession) not well respected, which is why we don't get funding for the arts, memes about metaphors in high school taught literature, and Steve complaining about learning music theory. While we are in no shortage of examples of high school students not fulling engaging in literature, I can testify to how even those involved in the arts can be pushed away from literature, thanks to how the education system has presented it and how capitalism has changed our expectations for art. While I engaged with and participated in various creative mediums on my own time, I was absolutely tuned out by any English class assignment that involved reading. I could try to excuse this with a lack of time thanks to my other activities going on, a lack of enjoyment of the process of reading, or genuine difficulty in understanding the content. Regardless, I ultimately did not actually read most of the books I was supposed to and got by on quick skims and online reviews. From this experience, I can totally understand the appeal of calling out Daisy's Green Light as basically a sham. To this day I don't really get it, but that's due to my complete lack of an attempt to, as I was relying on sources that could only cover functional aspects like plot beats and character descriptions. And I say all this as someone who actually enjoyed reading and creative writing on my own time. Taking classes on subjects like animation and film past high school is what really enforced the idea that "everything is intentional in art" for me. Of course, there are definitely some ways that something can be made unintentionally, especially with film when it comes to how things play out on set. Even then, I think what you discussed in your conclusion about art being a two-way process is interesting, as there's still value in engaging with any unintentional aspects of creative works that may occur. I'm in full support of critiques on "X doesn't have any meaning, stop trying to say it does", and I really hope that this video lands on people that need to hear it.
At the risk of sounding like a total buffoon, this piece, like some others discussing "the curtains are just blue" fails to convince me of the wrongheadedness of the functional critic (as this video describes them). A willing suspension of disbelief being broken by details that fit on theme but unravel the narrative chronology is not just the audience member being trained to inspect art like an appliance, it can also be the carelessness of the author or editor. This can be seen on a case by case basis, some films or books can be cynically assembled as products for the capitalist content machine, and like cheap products they show defects at the slightest of inspections Some can be crafts made with greater attention and can only show cracks under different analytical lenses, like comedy that ages poorly becuase more modern lenses show in greater contrasts the way the problematic attitudes the work uncritically reproduces. Or a historical fiction work that describes an ancient culture with details that more recent archeology and historical research shows to be wrong. I don't feel the conversation between audience and text always is the two way mixing of inner content that is described near the end. And I admit here, as a STEM student, I am not truly equipped to deal with the distinction between death of the author as a starting point for analyzing a text and the seeming carte blanche it gives audience members to pour whatever meaning they want onto the text and more troubling, they sometimes use their reading of the work not just to pour notions of intention onto the text but onto the author. And here is the crux of the issue for me, a functional analysis of the mechanics of plot can be a misguided attempt to find faults that on the whole are inconsequential to the emotions or reflections the piece of art imparts on the viewer. But that to me is less harmful than analysis that read the work in ways not just anathema to the intention of the author but to justify a moral indictment of them. (e g. Readings of Dune that just take it as a white savior narrative by people who are in no way of the stem or conservative persuasion)
We must not have beauty, for it may lead to horror. At the end of all things, the universe becomes cold and still, homogenous, for there is really only one truth and all else is just entropic oscillations whirling down into that abyss. The golden path is inevitable.
As someone who is hoping to start an English teaching credential program next year, thanks for the existential dread/reality check. I don't know if there's a way to fix this flaw in the American education system. Post-pandemic, students are struggling to meet standards with literally everything, and with shorter attention spans due to the state of social media and a lot of pop culture being very easy to digest, it is only going to get more difficult to get over that initial frustration that comes from not understanding a work that has more to offer than what can be seen at face value. I think one of the points you made that really spoke to me is the fact that the meme isn't even referencing an actual novel/symbolic element, since the creator didn't want to look stupid for misunderstanding Hamlet. Because of how the education system works, there is this deep-seeded fear of being wrong that so many students have, especially those that are struggling in a class. It is way easier to be dismissive of the curtains than to say you don't understand why they're blue. I think this fear of being wrong also extends to students that have different interpretations of a work than the stuff they can find on SparkNotes or what their teacher is saying in class. The fact that these stories have been studied for years means that there is always a standard interpretation of its symbols, so straying from that, especially if you struggle to articulate yourself on why, often goes poorly. Which, again, leads to dismissing the entire idea of deeper analysis. It seems like a lot of English education, especially before college, is regurgitating the same points over and over, and whoever can say it in the prettiest way gets the highest grade. I forgot where I was going with this. Anyway, great video, you've given me a lot to think about. Gotta be one of my favorite Fire Emblem video essays of all time.
Finding out that a youtuber you watch has actual thoughts in their head is like the emotional opposite of finding out they sexually assaulted or groomed people in their fandom. Imagine developping class consciousness from a video of the guy who gave you advice on how to pick units in fire emblem path of radiance.
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 the lords of the castle need an everflowing supply of fighters because if they earn too much exp they can promote and they'll revolt. This is why they poisoned his mutton.
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740Dorcas is like that story of John Henry vs the Steam engine. Except there's no steam engine and the mountain is just fodder enemies in between Dorcas and the boss.
Honestly Idk what to comment about the video but to boost the algorythm I'll just say that the person who reads this is now obligated to read "100 years of solitude" or I'll appear in their house
The need to be "correct" ruined literature classes for me. English felt like a history class: that there's a correct interpretation (or set of interpretations) to a certain work that you have to find. My classes taught me to ask "What's the meaning of this work?" instead of "What does this work mean to you?" That question was only really poised to me at church, as I developed a personal Christian faith that I now call my own. And even then, it took a lot of time for my analytical school brain to get away from the idea of there always being an objective "right" answer. I ended up going to STEM school since I adore mathematics and think there's so much beauty to them. But I was always sad to hear my peers say things like "I'm an engineer, I don't mess with reading." Sure, STEM allows the world to function on the massive global scale that we see today. But engaging with art, practicing self-discovery, wondering about ourselves, other people, the world around us - those things bring life color and make life meaningful. We're made to be full people, not machines to go through the motions each day. There's so much beauty to struggling with difficult life questions and sharing our ideas with others through art. It makes me sad that not everyone chooses to explore that.
You put it well. Modern society has little need to explore art in order to function at a basic level, but *humanity* needs to explore meaning in order to deepen its understanding of itself, as well as understanding of meaning. Religious experience is, at least at some level, inherently symbolic and metaphorical, in that it is fundamentally about finding greater personal meaning in the world, and the search for meaning through symbolism in scripture is just one aspect of that greater search for universal purpose.
i used to be a blue curtain proponent in high school and i'm now a literature major and i spend all my time reading "too much" into the meaning and themes etc. i think the reason so many people buy into that idea is when teachers do try to introduce any non-literal readings in class, a lot of the time it's done quite poorly. not necessarily blaming teachers (or more accurately i'm not blaming JUST the teachers) but they fail to get across the idea that a work of art COULD even have any non literal non functional value to their students. when i was in school, all of my teachers were like this. any deeper meanings were not to be thought about and arrived at by ourselves. it was like a math formula and there was a correct answer, and usually the teacher was quizzing us on what that correct answer was. i focused on functional analysis at the time because my english teachers painted metaphorical meaning like i'm just supposed to magically come to the same conclusions as them. when i came to different conclusions or argued different symbolism they would give me bad grades and say i had the wrong answer. this started to change for me when i started doing media analysis online, finally in an environment where i wouldn't be penalized for thinking something different. and when i got to university it got even better because now i was talking to professors who no matter what kind of take i had would say something encouraging like "i didn't think about it like that" and we would have a conversation about it. i was finally told that my reading of the work also has value and now if i write a paper with opinions and analysis that are completely contrary to the class discussions i still just get feedback on my argumentation and organization and how to make my paper stronger and i don't get marked down for saying something different.
I think it's easy to get sucked into the framework of functional analysis even when pushing back against the blue curtains meme. Because there's a tendency to respond, "well actually here's all the ways in which the book connects the color blue with depression, this scene is a setup for a later payoff in which the character admits to their depression and discusses the blue curtains, here's an interview with the author I dug up in which he says that the blue represents depression, the work is clearly referencing earlier work by Fancy McAuthorname in which blue curtains were tied to depression, therefore the RIGHT ANSWER is that the blue curtains represent depression and other interpretations are WRONG ANSWERS." It's still a very functional way of looking at the story, it's just extending functional analysis to include metaphor, in which the story becomes a giant sudoku puzzle of identifying which column is a metaphor for which row.
It says something, I think, that the meme about symbolic analysis of art being dumb is, itself, a neat little metaphor. Like yes. sometimes the curtains are just blue! sometimes the author wanted that to have meaning, sometimes they didn't but a careful reader might find meaning there anyway, sometimes the author wanted the curtains to have meaning but not the one you think... For example, "sometimes the curtains are just blue" can be interpreted, possibly despite the wishes of its creator, as a call for individual analysis and interpretation of a work, a reminder that every reader (in this case) takes something different from a text. And sometimes you should just have fun with it and look too deep into things like dumb memes about lit class! The curtains are just blue, not about depression. but is "the curtains are just blue, not about depression" not a profound statement about the alienation from art produced by the hectic and result-focused reality of the school system? This might be why I didn't have friends in high school. But also like. And this is something I've been mad about since we read la casa in collina when I was 16. It's always depression. It's always about how much life sucks. it's always about how the main character who is very obviously a reflection of the author is a directionless coward who hides in the comfortable illusion of the house on the hill instead of doing something to help the people around him or at least dying with them. Like yeah thank you so much. It's not like I'm not already depressed enough and afraid enough about my future. now I gotta read the extended suicide note of a much better person than me who still thought he wasn't good enough. at 8:30 am on a monday. and I can't even do drugs about it. makes me want to think about metaphors soo much And also crucially, as a reasonably depressed teenager with the approximate eloquence of a rock, I couldn't express that feeling beyond saying "I dunno I think this book sucks and we shouldn't have to read it" This might be why my literature teacher didn't like me much. I think what I'm trying to say is that even in a school system that (I think? that's the impression I've gotten) is way less on that just learn the right answers and shut up grind, even with a teacher who wanted to engage and interest the class, teach how to think and discuss etc, ultimately the meme is born of being a teenager who is being forced to do something and is trying to rebel however they can. "you can force me to read this, but you can't force me to think about it or express my opinions in a constructive way or contribute honestly to a conversation about it" etc Like I enjoyed reading, I enjoyed thinking about what I was reading, and I enjoyed talking about it. and I still fucking hated lit class
Actually speaking of willful superficiality as an expression of frustration with an inability to express one's own interpretation of art, both due to a lack of vocabulary and experience and because of the necessity for even the most dedicated teachers to push a singular "correct" reading so as to move the class along, I have more beef. And you can't stop me because you're an english teacher on the other side of the world, you can't afford the plane ticket to physically make me shut up. this is a callout post for alessandro marchi, the curator of the annotated edition of the divine comedy we were required to use in school. You're not wrong about Par. XVII vv. 58-60 being about the bitter pain of exile and the indignity of being eternally a guest of others' charity. But please. think of your audience. You have to tell people that the reason he specifically mentions the salty taste of bread as a symbol of unfamiliarity and loss of home is specifically because people in florence are insane and don't put salt in their bread. please. a singular drop of context. the heartfelt expression of suffering isn't reduced by the knowledge that it's also a literal complaint about having to eat food with too much flavour and climb too many stairs I could write entire poems about these three verses alone and you can't even annotate them right. alessandro. please. if I meet you I'm going to beat you up ok I think I'm done with petty literature grudges from high school now (
People don't consciously know what they mean Maybe he DID pick blue curtains while he was depressed??? Or because he was listening to 90s pop Daba di daba dai daba di daba dai Daba di daba dai daba di daba dai Daba di daba dai daba di daba dai Daba di daba dai daba di daba dai Daba di daba dai daba di daba dai Daba di daba dai daba di daba dai Daba di daba dai daba di daba dai Daba di daba dai daba di daba dai I'm a speed loving guy At the speed of light If i was green i would die If bleed i will die I believe I'm a guy I'm in need of a guy
I KNOW RIGHT it was such a jumpscare one moment I'm watching a video on the Netflix Avatar remake and then [niche RUclipsr who talks about Fire Emblem a lot]
Really interesting stuff. Gotta watch it a few more times to digest it in full, probably, but I continue to be grateful that you willingly share your thoughts and analyses with us Bopper. I hope you’re encouraged by the feedback you’ve received and your own process in putting this together.
Perfect title man. Please keep pursuing the ideas you’re passionate about as you did here, as hard as it may be. This video is one of your best and I hope the process of making it brought the utmost fulfillment.
Why X is described as Y. why anything is added to a story, a narrative, a piece of art. Sometimes it's deep and meaningful, sometimes that way on a whim, sometimes it's referential to something or someone else. Sometimes a blue curtain is just a blue curtain, and sometimes it means so much more than it's simplicity would imply. Maybe they were referencing a curtain in their own home, maybe they just like the color blue, maybe their is an in universe reason why the character chose a blue curtain over any other color, maybe it's symbolic or metaphorical for something deeper. And any and all of those can be true even without the authors intent
When I was in Highschool I thought the interpretation of a work of art is correct when it is written into a book by a smart guy. When I went to University in the first levels I understood that an interpretation is correct as long as you can proof it and it makes sense in itself. Blue curtains can be depression if they somehow represent things that depression represents. If you can proof that with the text then you are correct. The interpretation serves a function. As University went on I understood that there is a language of art. Art itself references the reference to a reference to a reference and so on. from the earliest cave drawings to the most recent drawing there is a line of storytelling. Honestly, to me a Rothko is just color on a canvas. I watched a documentary about his art and I sort of understand the whys and hows, but still. To me a lot of art is an inside joke that I don't get. And I consider myself one of the more literate people. But I would not say I can go to a museum and understand everything. I interpret art very personal. I like it or I don't. It reminds me of a story or it doesn't. I have a feeling towards it or I don't. And then there's apparently another interpretation - Rothko wouldn't have spent that much time on his paintings if they were just blue curtains. He thought really hard on how to bring those blocks of color on canvas and that act makes it art. A lot of people do not want to work at media literacy. They want the Fast and the Furious 54 to just be what is is. They don't even care about an interpretation of that, in fact they are strongly against it. Some people care for some understanding. Because it dawns on them that art is communication and it matters what you communicate. And there will always be a group of people that know the history, they know the references, they can read like noone has read before. And then there will be the people who have a lot of money and they need to keep that money, so they "invest" in what the smart guys told them is the most valuable art. Does the price make the art a better communicator? probably not. Is the artist a better storyteller because of that? Probably not. It's better to retell a popular story than being poor. But capitalism aside - it matters that people undergo the process that I went through when I discovered how to read art. It mattered because it taught me that there is one truth (the text) but there are many stories (the interpretations). Not all stories are valuable lessons but they all exist. Not all stories will be told again. And in a post-(pre)Trump world, it is probably a good thing if you understand how stories shape reality and what the value of listening to someone elses story is. It widens your horizon a little if you can see that the clue curtain can be depression for someone. And then you maybe understand that person and you do not want to eradicate them from public life.
Love this video. Studying art history, I've always been struck with how deliberately propagandistic fine art is, whether it be promoting the power of the church, monarchs, and the ultra wealthy. Then the impressionists come along and make parodies such as Manet's "Olympia" after Titan's "Venus of Urbino", which becomes social and class commentary, and definitely the result of broader access as you said. There's also the whole Nazi persecution of degenerate art, and later the CIA promoting abstract painting during the cold war. Even poetic art has a utilitarian function, even if not implicit in its design, but that rarely extends to the individual. Perhaps this is more of how superstructures, not just capitalism, subsume individual expression for its own ends.
I'm not sure the "functional" thought is separate from understanding metaphor, but that it's being taught in the wrong way. The curtains being blue could be explained through color theory and psychology, with the connection of sadness and the color blue. I was not an art person growing up, but it was scientific (functional) curiosity that led to me learning a lot of the logical concepts in art. I basically moved the "challenge" of understanding art to something I wanted to be challenged in, which has led to a better understanding and comprehension of art overall. At least for people interested in science, the failure to integrate science into art is what causes the blue curtain meme.
I'm proudly aware of my own stupidity when I read Shakespeare. I can barely comprehend the functional story, let alone glean any sense of symbolism or metaphor without looking it up afterwards
To me, the best art is art that, as you touched on, makes you feel meaning rather than think it. Berserk is one of the best examples of this. You don't need to go through an hour-long lecture about how Guts feels at a particular moment because all you need to do is look at the manga panel and you'll just get it. Of course, thinking about what a scene could mean is still valid, as there are plenty of works I disregarded in the past that I now appreciate looking back on them. But with my finite time on Earth, I'd prefer to see/watch/read/play as much art as possible rather than continuously return to the same few pieces over and over again. Except for the art that makes me feel something, whether it's the complex emotions of a lone swordsman staring into the night sky or simply because John Wick has some kickass fight scenes.
The real question is was the story originally written in a language that uses the same word for blue and green and was the color we know as blue what the author meant or was it closer to green ...Haha in all seriousness, this is a great video! It's a really thought-provoking dive into the relationship between art and its audiences in our current society, and I hope it gets more people thinking and helps open people's minds to engaging with art on more levels than just the "functional", as you put it.
I think part of the problem is that art appreciation shouldn't be taught. (At least not to those who don't specifically sign up for it) (although propaganda litteracy should be, and theres some overlap) rather art should meet you where you are at. If you gain your pleasure from the art equivalent of scoffing a burger, or from the equivelant of the satisfaction of a hard gym session or the satisfaction of tracking to the south pole. That's all fine ways to engage with art, and there should be chances for them all. And your more likely to go to the gym again and try harder if you chose to, and got that buzz, rather than faking it for the checkbox you were forced to full out. There is a market for art that makes the viewer work. But its a small one and economics of scale mean it's not as available. Just like how some people want to track to the north pole, they need to seek out the equipment to do so, because most people don't want to. Hopefully platforms like RUclips help connect the creators and audience for this and we can have more. Massively enjoyed your video BTW, can't think fast enough for it lol, every new sentence started a new thread in my mind. Sorry for dunking on your profession, hope you can find your chosen students here.
I was certainly a blue curtains reader back in high school. I remember once when my class given a list of topics to choose from to write an essay on Huckleberry Finn, and all of them were asking us to explain some specific metaphor or symbolism with evidence. I chose to write an essay arguing that the Mississippi River represents the Mississippi River and its shores represent its shores. I got a D and thought it was the funniest, cleverest thing I’d ever done. I’m trying to be better about this sort of thing. I think Godzilla: Minus One was the first movie (or media in general) I saw where I organically spotted a meaning aside from the narrative function. I think that’s progress.
You talking about this gets me thinking about game difficulty, and how people feel entitled to win a game just because they bought it. Specifically, FE, since that's your mainstay content. Difficulty is part of that narrative sublime, but also it's a surface level narrative tool in the context of games. You can finish a book and not understand it, you have to understand a game to some level to finish it. Within the framework of capitalistic art, the idea of art being grounded into commodified entertainment, are players who complain about difficulty being entitled? Are they wrong for asking to have the sublime without working towards it? Or is it simply an issue of accessibility, with being able to meet a game's challenges being akin to the reader's literacy? Frankly I err on the side of games being designed with not everyone in mind, because I feel that any mature work of art should challenge its audience to some degree, and also because I'm a masochist who can't sleep at night unless I can LTC Iron Man 0% Growths 1HP 1 Durability speedrun Thracia 776 with my eyes blindfolded and my ears plugged before my mommy is done cooking me my wholesome Reddit gold chicken tendies. But I'm not so sure of my answer that I can make a definitive statement one way or the other. It's something I think about a lot as someone who's going into game development due largely in part to how I think it's a medium for art.
There's also the expectation we place on ourselves that if you buy a game then you should finish all the content it includes, even if it makes your experience worse. Even Nintendo doesn't care if I never visit the Somiel, they get the sixty bucks either way.
As is typical of criticisms of Capitalism, the problems attributed to Capitalism aren't traits of Capitalism but inherent traits of existing in physical reality. Artists get hungry. Artists get tired. Artists get cold. Like every other person, since you spend your time doing one thing, in this case art, you cannot spend your time doing other things like building shelter or growing food. In order to have artists at all, we need a way to facilitate the exchange of art for food. There are only two options. Either free exchange, or a centralized authority. In not one, but in both cases the artist is beholden to the demands of the exchange. Either in a free market, the demands of the one buying the art, or in a centralized authority, the demands of the authority. Since free exchange is what we presently have, people like to imagine that if we got rid of it, we would escape the inherent restrictions of having to live by trading with others. Imagination is precisely what that is. The only artists in world history not to be limited by the demands of the trade are the ones wealthy enough to have no material need. The Capitalism makes no difference.
There shall only ever be two options. Not three, for that would be confusing to minds so poor that they have mental capcaity only able to imagine a free market. So saith the economists, who claim to know the truth of reality while hurriedly explaining that it's just a model, man, it doesn't predict the future or anything, you can't take our word like that, just look at the numbers.
I had a long-held appreciation the "blue curtains" meme, but this video helped me realize that I was reading meaning into it based on my personal experience and preconceptions that was not actually consistent with the content of the meme, and was thereby missing the deeper meaning that _is_ actually present within the work. Which means I was acting exactly like the type of English teacher I thought the meme was targeting, ironically enough! In retrospect, I have no idea how I was able to convince myself that a meme about teachers trying to insist that meaning exists where there (allegedly) is none was in fact about teachers limiting themselves to assuming there is no meaning in art beyond the single, simplistic interpretation that they, the teacher, already hold 🤷♂That's almost exactly backwards from what the meme actually depicts!
I'm trying to imagine an altered version of this meme that would better match the view of English teachers through which my interpretation of the meme was filtered, based on my personal experience with one middle-school teacher in particular. I think it would be something like this: The teacher's interpretation: "The blue of the curtains represents depression and his lack of will to carry on. We know this because the author was diagnosed with clinical depression shortly after publishing this story, and wrote many other stories dealing with themes of depression both before and after this one." What the story literally says: "The curtains were yellow"
Yo Bopper, I'm unlikely to see my own high school teachers, so I'll share this with you instead. A former curtains are blue because they're blue guy here, I used to believe that performance/delivery was vastly more impactful than meaning. Yes, I greatly overestimated my own intelligence at the time. I was also in a period of basic research into my own artistic pursuits. Trying things just to see if it worked or not. As time passed I became more and more interested in understanding WHY specific spaghetti stuck to the wall and some didn't. And as I analyzed and honed my own craft, I silently came around to things mean something. (And that meaning is one of the most reliable building blocks to evoke the idea.) I hope hearing someoe eventually coming around independently of classes gives you some amount of hope or comfort or satisfaction.
Thanks you so much for thie video Professor Booper, you've spoken in words what I felt about the intrinsic contradictory relationship between capitalism and art that I couldn't put words into. This might have been one of the most important videos I've ever watched. I think my biggest gripe with how institutions, particularly high school, teaches literature is how it forces students to adopt only one perception on a story, and its typically the one that the teacher themselves agrees with. That isn't always bad, but when a student has their own interpretation on it they're usually told they're wrong and forced back on the 'right track.' Obviously there are better and more logical interpretations on a story based on its text and whether it sufficiently aligns with the stories thematic narrative, but I feel like this type of disencouragement for students to think about what they read and how they individually feel about it is really such a disservice to how we as human beings come to appreciate art. Art should be more than people merely consuming products, it should be about getting invested in our fellow human beings, their personal works of art that they've put their heart into, and how it affects each of us. It's going to be inherently different and yet all these schools force us to think about it in the opposite direction, with one golden explanation, and every other perspective is either looked down upon with half-hearted comments, or worse, a failing grade.
The one, single problem I have with this is that a transactional, capitalist environment can also in theory optimize for certain kinds of poetic art, provided they dazzle consumers enough to provoke the feeling of "I could never do that, I need to persuade everybody to pay money for this genius work and make it popular". Some works of poetic art fail to get a lot of attention, but occasionally it seems like others actually blow up to levels that are almost confusing, and get a lot of people obsessing over their mystery or craftsmanship even if not every layer of meaning. Markets seem to have an unintentional feature of always serving social graphs that assemble in real time rather than individuals independently making choices.
Bopper, you drop a well-written, thought-out lecture on art, and post it free of charge? Before I say anything else, thank you so very much for this. Whenever I read Virginia Woolf, there are always sentences that I find perfectly encapsulate a feeling I feel I've only ever brushed across the surface of. And I think you've done the same with this. You mention that in your most pessimistic moments you believe that the blue curtain believer was someone who never paid much attention in school, and as former blue curtain believer, you are absolutely right: I didn't pay attention, and I was extremely arrogant in my own interpretation. And while you are right on that point, and that Capitalism does harm art, it does, also paradoxically perhaps, benefit it as well, via spreading the message to a larger audience, whose only barrier is money. I mention above that I was a blue curtain guy. It's embarrassing to admit, but I also used to be a racist, misogynistic P.O.S. when I lived with my parents, before I discovered the redemptive power of art. The Criterion Chanel, for example, exposed to me to so many new viewpoints, so many new ideas, and challenged so many of the points I held sacred in my youth, that I couldn't help but start to question that which I built my rapidly weakening foundation on. And once I started to question that, the whole rotten foundation I had built my world upon came crumbling down. You summarize it beautifully in your point that Capitalism dulls, blunts, but can never fully erase the human spirit, the desire for more, the desire to look inwards. And while it will continue to harm it as long as it exists, there will always be those, like myself, who benefit on a great personal level from it. I'll be re-watching this a few times in the coming days, as I've undoubtedly missed a few things here, but again, bravo on the great video, and on reminding me why I love art in the first place.
When you started talking about art as a transaction, it took me several sentences to realize you were literally talking about paying money. I thought you were being metaphorical, as in I pay with my time and attention and expect a meaningful or thought-provoking experience in return.
One who’s used to organic healthy food enjoys the taste of it tremendously and finds fast food repulsive naturally and without effort in resisting it, at the same time people who get used to eating processed fast foods enjoy the taste of it to the point of addiction and find healthy foods to be tasteless and obnoxious while also being economically disadvantaged due to their rarity and the difficulty in their production. But the problem with fast food is that it’s destructive to the health of the person and the society, not only due to its lack of nutrients but also because it contains harmful elements, which inevitably causes epidemics of stupidity, a deficiency in manners and morals lasting for generations, due to an obesity of the soul and cancer of the intellect
I would say this is your best video. I really enjoy the more academic material and I like seeing the teacher side of you come out more. Exemplary work, Bopper.
“Nothing in art is arbitrary.” That’s a quote from a video another RUclipsr made because he was annoyed that people often commented that he was finding meaning that wasn’t there.
I feel like you are talking about about multiple different issues here. I completely agree with capitalism and the public school system minimalising art literacy. But it is a strange comparison to lump modern abstract art into the literature conversation. Modern abstract art is little more than a mechanism for money laundering, people find meaning in it accidentally, and calling its practitioners heroes against capitalism for selling a ripped Haitian flag with grass stains on it called "untitled 86,943" for 45 million dollars is so crazy. No one is more consumerist than the American anti-capitalist. Art is not exempt from this. And, poor though it is, art literacy at least exists for the lower classes today as opposed to in the Renaissance, when it was for nobles and aristocracy. The "muh blue curtains" meme is poking fun at the English teacher's notion to assign meaning in specific instances where thier is not ant in certain instances. Yes the morons on the internet missuse the meme and don't understand metaphor because that's what happens when everyone gets to voice thier opinion, you sometimes hear an idiot. It seems like you are arguing 2 or 3 related but distinct points. And it doesn't really fit together in one video.
Your argument about minimalist art is backwards. If the economics of art are worth looking at, there’s no meaningful distinction between any movement. All art is used for tax avoidance by the uber-wealthy and corporations, and it’s certainly not true that minimalist artists are doing what they do as a scam. Most art that attracts high value is from dead artists. Artists that gain wealth and/or fame during their lifetime are incredibly rare under capitalism (Picasso, Basquiat, Pollock are major exceptions. Pollock was pumped up by the CIA to combat the growing cultural popularity of Socialist Realism coming from Soviet artists, but in all three cases, the monetary value of their art skyrocketed after death.) As for the last point, art literacy and education has little to do with economic system. Literary increased dramatically during the English Renaissance which was defined by the popular theater (Shakespeare/Marlowe) as opposed to the earlier, courtly poets; Ancient Greece was dominated by the theater (Sophocles, Aristophanes were super popular among the general public). We see incredibly high rates of literary and art literacy in places as disparate as Europe, China, post-colonial Africa, Cuba, the US, etc even though they are all vastly different. Technological innovations (television, printing press) and economic/political stability tend to have much more to do with increased art literacy than industrial capitalism
I agree with a lot of things you say, but something that still bothers me is when narratives don't make sense. Is there symbolic meaning to why they don't make sense? Could the story not have maintained it's symbolism while making sense? I understand if a creator was prioritizing there themes and symbolism over the cohesiveness of the plot; however, I ask as to whether symbolism can survive with a dysfunctional plot. An example I would point to is Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The plot is quite bad. If you need convinced of this, there are plenty of essays on RUclips regarding what makes it so bad. But it's defenders often look at reasons outside of the plot for why it is actually good. And to that end I ask: can you have symbolism and theme when the actions that take place to build them aren't cohesive? This of course only concerns art with narrative, but it's something I wanted to get off my chest. This is not to say your video made me angry, quite the opposite, it sparked a lot of thought. So thank you Bopper
It's a complicated question, so this response will mostly be thinking through the different issues we can encounter. For narratives that don't make sense, I think the discussion (particularly when it comes to Star Wars) has gotten pretty caustic, and I think it's worth splitting between criticisms of inconsistencies and of personal taste. As a corporate product, Disney-era Star Wars is going to always have a deeply compromised artistic vision, so I don't necessarily consider it a good case study in artistic success and failure. So, I would say the answer is yes to your question. You don't need cohesion for art to be meaningful and powerful. If you want to see films that successfully illustrate this, I wouldn't look at films like modern Star Wars because their compromised on a production side and also are cultural caustic when discussing them. You can see this better in works by directors like David Lynch (Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway), Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker, Solaris), Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Tapo, The Holy Mountain). These directors all tell stories that are narrative driven, but operate frequently on surreal dream logic. I would say for general use, it's better to be in conversation with a work of art rather than trying to best it, if that makes sense, and try to differentiate between an observable criticism and personal taste. For example, complaints about Luke's arc in The Last Jedi are primarily complaints of taste, and I think it's worth considering why it runs contrary to your taste and what you can learn about both the film and yourself in that complaint.
@@ProfessorBopper This comment made me watch The holy mountain, expecting it to be good due to being mentioned alongside Lynch's and Tarkovsky's works, but it didn't prepare me to the fact that it would become one of my favorite films of all time
damn, i just love the point about the blue curtains being a made up metaphor, so that the person telling the joke cannot just be proven wrong on the spot
Haven’t finished the video yet, but since this seems on topic, I just want to write it out. What you discuss in the video is exactly what I despise about ai “art”. You can’t analyze them, at least not in the same way you analyze actual art, because the decisions were arbitrarily made. Why are the curtains blue? Because from its data base the ai decided to color them blue. There is no human element, no deeper meaning. I mean sure, not all art has deeper meaning nor does it need to, but all the small decisions a person makes while drawing still reflects that person. Something that ai images lack. Ai images are just meaningless noise thrown together by combining data.
It's exhausting to read the comments after such a video and get a bigger picture of the whole problem. What is there to do, really? I remember a candidate for the far-right party in my country advocating for teaching more poetry in schools was publicly ridiculed for such an idea - and I don't believe he's genuine for a second - but it sure is disheartening that the only voice willing to speak truth to power coming from neo-nazis. I do enjoy gross polemics here and there, you know, genuinely stepping one people's toes. So whenever I see a discussion about loli hentai on X née Twitter, I always write something akin to "It's just pixels on a screen, so it can't be CP. Anyways, the author says she's like a 1000 year old loli baba, so it would be legal in-universe." It's stupid, but there is really nothing to do in a society devoid of soul. Don't bother reading this comment, some of you dim-wits wouldn't understand the meaning behind this random string of letters. You would need to know my intentions first.
In school, english, drama and arts class were really boring. Perhaps it is capitalism allocating poor resources into those classes and putting them all into math and science.
I'd never heard of this meme before, and like most memes, I don't understand it even after watching this video. Philosophy is totally lost on me. People keep telling me it starts to make sense after wresting with it for a while, but it's never gelled for me. I'm not sure how it links to capitalism either. I know I'm missing something, but that's the story of my life.
Thank you for this video, I think I really needed it right now so this fell into place beautifully. I feel like my comprehension of art isn’t as great as I’d like and want to learn more and practice it more but wasn’t sure how and watching this feels like a big step in the right direction for me. Like honestly the video feels tailor made for me since just like 8 months ago in my last semester of college I asked my philosophy teacher, the first time I’d taken a philosophy class, what kinds of topics to explore after I graduated to keep learning about philosophy, and one he mentioned and that I remembered was hermeneutics which is the practice of whole and circular thought, and I read a little and didn’t go much deeper (ironic and hypocritical, I know) but did write a little paper about why I thought it was a good school of thought. Then in this video you talk about circular thought when interpreting art in a purely functional sense, something I think I’m prone to doing, and outlined the exact issues that come with viewing things that way. And that felt like I’d just been handed a little revelation. That teacher of mine said I seemed to have found my own personal Ariadne’s golden thread when I stumbled on that intro to philosophy class and that I should follow it. 8 months later I pretty let my new life in the 40 hour work week get the best of me and I put all that sort of stuff to the side, and I feel like this video kinda nudged me back like “no, the thread is still there.” So for that, and for reading my little rant if anyone did, thank you very very much and I’ll probably be back to this video to rewatch and try and digest more of it, as someone who wants to write books of his own one day.
This was awesome. The discussion of consumerist and "functional" understandings of art reminded me of Patricia Taxon's vids on Getting Over It and Don't Hug Me I'm Scared
But dont many enjoy functional perspectives of art. Many enjoy analysing realism and plotholes infact it could be the case many more enjoy looking at art this way. Readers also enjoy the non story elements (e,g. Tension and spectical) being another thing many seem to simpily enjoy. And ontop of that i dont see any inherit good to seeing art in a poetic way so its lovely you have a way of consuming art you enjoy sometimes i enjoy art that way too but you shouodn't push that on children who may not enjog this way of enjoying art.
Someone enjoying fiddling away at plot holes doesn’t magically give Blue Curtains analysis any value since it’s relies on a descriptive claim (“the curtains are just blue”) and if education were based strictly on whether or not a child enjoys doing something, we’d be a society of deficient nematodes
It's so goddamn weird that as a species who's entire interactions with anything boil down "can I eat or have sex with this?" still shows some kind of yearning for some abstract sublime. It's even weirder that the level of this yearning is so variable. Some of us missed the day they handed out the sublime brains in school, others took double portions. So on one hand I get the metaphor deniers, since that doesn't really help someone living in paleolithic Africa. But on the other, that same drive for stuff beyond the material is made humanity what it is, through millenia of evolving pattern recognition. Having to figure out what it is about abstract stuff that satisfies the meat and electricity that is me, despite things like souls and spirituality and all that jazz being non-existent (imo), is one of the most frustrating and satisfying parts of being human. So yeah, good video Bopper. P.S. There actually is an objectively correct interpretation of metaphorical art: mine.
Hmm, still digesting this video and rewatching parts. I disagree that this is a unique phenomenon that has arisen with capitalism. If we go back far enough, people who complain about the "blue curtains" very likely wouldn't be interacting with the medium at all. I think the attempt to try and force every 16 year old high schooler to try and truly understand something like Great Gatsby a hopeless task. I think it is at odds with the biological and psychological growth that most kids are going through. Of course that also relies upon a teaching system that doesn't require a "correct" answer, like you denoted. Unfortunately it seems like education everywhere serves as a daycare-to-job factory. I'm not sure if thats something we can overcome, or if it is the natural path we have taken as humanity.
Thank you for being a bastion of actual analysis in a sea of functionality and plot summaries. As someone who is at the very bottom of "the curtains symbolize depression," I find that creatives such as yourself, those who actually want to say something that is nuanced, serve as a foundational touchstone for attempting to move forward into the realm of art. You are a massive influence upon me and this is definitely one of your best works.
So, are you saying poetic art needs to be treated more like a video game? Either way, I'll stay the comfort reader. If I want to read a book to think through, I'll grab a Real Analysis one.
I think in a way you answered a question that I pondered for a longtime. Is that why I never cared for “spoilers”. A good work of fiction is so much than its function of a plot line. Knowing what will happen later into the story does not take always anything that makes a story enjoyable, any sentimentality any “vibe” any imagination even inspiration it might motivate. (And I’d even argue“spoilers“ enable a better judgement of whether reading or watching in the first place based on personal preference.) I always thought of myself as the “unable to detect let alone appreciate the subtleties ” kind of person. Maybe I should give myself more credit where it’s due.
Listening at 22:55 and trying to jog my brains' muscles for metaphors, I realized something. Minimalist art is in a way, rebelling against the capitalist need for functionality. I've never before had an interest in minimalist art but now I do. There must be a lot more depth in the metaphors of minimalist art than I first thought.
Standardized curriculum is turning kids into POW Picard about media literacy in a way that's too meta for them to cognivize. THERE! ARE! BLUE! CURTAINS!
I was a steve in high school, and I fully agree with you. Literature class teaches you that "X work from Y author is about Z" and you're expected to write that down in a test under a time constraint. It doesn't teach kids to appreciate art at all. You're supposed to ripen your tastes on your own terms in your own tempo, not because the curriculum has decided that the average 16 year old must be ready for shakespeare by now. If school rams a child through understanding the meaning behind romantic era english poetry when their favorite work is still the fourth harry potter book it'll just make them grow frustrated and teach them the opposite of appreciating art.
This brought to mind two different Shakespeare classes I took during my education: Once as a dual enrollment during my senior year of high school, and once during my senior year of college. In my high school class, Shakespeare was taught as metaphorical but strictly in a sense of what the 'right' interpretation of the text was supposed to be, akin to a standard High School literature text. In college however, I was taught by an older gentlemen who had made Shakespeare the focus of his profession. He taught us about the way Shakespeare's plays were presented, how directors would omit or rearrange some lines to make their own interpretations of the work. He also showed us two versions of Hamlet, a Soviet production in black and white and a more modern BBC rendition. He showed us the two versions of the scene where Hamlet confronts his father's ghost, and I personally found the Soviet version to be more interesting. In the Soviet version, the father is entirely clad in darkness, save for the look of his eye just before he vanishes at dawn's light. It creates ambiguity, about whether it truly is the specter of his father or the shadows playing with Hamlet's imagination. In the BBC version, his father appears tangibly before him and even physically grabs his shoulders, erasing all ambiguity. Needless to say I greatly preferred that college class, despite it being an 8 AM. Rather than emphasizing a correct interpretation, he welcomed varying student interpretations, even ones he personally disagreed with. In fact, Hamlet act one scene five was the basis of my final thesis for his class, arguing it to be the most important scene in terms of impact on the rest of the play's themes depending on how it is depicted. To end this massive wall of text, I want to bring up a different education meme, the one that goes "another beautiful day without using sin cos and tan". Like you said, the American education system teaches you a yes or a no, how to press a button but not much more in a critical sense. The existence of sin cos and tan is a perfect example, as unless you are going into some major robotics or physics career, that information is doomed to be rendered mute. In contrast to this, my college English professor didn't teach me to give a yes or no, but rather to encourage us to explore the text and find our own interpretations. I really value that encouragement of critical thinking in an educator.
This was an amazing video Bopper, I'll be looking forward to your future videos!
you may think of me a specter of your past, a fading fragment of knowledge lodged deep within some neglect crevice of your mind
you may think of me as someone you have escaped, a harrowing experience in some cluttered classroom that you've long since put behind you
but i am not gone
i am merely
*_inverted_*
Similarly, the point of learning sine and cosine and tangent is not to have tools to use in the future, but to understand that the triangle as an object has internal relationships that can be quantified in ways that themselves are related, and then those relationships can be remixed into different shapes, like sinusoidal waves or unit circles or modeling rates of change. Mathematics is a humanities subject, and it is a travesty that it is taught as if it were a weapon for shaping the human mind into a logical machine or an algorithm to be processed computationally. Proofs are simply poems that reference themselves so deeply that reality itself struggles to show them wrong, using symbols that are more abstract that words in an effort to reach for transcendent universality.
But the beauty of a poem is invisible if you don't understand the language.
Personally I always took the meme as "*sometimes* the curtains are just blue", not necessarily that there is no greater meaning, but that not every single thing necessarily has a greater meaning. You can have symbolism and metaphor and mere prose to make the scene a bit more vivid in the same scene or work. Sometimes the curtains represent depression, sometimes they are just blue, and sometimes the author just thinks that some specific detail is cool. Great video btw! I love it when a video makes me think, seems like they are harder to find nowadays
Yeah. I think it's best mostly as a moment to touch earth whenever one may get lost in a sort of navel-gazy spiral getting increasingly abstracted from the text. A lot of mental legwork to what end? Sometimes missing the forest for the trees and just focusing in on a single tree kind of intellectual exercise.
It can yield interesting fruit, not gonna lie. It's just not the end-all-be-all takeaway from the text. (I think at times the sunk costs of it is one reason why people can get precious about their interpretations, their "head canons" to the point that they prescribe it to be the only truth to glean from the text. If anyone walked away from it differently, it's simply inconceivable... rather at least a moment to be at least a little bit curious about.)
I try not to be too judgemental of people who repeat this meme, because it is a reaction to big problem in our education system- in that, we are bogged down with pointless, unchallenging, understimulating busy work. When you've had worksheet after worksheet of bland repetition, being told to consider the meaning of the curtains can feel like more pointless BS.
A lot of English teachers don't exactly do a great job of explaining it either. I remember the difference between two years of English where one teacher was really into Old English poetry and she got into detail with the history and the meaning of the work, and it was a really fascinating class.
Then one year I had a teacher who could barely pronounce the author's names and just played movies instead of teaching the material since she couldn't engage the students enough to get them to read the assignments. (Yes, I was literally the only student to read the books, but that's neither here nor there.)
X2, I also saw that happened with songs on the internet, where even the artist them shelf would say that "x" doesn't mean anything but some people would still insist there's a deeper meaning behind it for example Banana Man by Tally Hall, i even expirincid myself since a lot of times i would draw something meaningless and my mother would still be asking me for the meaning even though I already told her there's non
(Idk if I wrote that right I'm spanish)
There was that "conservativecore games" list going around on Twitter a while back that everyone dunked on. One of the games on there was Silent Hill 3, which is, through the thinest possible layer of horror-metaphor, about a teenage girl who's trying to get an abortion against the wishes of religious fundamentalists. It really stuck with me when someone pointed this out and the guy who'd made the list answered "no, it's a game about running away from monsters". I approach art pretty "functionally", as you put it, but even still, it really struck me as this moment of... Wow, you really JUST take what's literally on screen into account, huh? It was this really weirdly sad moment for me, because I honestly could not imagine enjoying art if I saw it the way that person did, completely refusing to take any deeper meaning that's not explicitly, literally given to me.
Explains why a lot of conservatives miss the entire point of Star Trek. Or the X-Men. Missing out on the metaphors speaking about racism, being othered, and ideals like working together to create a better future. Understanding schisms in society, and being able to freely speak and add nuance to the context we live in, is paramount in healing those schisms. Some time ago, I realized that american schools ingrain sort of an assembly line worker mentality. And I'm glad that I grew up on the other side of the world.
Imagine thinking any of the Silent Hill games are JUST about running away from monsters, my goodness.
In high school I had to read the book Unwind. I did not like the book, and for my final paper on the book I described why. I got a D on the paper because how I’d felt was apparently incorrect, or not what was expected. I remember very clearly my teacher telling me “It doesn’t matter what you thought, you’re supposed to write what happened” I quickly lost interest in reading for school and began using sparknotes to do the work on books, and it actually improved my grades in English. I think the frustration around the blue curtains can come from how the ‘blue curtains’ are expected to be interacted with in school. It’s not presented as art meant to be pondered and understood, but like a scan from sheet, like a math equation with correct and incorrect answers. The question stops being “what do the curtains mean” and becomes “what does the teacher want you to think the curtains mean” it can make it feel pointless. Why would they write in metaphor if I’m being told the meaning overtly. In high school I remember heavily agreeing the blue curtains meme, in retrospect I was just frustrated, but unaware what it was that was frustrating me
I remember in Year 11 (that's the school year from 15-16 years old) my English teacher had us analyse William Blake's poem The Clod and the Pebble.
It's a very short poem about a clod of mud being positive about love and a pebble in a stream retorting by being very negative. It's part of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, and we had to analyse it under that lens. We spent a class discussing the poem, and the teacher was very much of the opinion that the pebble - with its cynical perspective, hardened exterior, shaped by the stream - represented experience, and the clod represented innocence. He argued Blake was saying that as you're hurt in love, you become more cynical about it. As an annoying teen contrarian, I had the exact opposite reading - the clod is specifically described as having been trodden on by cows, where the stream the pebble sits in is described in pleasant terms. I saw (and still see) the clod as representing experience, as someone who's gone through hard times and made it out unscathed, and the pebble as innocence, as someone protected from the danger of being tread on by cows by a coddling, nurturing stream. The clod is positive about love BECAUSE it is aware of the hardships of life, because it's experienced them and seen how love improves his life, where the pebble's cynicism comes from a lack of hardship, from a lack of need and opportunity for love to, as the clod says "build a Heaven in Hell's despair". Having known only the Heaven of the stream it fears love, and thinks it can "build a Hell in Heavens' despite"
My teacher gave me an A+ on that paper, and wrote a note that he completely disagreed with my reading but that it was compelling and well reasoned.
It was such a great approach, and the fact he always encouraged and respected readings other than his own was phenomenal. I really think I owe him a lot of the passion I have for art and storytelling - he was a truly brilliant teacher.
Apart from not teaching students how to properly read art and literature, I think one of the major failings of the US education system is not teaching students how to make art. If students were more well versed in writing, perhaps when reading a book they would be more understanding of what went into the creation of it. They may realize that the author mentioned that the curtains were blue for a reason, even if they don't entirely realize what the reason is, because at the very least they wanted the reader to know about it. Every word in a book is there because the author thought it was worth the time to put it in. If it didn't matter that the curtains were blue, and they just were and it meant nothing, the author *would not have mentioned it.* But because students are not taught how to write, or what the creative process is like, and because they're so removed from the people that create the works that their teachers are trying to get them to read, they don't realize that an actual person made a conscious choice to tell them this detail for a reason. It's the real idea behind Chekhov's Gun: it's not just about foreshadowing or telegraphing, it's about economy of description. You don't put something in that you don't mean to "use" in some way. But you won't understand that unless you're familiar with the process, either by doing or by being familiar with someone who does it regularly.
This also reminded me of how plot twists are revered on a literal level removed of implications; it's because many audiences would rather be shocked than enlightened. The discussion starts and ends with "it was crazy that that happened" with very little discussed between
This is exactly why I say "a good story cannot be spoiled". Not because twists shouldn't occur or anything like that, but if your entire story is only good because you have a plot twist. You just didn't write a well written story in my opinion.
An example of what I mean from Dune, as well as all the sequels, the opening narration for every chapter literally tells you "this is what's gonna happen", like how the opening paragraph tells you the entire plot to Romeo and Juliet. That doesn't stop either story from being well told
@@aaronwishard7093 It's well-trodden ground but I concur with the common opinion that _subverting audience expectations_ isn't in and of itself worth anything. If the plot point the audience _expected_ would've been more coherent and satisfying, it's no sin to meet their expectations. Surprise isn't inherently valuable, it's what you _do_ with that surprise. And for every brilliant twist in fiction there's many more that fall flat.
My personal perspective on "the curtains are blue" is that it also represents a failure of the fundemental stucture of the education system. The curtains are blue because they represent depression as an interpretation given by an english teacher is testable. Its multiple choice, its the same for everyone because it is presented as a truth. There is no discussion and thought, no room for other perspective. No child who is encouraged to wonder for themselves what the blue curtains represent. We cannot put in our test answer "maybe the soft rippling shape of the blue curtains is meant to call to mind the sea, or a longing for the sea." or "the blue curtains could represent an artificial barrier to the outside world, a division from the blue sky by an almost mockingly blue obstacle, the place he lives is his world in itself, with blue curtains representing a perversion of the blue sky that lies outside the scope of his isolation."
the curtains are blue, and heres whats on the test about them.
I think that's why in hindsight i was lucky i was assigned so many reports and discussion assignments in school.
It was frustrating but I think it did help me grow some thinking muscles.
Ofc most of highschool was "here are 5 classics, here are the correct interpretations, don't blow your SAT/IB/Tawjihi".
I hate literary analysis because my teachers would tell me I'm wrong for having different interpretations of a story. The grading is super subjective! Why would teachers mark you wrong just because they don't disagree with your interpretations? That's the problem. I heard my former classmate said that when she was analyzing a poem, her English teacher disagreed with her, thus she earned a low grade. There was a time when the author of the poem came. My classmate asked if her analysis made sense, and the author said that her interpretations are correct. So the teacher changed her grade because of that.
But if we are talking about students dismissing the meaning of symbols in literature, why don't you analyze John Lennon's "I Am The Walrus" to tell me what that song means? And while you're at it, explain why Ralph's name is literally "Ralph". This is another problem students face. The teachers would just pick up random details from the text for students to analyze when there's really no hidden meaning. As Mr. Hippo says, "Sometimes uhh, you know, sometimes a story is just a story. You try to read into every little thing and find meaning in everything anyone says, you'll just drive yourself crazy."
The story from your classmate made me wish that the "all Romanians are vampires" trope was true irl
On the point about "plot-holes" and Hamlet, I think there are 2 things to consider there: 1) you can fill them in with your brain however you want, and 2) you can consider these inconsistencies to be *part* of the narrative, rather than a hole in it. On Hamlet, I think the timeline incongruence genuinely adds to the sense of madness and contributes to overarching themes of truth, deception, and the (at times) ambiguity between the two that are so present in the play. Prince Hamlet spends the entire play ranting and raving to such an extent that other characters in the play are uncertain of his lucidity on a scene-to-scene basis, and realistically, that same sense *should* be present in the audience, and yet there's such an obsession with consistency and reliability of narration among modern audiences under capitalism that I recall several of my classmates balking at the notion that virtually every occurrence off-screen may be complete cock-and-bull, and that 3/4 of the cast should only be trusted as far as you can see them. I think that the inconsistent timeline of Hamlet, while it may very well have been a series of small oversights in the writing processes as the play has been written and re-written in a long game of telephone, ends up adding to the play, as this can very well be interpreted as the fragile foundation of lies upon lies within the court of Denmark comes collapsing in on itself at the end of the play. Tl;dr, "plot holes" should be *engaged with as part of the text* rather than rejected, as they so often are in modern online criticism.
Actually the authors trying to get across that the person isn’t color-blind
Alternatively, the person is red-green colorblind, and the curtains’s color were one of the only colors he knew for sure.
@@iantaakalla8180 Wish this were true but then it turns out they're god-damn purple.
What if the person was told they are blue, but does not actually understand nor can perceive "blue."
As a new High School English teacher, this video filled me with an existential dread that is particularly brutal and soul crushing given that it is a Sunday afternoon as I watch this.
Thanks Booper, I'm going to get ready for Monday now.
Maybe I can get one student to see that the curtains aren't just blue, that'll be enough for me.
In my experience, the Blue Curtains analogy isn't a metaphor for the worthlessness of analyzing stories as metaphor, but the incompetence of the teachers trying to teach in that way and failing spectacularly. The blue curtains example is generally used to describe a sentence like "Samuel moved his rook, the light passing through the pale blue curtains faintly illuminating the chessboard." prompting an English teacher to conclude that the reason that the curtains are described as blue is that Sam must be feeling depressed in this scene. As the author of this sentence, I can confirm that I described the curtains as blue for the same reason I described them as pale: it sounded good. That's it.
Now, there IS meaning you can find in this sentence. I described the light as "faintly" illuminating the chessboard in order to create a sense of quiet atmosphere, accentuating the subtle intensity of a chess game. The problem the Blue Curtains analogy highlights is that most educators have no idea how to identify that intended meaning, so they spend their class time analyzing the insignificant details and wasting everyone's time. That's been my experience throughout high school and even college, English teachers going on and on about details I can tell are not the focus of this scene.
TLDR: The Blue Curtains analogy is not indicative of an emphasis of functional storytelling in education, but a commentary on how rare it is for poetic storytelling to be properly understood, even among those whose job it is to teach it.
I’ve often seen many a (mostly conservative) joke online mocking people who talk about their “feelings” on art. This hypothetical person cares about how a painting or novel made them personally feel, rather than what the art objectively shows. Many people hold the belief that feelings should be separate from art because feelings aren’t a valid way to interact with art because feelings aren’t objective and thus shouldn’t be taken intellectually seriously. But feelings, especially the complex, are an essential part of intelligence. We interact with art, we feel, our feelings shape our thoughts, consciously or not, and our thoughts give rise to ideas, theories, and new art. Many of history’s greatest scientists loved art and literature because both art and science ultimately stem from the weird enigma that is the human brain.
TLDR: facts DO care about your feelings. Great video Bopper
Conservatives: FACTS dont care about FEELINGS Librul.
Russian composers: I am deeply depressed. My dog died, my family died, my wife cheated on me, I have cancer, I have aids, I am forced to repress my sexuality, I am old. Words cannot express the depth of my sufferings, so I will translate my emotions to music.
Actors: Well, to really prepare for this part, I murdered my family so i could really get the feelings of loss that the character experiences in the second act.
whats funny is that conservatives entire worldview revolves around their FEELINGS about eurocentric culture. that its objectively beneficial for the human species. but a little bit of mathematical and scientific analysis shows its only caused net harm to 99% of the human species and killed at least 75% of the wildlife it comes into contact with lol. its objectively unsustainable in every measurable way, but because they were raised to perpetually glorify eurocentric culture (and monarchy/feudalism, as a side effect, since its still the main mode of economic/political distribution) with stuff like disneys pro european propaganda, and since they arent taught that they COULD be wrong about anything, cognitive dissonance takes over their brains and stops any potential critical introspection about the mathematical and scientific results of their worldview. objectively, conservatives care more about feelings than they do about undeniable facts.
I wanna thank you for making this video.
Not only did it give me a lot to think on, but it also helped me recenter my priorities on a project that’s been giving me trouble lately. Definitely needed that.
I got a fnaf movie ad in the middle of this which felt incredibly poignant 😂😭
I don't exactly know how to say this -- I really appreciate how your means of analyses go against the grain and make me think about my own perspective and manner of critique 🙏 because yeah we live in a really binary-focused society....... people fall into it whether they mean to or not
Anyway I trust that you make plenty of chuds mad with this video 💖💖
I only just found your channel today, but this video is phenomenal. I'm between jobs right now, but when I'm able I intend to subscribe to your patreon to support more work like this.
Truly superb work.
Listening to this whilst writing fanfiction. and boy does this make me feel a whole new type of depression. But I do believe that what you say is.. interesting. I tried many words to describe it but this is the only one i felt comfortably saying. thank you for the this weird feeling.
A cool metanarrative of this video is that you are presumably mostly funded by patrons. Giving up the video by video profit analysis can give more freedom to create interesting and thought provoking art.
I see quite a few people in this comment section talking about how they read Shakespeare in school, and I have come to realize that in addition to the problems regarding how literature is taught (or is failed to be taught) is the problem that many English classes treat reading Shakespeare's works in the same way they treat reading a short story or novel. Shakespeare wrote PLAYS, not novels, and you end up losing a lot of the context when you reduce it to just text. His works are meant to be watched or performed, not just read. Plays are meant to be interpreted not just by the audience but by the directors, actors, set and costume designers, and musicians if there are any, and this can change how it is perceived. While a book is only written one way, and cant really be changed very much between publications, each performance is going to be different. The way the actors happen to say their lines or simply how they move on stage, the colors and shapes of the costumes, the lighting, the musical accompaniment, the pacing of each scene, all of this can have an impact on how the story and characters are perceived. A whole extra level of symbolism is lost when it is reduced to mere lines on a page for high schoolers to flatly read through. Imagine if when you went to the movie theater or a video store (do they still have those?) and the guy there just plops the script down in front of you.
Now that I’ve dropped my joke comment, my main struggle with poetic art is not necessarily entirely within understanding the deeper meaning but rather just understanding the language.
The passage from Hamlet at 20:53, for example, is a great example of my constant struggles with trying to understand what the fuck these sentences even mean. Nobody says shit like this but if I were to read a more simplified version of the plot I’d be missing out on potential meaning.
I don’t mind spending time mulling over art and thinking about it in my spare time, but I really struggle with having to go line by line and translate it in my head to sentences that don’t sound like they were written by some deranged lunatic. Like you quoted in the video, the struggle IS the poetic art, but I’m pretty sure the struggle is supposed to be understanding what something represents not what it even means on a face level.
The worst part is that that's pretty tame as far as Hamlet goes.
Sure, I have to figure out the bounds of the phrase and the rhythm of it, but once that's done I've got it, the sentence is comprehensible.
There were segments that I just had to nod along to and accept that I'll never understand them as half the words are out of my vocabulary and the other half are in an order that's not conducive to intuiting the meaning.
Combined with my inability to remember names or specific phrases I struggle a great deal with Shakespeare in much the same way you're describing.
one thing i would say with Shakespeare specifically is that when you are taught it in most high school classes you are either given it to read as a written text, or perhaps the teacher will have the class read it out loud or even perform it. Shakespeare plays are *plays* and they are much easier to comprehend when you watch one performed by actors who are familiar with the content and context of these plays. just the physical body language and verbal delivery of these actors does a lot to make Shakespeare more easy to understand, so if you ever would want to try getting into his stuff -- or if you happen to still be in high school and are studying him -- I think its much better to watch a performance (which can be done easily by searching on youtube)
I'm primarily a non-fiction reader (usually history) and an illustrator. I am often on the "the curtains are just blue" side when I read fiction. I appreciate the video, but personally, it has not really changed my viewpoint that much. Poetry is different of course, but when reading novels I feel like if you get stuck on descriptive details you can create a lot of meanings in the work the author simply did not intend on. If this is something you enjoy doing, of course go right ahead but presenting it as the right way to interact with art is a little redundant. As an artist, when I create something I create it because I think it's beautiful purely from an aesthetic point of view. If someone looks at my work and puts a different meaning on it than simple aesthetic pleasure, that is fine, but not the intended takeaway.
I don't know, that is my two cents.
I guess my disconnect with this is the idea of intention being the end-all be-all when it comes to literature or any other art. I hold the view that once a work is published, its creator ceases to have any more authority on it than the work’s audience. That extends even to sequels that recontextualize the original work. How many people disregard Godfather Part 3 or the Matrix sequels when they were made by the same artists as the original?
Obviously that doesn’t mean that any interpretation has equal value, but if someone can prove an author wrong about something in their novel using textual evidence, that carries a lot more weight for me than the latter saying “I’m right because I say so and I wrote the damn thing”.
@@DAHIESTABUNNE Also the author's interpretation of their own work is not static and they may have forgotten why exactly they decided to make the curtains blue, or they may since have decided that the blue curtains have a meaning to them they didn't at the time they wrote it.
Circumstances in the author's life may colour their interpretation of their old works. They may begin to resent them and consciously avoid engaging with their legacy. Any number of things might have changed; unless you can travel through time and ask the author why the curtains were blue the very second they put pen to paper, you're not going to get an infallible answer. Even then the answer you get won't be definitive - one of the fascinating things about the human mind is we can do things for reasons we don't consciously understand.
I thoroughly enjoyed this, and I'm very glad you brought attention to this topic. I won't try to say that "this is what I've been saying all along", but I do think that this will speak to a wide variety of people with experience in creative fields, myself included.
My "Steve said the curtains are just blue" moment is someone in middle school complaining about having to take music class, since they weren't going to use it in the future. While this sentiment is also commonly applied to subjects like math and science, it definitely exemplifies how the education system is teaching for job security over any form of actual self-enrichment. I'd say it's even more notable for the arts, because even though there are creative professions, they typically aren't well paying or well respected. Perhaps this is also circular though, with being not well paying making a profession (and the teaching to that profession) not well respected, which is why we don't get funding for the arts, memes about metaphors in high school taught literature, and Steve complaining about learning music theory.
While we are in no shortage of examples of high school students not fulling engaging in literature, I can testify to how even those involved in the arts can be pushed away from literature, thanks to how the education system has presented it and how capitalism has changed our expectations for art. While I engaged with and participated in various creative mediums on my own time, I was absolutely tuned out by any English class assignment that involved reading. I could try to excuse this with a lack of time thanks to my other activities going on, a lack of enjoyment of the process of reading, or genuine difficulty in understanding the content. Regardless, I ultimately did not actually read most of the books I was supposed to and got by on quick skims and online reviews. From this experience, I can totally understand the appeal of calling out Daisy's Green Light as basically a sham. To this day I don't really get it, but that's due to my complete lack of an attempt to, as I was relying on sources that could only cover functional aspects like plot beats and character descriptions. And I say all this as someone who actually enjoyed reading and creative writing on my own time.
Taking classes on subjects like animation and film past high school is what really enforced the idea that "everything is intentional in art" for me. Of course, there are definitely some ways that something can be made unintentionally, especially with film when it comes to how things play out on set. Even then, I think what you discussed in your conclusion about art being a two-way process is interesting, as there's still value in engaging with any unintentional aspects of creative works that may occur. I'm in full support of critiques on "X doesn't have any meaning, stop trying to say it does", and I really hope that this video lands on people that need to hear it.
At the risk of sounding like a total buffoon, this piece, like some others discussing "the curtains are just blue" fails to convince me of the wrongheadedness of the functional critic (as this video describes them).
A willing suspension of disbelief being broken by details that fit on theme but unravel the narrative chronology is not just the audience member being trained to inspect art like an appliance, it can also be the carelessness of the author or editor.
This can be seen on a case by case basis, some films or books can be cynically assembled as products for the capitalist content machine, and like cheap products they show defects at the slightest of inspections
Some can be crafts made with greater attention and can only show cracks under different analytical lenses, like comedy that ages poorly becuase more modern lenses show in greater contrasts the way the problematic attitudes the work uncritically reproduces. Or a historical fiction work that describes an ancient culture with details that more recent archeology and historical research shows to be wrong.
I don't feel the conversation between audience and text always is the two way mixing of inner content that is described near the end. And I admit here, as a STEM student, I am not truly equipped to deal with the distinction between death of the author as a starting point for analyzing a text and the seeming carte blanche it gives audience members to pour whatever meaning they want onto the text and more troubling, they sometimes use their reading of the work not just to pour notions of intention onto the text but onto the author.
And here is the crux of the issue for me, a functional analysis of the mechanics of plot can be a misguided attempt to find faults that on the whole are inconsequential to the emotions or reflections the piece of art imparts on the viewer. But that to me is less harmful than analysis that read the work in ways not just anathema to the intention of the author but to justify a moral indictment of them. (e g. Readings of Dune that just take it as a white savior narrative by people who are in no way of the stem or conservative persuasion)
We must not have beauty, for it may lead to horror. At the end of all things, the universe becomes cold and still, homogenous, for there is really only one truth and all else is just entropic oscillations whirling down into that abyss. The golden path is inevitable.
As someone who is hoping to start an English teaching credential program next year, thanks for the existential dread/reality check. I don't know if there's a way to fix this flaw in the American education system. Post-pandemic, students are struggling to meet standards with literally everything, and with shorter attention spans due to the state of social media and a lot of pop culture being very easy to digest, it is only going to get more difficult to get over that initial frustration that comes from not understanding a work that has more to offer than what can be seen at face value. I think one of the points you made that really spoke to me is the fact that the meme isn't even referencing an actual novel/symbolic element, since the creator didn't want to look stupid for misunderstanding Hamlet. Because of how the education system works, there is this deep-seeded fear of being wrong that so many students have, especially those that are struggling in a class. It is way easier to be dismissive of the curtains than to say you don't understand why they're blue. I think this fear of being wrong also extends to students that have different interpretations of a work than the stuff they can find on SparkNotes or what their teacher is saying in class. The fact that these stories have been studied for years means that there is always a standard interpretation of its symbols, so straying from that, especially if you struggle to articulate yourself on why, often goes poorly. Which, again, leads to dismissing the entire idea of deeper analysis. It seems like a lot of English education, especially before college, is regurgitating the same points over and over, and whoever can say it in the prettiest way gets the highest grade. I forgot where I was going with this. Anyway, great video, you've given me a lot to think about. Gotta be one of my favorite Fire Emblem video essays of all time.
I wonder, is there any solution that does not involve a disintegration of something? Because this is so fundamental to America at this point.
Finding out that a youtuber you watch has actual thoughts in their head is like the emotional opposite of finding out they sexually assaulted or groomed people in their fandom.
Imagine developping class consciousness from a video of the guy who gave you advice on how to pick units in fire emblem path of radiance.
And then you learn how to pick Fire Emblem units based on class consciousness.
Now you get why Dorcas poisoned the mutton.
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 the lords of the castle need an everflowing supply of fighters because if they earn too much exp they can promote and they'll revolt. This is why they poisoned his mutton.
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740Dorcas is like that story of John Henry vs the Steam engine.
Except there's no steam engine and the mountain is just fodder enemies in between Dorcas and the boss.
Honestly Idk what to comment about the video but to boost the algorythm I'll just say that the person who reads this is now obligated to read "100 years of solitude" or I'll appear in their house
The idea that students cant grasp metaphor in media because its the antithasis of what school teaches makes alot of sense
The need to be "correct" ruined literature classes for me. English felt like a history class: that there's a correct interpretation (or set of interpretations) to a certain work that you have to find. My classes taught me to ask "What's the meaning of this work?" instead of "What does this work mean to you?" That question was only really poised to me at church, as I developed a personal Christian faith that I now call my own. And even then, it took a lot of time for my analytical school brain to get away from the idea of there always being an objective "right" answer.
I ended up going to STEM school since I adore mathematics and think there's so much beauty to them. But I was always sad to hear my peers say things like "I'm an engineer, I don't mess with reading." Sure, STEM allows the world to function on the massive global scale that we see today. But engaging with art, practicing self-discovery, wondering about ourselves, other people, the world around us - those things bring life color and make life meaningful. We're made to be full people, not machines to go through the motions each day. There's so much beauty to struggling with difficult life questions and sharing our ideas with others through art. It makes me sad that not everyone chooses to explore that.
You put it well. Modern society has little need to explore art in order to function at a basic level, but *humanity* needs to explore meaning in order to deepen its understanding of itself, as well as understanding of meaning.
Religious experience is, at least at some level, inherently symbolic and metaphorical, in that it is fundamentally about finding greater personal meaning in the world, and the search for meaning through symbolism in scripture is just one aspect of that greater search for universal purpose.
i used to be a blue curtain proponent in high school and i'm now a literature major and i spend all my time reading "too much" into the meaning and themes etc. i think the reason so many people buy into that idea is when teachers do try to introduce any non-literal readings in class, a lot of the time it's done quite poorly. not necessarily blaming teachers (or more accurately i'm not blaming JUST the teachers) but they fail to get across the idea that a work of art COULD even have any non literal non functional value to their students. when i was in school, all of my teachers were like this. any deeper meanings were not to be thought about and arrived at by ourselves. it was like a math formula and there was a correct answer, and usually the teacher was quizzing us on what that correct answer was. i focused on functional analysis at the time because my english teachers painted metaphorical meaning like i'm just supposed to magically come to the same conclusions as them. when i came to different conclusions or argued different symbolism they would give me bad grades and say i had the wrong answer. this started to change for me when i started doing media analysis online, finally in an environment where i wouldn't be penalized for thinking something different. and when i got to university it got even better because now i was talking to professors who no matter what kind of take i had would say something encouraging like "i didn't think about it like that" and we would have a conversation about it. i was finally told that my reading of the work also has value and now if i write a paper with opinions and analysis that are completely contrary to the class discussions i still just get feedback on my argumentation and organization and how to make my paper stronger and i don't get marked down for saying something different.
I think it's easy to get sucked into the framework of functional analysis even when pushing back against the blue curtains meme. Because there's a tendency to respond, "well actually here's all the ways in which the book connects the color blue with depression, this scene is a setup for a later payoff in which the character admits to their depression and discusses the blue curtains, here's an interview with the author I dug up in which he says that the blue represents depression, the work is clearly referencing earlier work by Fancy McAuthorname in which blue curtains were tied to depression, therefore the RIGHT ANSWER is that the blue curtains represent depression and other interpretations are WRONG ANSWERS." It's still a very functional way of looking at the story, it's just extending functional analysis to include metaphor, in which the story becomes a giant sudoku puzzle of identifying which column is a metaphor for which row.
It says something, I think, that the meme about symbolic analysis of art being dumb is, itself, a neat little metaphor. Like yes. sometimes the curtains are just blue! sometimes the author wanted that to have meaning, sometimes they didn't but a careful reader might find meaning there anyway, sometimes the author wanted the curtains to have meaning but not the one you think...
For example, "sometimes the curtains are just blue" can be interpreted, possibly despite the wishes of its creator, as a call for individual analysis and interpretation of a work, a reminder that every reader (in this case) takes something different from a text. And sometimes you should just have fun with it and look too deep into things like dumb memes about lit class!
The curtains are just blue, not about depression. but is "the curtains are just blue, not about depression" not a profound statement about the alienation from art produced by the hectic and result-focused reality of the school system?
This might be why I didn't have friends in high school.
But also like. And this is something I've been mad about since we read la casa in collina when I was 16. It's always depression. It's always about how much life sucks. it's always about how the main character who is very obviously a reflection of the author is a directionless coward who hides in the comfortable illusion of the house on the hill instead of doing something to help the people around him or at least dying with them. Like yeah thank you so much. It's not like I'm not already depressed enough and afraid enough about my future. now I gotta read the extended suicide note of a much better person than me who still thought he wasn't good enough. at 8:30 am on a monday. and I can't even do drugs about it. makes me want to think about metaphors soo much
And also crucially, as a reasonably depressed teenager with the approximate eloquence of a rock, I couldn't express that feeling beyond saying "I dunno I think this book sucks and we shouldn't have to read it"
This might be why my literature teacher didn't like me much.
I think what I'm trying to say is that even in a school system that (I think? that's the impression I've gotten) is way less on that just learn the right answers and shut up grind, even with a teacher who wanted to engage and interest the class, teach how to think and discuss etc, ultimately the meme is born of being a teenager who is being forced to do something and is trying to rebel however they can. "you can force me to read this, but you can't force me to think about it or express my opinions in a constructive way or contribute honestly to a conversation about it" etc
Like I enjoyed reading, I enjoyed thinking about what I was reading, and I enjoyed talking about it. and I still fucking hated lit class
Actually speaking of willful superficiality as an expression of frustration with an inability to express one's own interpretation of art, both due to a lack of vocabulary and experience and because of the necessity for even the most dedicated teachers to push a singular "correct" reading so as to move the class along, I have more beef.
And you can't stop me because you're an english teacher on the other side of the world, you can't afford the plane ticket to physically make me shut up.
this is a callout post for alessandro marchi, the curator of the annotated edition of the divine comedy we were required to use in school. You're not wrong about Par. XVII vv. 58-60 being about the bitter pain of exile and the indignity of being eternally a guest of others' charity. But please. think of your audience. You have to tell people that the reason he specifically mentions the salty taste of bread as a symbol of unfamiliarity and loss of home is specifically because people in florence are insane and don't put salt in their bread. please. a singular drop of context. the heartfelt expression of suffering isn't reduced by the knowledge that it's also a literal complaint about having to eat food with too much flavour and climb too many stairs
I could write entire poems about these three verses alone and you can't even annotate them right. alessandro. please. if I meet you I'm going to beat you up
ok I think I'm done with petty literature grudges from high school now (
People don't consciously know what they mean
Maybe he DID pick blue curtains while he was depressed???
Or because he was listening to 90s pop
Daba di daba dai daba di daba dai
Daba di daba dai daba di daba dai
Daba di daba dai daba di daba dai
Daba di daba dai daba di daba dai
Daba di daba dai daba di daba dai
Daba di daba dai daba di daba dai
Daba di daba dai daba di daba dai
Daba di daba dai daba di daba dai
I'm a speed loving guy
At the speed of light
If i was green i would die
If bleed i will die
I believe I'm a guy
I'm in need of a guy
Just experienced severe whiplash seeing this video get recommended by Jessie Gender
I KNOW RIGHT it was such a jumpscare one moment I'm watching a video on the Netflix Avatar remake and then [niche RUclipsr who talks about Fire Emblem a lot]
Bopper's video essays are among my favorite across all RUclips!!
This was a difficult video to work thru and I plan on revisiting it :) thank you bopper
Really interesting stuff. Gotta watch it a few more times to digest it in full, probably, but I continue to be grateful that you willingly share your thoughts and analyses with us Bopper. I hope you’re encouraged by the feedback you’ve received and your own process in putting this together.
Perfect title man. Please keep pursuing the ideas you’re passionate about as you did here, as hard as it may be.
This video is one of your best and I hope the process of making it brought the utmost fulfillment.
This was a lovely and thought provoking video. Thank you for making it.
2:42 yo this would make a SICK album cover.
Why X is described as Y. why anything is added to a story, a narrative, a piece of art. Sometimes it's deep and meaningful, sometimes that way on a whim, sometimes it's referential to something or someone else. Sometimes a blue curtain is just a blue curtain, and sometimes it means so much more than it's simplicity would imply.
Maybe they were referencing a curtain in their own home, maybe they just like the color blue, maybe their is an in universe reason why the character chose a blue curtain over any other color, maybe it's symbolic or metaphorical for something deeper. And any and all of those can be true even without the authors intent
When I was in Highschool I thought the interpretation of a work of art is correct when it is written into a book by a smart guy.
When I went to University in the first levels I understood that an interpretation is correct as long as you can proof it and it makes sense in itself. Blue curtains can be depression if they somehow represent things that depression represents. If you can proof that with the text then you are correct. The interpretation serves a function.
As University went on I understood that there is a language of art. Art itself references the reference to a reference to a reference and so on. from the earliest cave drawings to the most recent drawing there is a line of storytelling. Honestly, to me a Rothko is just color on a canvas. I watched a documentary about his art and I sort of understand the whys and hows, but still. To me a lot of art is an inside joke that I don't get. And I consider myself one of the more literate people. But I would not say I can go to a museum and understand everything. I interpret art very personal. I like it or I don't. It reminds me of a story or it doesn't. I have a feeling towards it or I don't.
And then there's apparently another interpretation - Rothko wouldn't have spent that much time on his paintings if they were just blue curtains. He thought really hard on how to bring those blocks of color on canvas and that act makes it art.
A lot of people do not want to work at media literacy. They want the Fast and the Furious 54 to just be what is is. They don't even care about an interpretation of that, in fact they are strongly against it. Some people care for some understanding. Because it dawns on them that art is communication and it matters what you communicate. And there will always be a group of people that know the history, they know the references, they can read like noone has read before. And then there will be the people who have a lot of money and they need to keep that money, so they "invest" in what the smart guys told them is the most valuable art. Does the price make the art a better communicator? probably not. Is the artist a better storyteller because of that? Probably not. It's better to retell a popular story than being poor.
But capitalism aside - it matters that people undergo the process that I went through when I discovered how to read art. It mattered because it taught me that there is one truth (the text) but there are many stories (the interpretations). Not all stories are valuable lessons but they all exist. Not all stories will be told again. And in a post-(pre)Trump world, it is probably a good thing if you understand how stories shape reality and what the value of listening to someone elses story is.
It widens your horizon a little if you can see that the clue curtain can be depression for someone. And then you maybe understand that person and you do not want to eradicate them from public life.
If an artist creates art in a forest and no one is there to interact with it, are the curtains even blue?
Love this video. Studying art history, I've always been struck with how deliberately propagandistic fine art is, whether it be promoting the power of the church, monarchs, and the ultra wealthy. Then the impressionists come along and make parodies such as Manet's "Olympia" after Titan's "Venus of Urbino", which becomes social and class commentary, and definitely the result of broader access as you said. There's also the whole Nazi persecution of degenerate art, and later the CIA promoting abstract painting during the cold war. Even poetic art has a utilitarian function, even if not implicit in its design, but that rarely extends to the individual. Perhaps this is more of how superstructures, not just capitalism, subsume individual expression for its own ends.
I'm not sure the "functional" thought is separate from understanding metaphor, but that it's being taught in the wrong way. The curtains being blue could be explained through color theory and psychology, with the connection of sadness and the color blue. I was not an art person growing up, but it was scientific (functional) curiosity that led to me learning a lot of the logical concepts in art. I basically moved the "challenge" of understanding art to something I wanted to be challenged in, which has led to a better understanding and comprehension of art overall. At least for people interested in science, the failure to integrate science into art is what causes the blue curtain meme.
I'm proudly aware of my own stupidity when I read Shakespeare. I can barely comprehend the functional story, let alone glean any sense of symbolism or metaphor without looking it up afterwards
To me, the best art is art that, as you touched on, makes you feel meaning rather than think it. Berserk is one of the best examples of this. You don't need to go through an hour-long lecture about how Guts feels at a particular moment because all you need to do is look at the manga panel and you'll just get it. Of course, thinking about what a scene could mean is still valid, as there are plenty of works I disregarded in the past that I now appreciate looking back on them. But with my finite time on Earth, I'd prefer to see/watch/read/play as much art as possible rather than continuously return to the same few pieces over and over again. Except for the art that makes me feel something, whether it's the complex emotions of a lone swordsman staring into the night sky or simply because John Wick has some kickass fight scenes.
The real question is was the story originally written in a language that uses the same word for blue and green and was the color we know as blue what the author meant or was it closer to green
...Haha in all seriousness, this is a great video! It's a really thought-provoking dive into the relationship between art and its audiences in our current society, and I hope it gets more people thinking and helps open people's minds to engaging with art on more levels than just the "functional", as you put it.
Now I want a video on metaphor. Great content, looking forward to more like this.
I think part of the problem is that art appreciation shouldn't be taught. (At least not to those who don't specifically sign up for it) (although propaganda litteracy should be, and theres some overlap) rather art should meet you where you are at.
If you gain your pleasure from the art equivalent of scoffing a burger, or from the equivelant of the satisfaction of a hard gym session or the satisfaction of tracking to the south pole. That's all fine ways to engage with art, and there should be chances for them all.
And your more likely to go to the gym again and try harder if you chose to, and got that buzz, rather than faking it for the checkbox you were forced to full out.
There is a market for art that makes the viewer work. But its a small one and economics of scale mean it's not as available. Just like how some people want to track to the north pole, they need to seek out the equipment to do so, because most people don't want to.
Hopefully platforms like RUclips help connect the creators and audience for this and we can have more.
Massively enjoyed your video BTW, can't think fast enough for it lol, every new sentence started a new thread in my mind. Sorry for dunking on your profession, hope you can find your chosen students here.
I was certainly a blue curtains reader back in high school. I remember once when my class given a list of topics to choose from to write an essay on Huckleberry Finn, and all of them were asking us to explain some specific metaphor or symbolism with evidence. I chose to write an essay arguing that the Mississippi River represents the Mississippi River and its shores represent its shores. I got a D and thought it was the funniest, cleverest thing I’d ever done.
I’m trying to be better about this sort of thing. I think Godzilla: Minus One was the first movie (or media in general) I saw where I organically spotted a meaning aside from the narrative function. I think that’s progress.
You talking about this gets me thinking about game difficulty, and how people feel entitled to win a game just because they bought it. Specifically, FE, since that's your mainstay content. Difficulty is part of that narrative sublime, but also it's a surface level narrative tool in the context of games. You can finish a book and not understand it, you have to understand a game to some level to finish it.
Within the framework of capitalistic art, the idea of art being grounded into commodified entertainment, are players who complain about difficulty being entitled? Are they wrong for asking to have the sublime without working towards it? Or is it simply an issue of accessibility, with being able to meet a game's challenges being akin to the reader's literacy?
Frankly I err on the side of games being designed with not everyone in mind, because I feel that any mature work of art should challenge its audience to some degree, and also because I'm a masochist who can't sleep at night unless I can LTC Iron Man 0% Growths 1HP 1 Durability speedrun Thracia 776 with my eyes blindfolded and my ears plugged before my mommy is done cooking me my wholesome Reddit gold chicken tendies. But I'm not so sure of my answer that I can make a definitive statement one way or the other.
It's something I think about a lot as someone who's going into game development due largely in part to how I think it's a medium for art.
There's also the expectation we place on ourselves that if you buy a game then you should finish all the content it includes, even if it makes your experience worse. Even Nintendo doesn't care if I never visit the Somiel, they get the sixty bucks either way.
I've always wanted to know why I do not see the "right" meaning behind art. This video really helps open my mind
As is typical of criticisms of Capitalism, the problems attributed to Capitalism aren't traits of Capitalism but inherent traits of existing in physical reality. Artists get hungry. Artists get tired. Artists get cold. Like every other person, since you spend your time doing one thing, in this case art, you cannot spend your time doing other things like building shelter or growing food. In order to have artists at all, we need a way to facilitate the exchange of art for food. There are only two options. Either free exchange, or a centralized authority. In not one, but in both cases the artist is beholden to the demands of the exchange. Either in a free market, the demands of the one buying the art, or in a centralized authority, the demands of the authority. Since free exchange is what we presently have, people like to imagine that if we got rid of it, we would escape the inherent restrictions of having to live by trading with others. Imagination is precisely what that is. The only artists in world history not to be limited by the demands of the trade are the ones wealthy enough to have no material need. The Capitalism makes no difference.
There shall only ever be two options. Not three, for that would be confusing to minds so poor that they have mental capcaity only able to imagine a free market. So saith the economists, who claim to know the truth of reality while hurriedly explaining that it's just a model, man, it doesn't predict the future or anything, you can't take our word like that, just look at the numbers.
I had a long-held appreciation the "blue curtains" meme, but this video helped me realize that I was reading meaning into it based on my personal experience and preconceptions that was not actually consistent with the content of the meme, and was thereby missing the deeper meaning that _is_ actually present within the work.
Which means I was acting exactly like the type of English teacher I thought the meme was targeting, ironically enough!
In retrospect, I have no idea how I was able to convince myself that a meme about teachers trying to insist that meaning exists where there (allegedly) is none was in fact about teachers limiting themselves to assuming there is no meaning in art beyond the single, simplistic interpretation that they, the teacher, already hold 🤷♂That's almost exactly backwards from what the meme actually depicts!
I'm trying to imagine an altered version of this meme that would better match the view of English teachers through which my interpretation of the meme was filtered, based on my personal experience with one middle-school teacher in particular. I think it would be something like this:
The teacher's interpretation: "The blue of the curtains represents depression and his lack of will to carry on. We know this because the author was diagnosed with clinical depression shortly after publishing this story, and wrote many other stories dealing with themes of depression both before and after this one."
What the story literally says: "The curtains were yellow"
Yo Bopper, I'm unlikely to see my own high school teachers, so I'll share this with you instead. A former curtains are blue because they're blue guy here, I used to believe that performance/delivery was vastly more impactful than meaning. Yes, I greatly overestimated my own intelligence at the time. I was also in a period of basic research into my own artistic pursuits. Trying things just to see if it worked or not. As time passed I became more and more interested in understanding WHY specific spaghetti stuck to the wall and some didn't. And as I analyzed and honed my own craft, I silently came around to things mean something. (And that meaning is one of the most reliable building blocks to evoke the idea.)
I hope hearing someoe eventually coming around independently of classes gives you some amount of hope or comfort or satisfaction.
> blue curtains
Are your relatives Slavic immigrants? I hear this expiration first time out of our speach modus
Thanks you so much for thie video Professor Booper, you've spoken in words what I felt about the intrinsic contradictory relationship between capitalism and art that I couldn't put words into. This might have been one of the most important videos I've ever watched.
I think my biggest gripe with how institutions, particularly high school, teaches literature is how it forces students to adopt only one perception on a story, and its typically the one that the teacher themselves agrees with.
That isn't always bad, but when a student has their own interpretation on it they're usually told they're wrong and forced back on the 'right track.'
Obviously there are better and more logical interpretations on a story based on its text and whether it sufficiently aligns with the stories thematic narrative, but I feel like this type of disencouragement for students to think about what they read and how they individually feel about it is really such a disservice to how we as human beings come to appreciate art.
Art should be more than people merely consuming products, it should be about getting invested in our fellow human beings, their personal works of art that they've put their heart into, and how it affects each of us. It's going to be inherently different and yet all these schools force us to think about it in the opposite direction, with one golden explanation, and every other perspective is either looked down upon with half-hearted comments, or worse, a failing grade.
The one, single problem I have with this is that a transactional, capitalist environment can also in theory optimize for certain kinds of poetic art, provided they dazzle consumers enough to provoke the feeling of "I could never do that, I need to persuade everybody to pay money for this genius work and make it popular". Some works of poetic art fail to get a lot of attention, but occasionally it seems like others actually blow up to levels that are almost confusing, and get a lot of people obsessing over their mystery or craftsmanship even if not every layer of meaning.
Markets seem to have an unintentional feature of always serving social graphs that assemble in real time rather than individuals independently making choices.
Bopper, you drop a well-written, thought-out lecture on art, and post it free of charge? Before I say anything else, thank you so very much for this. Whenever I read Virginia Woolf, there are always sentences that I find perfectly encapsulate a feeling I feel I've only ever brushed across the surface of. And I think you've done the same with this.
You mention that in your most pessimistic moments you believe that the blue curtain believer was someone who never paid much attention in school, and as former blue curtain believer, you are absolutely right: I didn't pay attention, and I was extremely arrogant in my own interpretation. And while you are right on that point, and that Capitalism does harm art, it does, also paradoxically perhaps, benefit it as well, via spreading the message to a larger audience, whose only barrier is money.
I mention above that I was a blue curtain guy. It's embarrassing to admit, but I also used to be a racist, misogynistic P.O.S. when I lived with my parents, before I discovered the redemptive power of art. The Criterion Chanel, for example, exposed to me to so many new viewpoints, so many new ideas, and challenged so many of the points I held sacred in my youth, that I couldn't help but start to question that which I built my rapidly weakening foundation on. And once I started to question that, the whole rotten foundation I had built my world upon came crumbling down.
You summarize it beautifully in your point that Capitalism dulls, blunts, but can never fully erase the human spirit, the desire for more, the desire to look inwards. And while it will continue to harm it as long as it exists, there will always be those, like myself, who benefit on a great personal level from it. I'll be re-watching this a few times in the coming days, as I've undoubtedly missed a few things here, but again, bravo on the great video, and on reminding me why I love art in the first place.
i love the video. great stuff, it's very resonant with my frustrations.
When you started talking about art as a transaction, it took me several sentences to realize you were literally talking about paying money. I thought you were being metaphorical, as in I pay with my time and attention and expect a meaningful or thought-provoking experience in return.
One who’s used to organic healthy food enjoys the taste of it tremendously and finds fast food repulsive naturally and without effort in resisting it, at the same time people who get used to eating processed fast foods enjoy the taste of it to the point of addiction and find healthy foods to be tasteless and obnoxious while also being economically disadvantaged due to their rarity and the difficulty in their production. But the problem with fast food is that it’s destructive to the health of the person and the society, not only due to its lack of nutrients but also because it contains harmful elements, which inevitably causes epidemics of stupidity, a deficiency in manners and morals lasting for generations, due to an obesity of the soul and cancer of the intellect
I would say this is your best video. I really enjoy the more academic material and I like seeing the teacher side of you come out more. Exemplary work, Bopper.
i swear to god if the title is a reference to Guernica hidden at the UN
The curtains never represented depression. The blue curtains represented ignorance.
I appreciate the effort to destigmatize literacy.
Isn't capitalism good for video games?
“Nothing in art is arbitrary.”
That’s a quote from a video another RUclipsr made because he was annoyed that people often commented that he was finding meaning that wasn’t there.
I feel like you are talking about about multiple different issues here. I completely agree with capitalism and the public school system minimalising art literacy. But it is a strange comparison to lump modern abstract art into the literature conversation. Modern abstract art is little more than a mechanism for money laundering, people find meaning in it accidentally, and calling its practitioners heroes against capitalism for selling a ripped Haitian flag with grass stains on it called "untitled 86,943" for 45 million dollars is so crazy.
No one is more consumerist than the American anti-capitalist. Art is not exempt from this. And, poor though it is, art literacy at least exists for the lower classes today as opposed to in the Renaissance, when it was for nobles and aristocracy.
The "muh blue curtains" meme is poking fun at the English teacher's notion to assign meaning in specific instances where thier is not ant in certain instances. Yes the morons on the internet missuse the meme and don't understand metaphor because that's what happens when everyone gets to voice thier opinion, you sometimes hear an idiot.
It seems like you are arguing 2 or 3 related but distinct points. And it doesn't really fit together in one video.
Your argument about minimalist art is backwards. If the economics of art are worth looking at, there’s no meaningful distinction between any movement. All art is used for tax avoidance by the uber-wealthy and corporations, and it’s certainly not true that minimalist artists are doing what they do as a scam. Most art that attracts high value is from dead artists. Artists that gain wealth and/or fame during their lifetime are incredibly rare under capitalism (Picasso, Basquiat, Pollock are major exceptions. Pollock was pumped up by the CIA to combat the growing cultural popularity of Socialist Realism coming from Soviet artists, but in all three cases, the monetary value of their art skyrocketed after death.)
As for the last point, art literacy and education has little to do with economic system. Literary increased dramatically during the English Renaissance which was defined by the popular theater (Shakespeare/Marlowe) as opposed to the earlier, courtly poets; Ancient Greece was dominated by the theater (Sophocles, Aristophanes were super popular among the general public). We see incredibly high rates of literary and art literacy in places as disparate as Europe, China, post-colonial Africa, Cuba, the US, etc even though they are all vastly different. Technological innovations (television, printing press) and economic/political stability tend to have much more to do with increased art literacy than industrial capitalism
the polaroid of the blue curtains in the middle of a barren parking lot goes hard
fire bemblem man so real for this one
Real reason is an interaction count of 220 humans instead of 40 past elementary school.
I was literally just arguing with someone about this exact meme haha, extremely uncanny timing
I agree with a lot of things you say, but something that still bothers me is when narratives don't make sense. Is there symbolic meaning to why they don't make sense? Could the story not have maintained it's symbolism while making sense? I understand if a creator was prioritizing there themes and symbolism over the cohesiveness of the plot; however, I ask as to whether symbolism can survive with a dysfunctional plot. An example I would point to is Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The plot is quite bad. If you need convinced of this, there are plenty of essays on RUclips regarding what makes it so bad. But it's defenders often look at reasons outside of the plot for why it is actually good. And to that end I ask: can you have symbolism and theme when the actions that take place to build them aren't cohesive? This of course only concerns art with narrative, but it's something I wanted to get off my chest. This is not to say your video made me angry, quite the opposite, it sparked a lot of thought. So thank you Bopper
It's a complicated question, so this response will mostly be thinking through the different issues we can encounter.
For narratives that don't make sense, I think the discussion (particularly when it comes to Star Wars) has gotten pretty caustic, and I think it's worth splitting between criticisms of inconsistencies and of personal taste. As a corporate product, Disney-era Star Wars is going to always have a deeply compromised artistic vision, so I don't necessarily consider it a good case study in artistic success and failure.
So, I would say the answer is yes to your question. You don't need cohesion for art to be meaningful and powerful. If you want to see films that successfully illustrate this, I wouldn't look at films like modern Star Wars because their compromised on a production side and also are cultural caustic when discussing them. You can see this better in works by directors like David Lynch (Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway), Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker, Solaris), Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Tapo, The Holy Mountain). These directors all tell stories that are narrative driven, but operate frequently on surreal dream logic.
I would say for general use, it's better to be in conversation with a work of art rather than trying to best it, if that makes sense, and try to differentiate between an observable criticism and personal taste. For example, complaints about Luke's arc in The Last Jedi are primarily complaints of taste, and I think it's worth considering why it runs contrary to your taste and what you can learn about both the film and yourself in that complaint.
@@ProfessorBopper This comment made me watch The holy mountain, expecting it to be good due to being mentioned alongside Lynch's and Tarkovsky's works, but it didn't prepare me to the fact that it would become one of my favorite films of all time
@@ProfessorBopper It depends entirely on the type of art. Lynchian dream logic is fine, provided it makes sense in the context of the art.
Every post on this video is so long I want to respond to individual points but by the time Ive scimmed one there are tbree more.
Love to see more videos like this
damn, i just love the point about the blue curtains being a made up metaphor, so that the person telling the joke cannot just be proven wrong on the spot
Gonna say it again in case it was missed before. Isbl's twitter no longer exists. It's a dead link.
I literally had to watch us a few times and you have some grease points there bud
Haven’t finished the video yet, but since this seems on topic, I just want to write it out.
What you discuss in the video is exactly what I despise about ai “art”.
You can’t analyze them, at least not in the same way you analyze actual art, because the decisions were arbitrarily made. Why are the curtains blue? Because from its data base the ai decided to color them blue. There is no human element, no deeper meaning.
I mean sure, not all art has deeper meaning nor does it need to, but all the small decisions a person makes while drawing still reflects that person. Something that ai images lack.
Ai images are just meaningless noise thrown together by combining data.
It's exhausting to read the comments after such a video and get a bigger picture of the whole problem. What is there to do, really?
I remember a candidate for the far-right party in my country advocating for teaching more poetry in schools was publicly ridiculed for such an idea - and I don't believe he's genuine for a second - but it sure is disheartening that the only voice willing to speak truth to power coming from neo-nazis.
I do enjoy gross polemics here and there, you know, genuinely stepping one people's toes. So whenever I see a discussion about loli hentai on X née Twitter, I always write something akin to "It's just pixels on a screen, so it can't be CP. Anyways, the author says she's like a 1000 year old loli baba, so it would be legal in-universe." It's stupid, but there is really nothing to do in a society devoid of soul. Don't bother reading this comment, some of you dim-wits wouldn't understand the meaning behind this random string of letters. You would need to know my intentions first.
The end of art is circular
In school, english, drama and arts class were really boring. Perhaps it is capitalism allocating poor resources into those classes and putting them all into math and science.
ECONOMIC SYSTEM STRIKES AGAIN!!! NOW TARGETING LITERATURE!!!!
I'd never heard of this meme before, and like most memes, I don't understand it even after watching this video. Philosophy is totally lost on me. People keep telling me it starts to make sense after wresting with it for a while, but it's never gelled for me. I'm not sure how it links to capitalism either. I know I'm missing something, but that's the story of my life.
Thank you for this video, I think I really needed it right now so this fell into place beautifully. I feel like my comprehension of art isn’t as great as I’d like and want to learn more and practice it more but wasn’t sure how and watching this feels like a big step in the right direction for me.
Like honestly the video feels tailor made for me since just like 8 months ago in my last semester of college I asked my philosophy teacher, the first time I’d taken a philosophy class, what kinds of topics to explore after I graduated to keep learning about philosophy, and one he mentioned and that I remembered was hermeneutics which is the practice of whole and circular thought, and I read a little and didn’t go much deeper (ironic and hypocritical, I know) but did write a little paper about why I thought it was a good school of thought. Then in this video you talk about circular thought when interpreting art in a purely functional sense, something I think I’m prone to doing, and outlined the exact issues that come with viewing things that way. And that felt like I’d just been handed a little revelation.
That teacher of mine said I seemed to have found my own personal Ariadne’s golden thread when I stumbled on that intro to philosophy class and that I should follow it. 8 months later I pretty let my new life in the 40 hour work week get the best of me and I put all that sort of stuff to the side, and I feel like this video kinda nudged me back like “no, the thread is still there.”
So for that, and for reading my little rant if anyone did, thank you very very much and I’ll probably be back to this video to rewatch and try and digest more of it, as someone who wants to write books of his own one day.
This was awesome. The discussion of consumerist and "functional" understandings of art reminded me of Patricia Taxon's vids on Getting Over It and Don't Hug Me I'm Scared
The Mid-Sized Bopper...
But dont many enjoy functional perspectives of art. Many enjoy analysing realism and plotholes infact it could be the case many more enjoy looking at art this way. Readers also enjoy the non story elements (e,g. Tension and spectical) being another thing many seem to simpily enjoy. And ontop of that i dont see any inherit good to seeing art in a poetic way so its lovely you have a way of consuming art you enjoy sometimes i enjoy art that way too but you shouodn't push that on children who may not enjog this way of enjoying art.
Someone enjoying fiddling away at plot holes doesn’t magically give Blue Curtains analysis any value since it’s relies on a descriptive claim (“the curtains are just blue”) and if education were based strictly on whether or not a child enjoys doing something, we’d be a society of deficient nematodes
It's so goddamn weird that as a species who's entire interactions with anything boil down "can I eat or have sex with this?" still shows some kind of yearning for some abstract sublime. It's even weirder that the level of this yearning is so variable. Some of us missed the day they handed out the sublime brains in school, others took double portions. So on one hand I get the metaphor deniers, since that doesn't really help someone living in paleolithic Africa. But on the other, that same drive for stuff beyond the material is made humanity what it is, through millenia of evolving pattern recognition. Having to figure out what it is about abstract stuff that satisfies the meat and electricity that is me, despite things like souls and spirituality and all that jazz being non-existent (imo), is one of the most frustrating and satisfying parts of being human. So yeah, good video Bopper. P.S. There actually is an objectively correct interpretation of metaphorical art: mine.
Hmm, still digesting this video and rewatching parts.
I disagree that this is a unique phenomenon that has arisen with capitalism. If we go back far enough, people who complain about the "blue curtains" very likely wouldn't be interacting with the medium at all.
I think the attempt to try and force every 16 year old high schooler to try and truly understand something like Great Gatsby a hopeless task. I think it is at odds with the biological and psychological growth that most kids are going through.
Of course that also relies upon a teaching system that doesn't require a "correct" answer, like you denoted. Unfortunately it seems like education everywhere serves as a daycare-to-job factory. I'm not sure if thats something we can overcome, or if it is the natural path we have taken as humanity.
Thank you for being a bastion of actual analysis in a sea of functionality and plot summaries. As someone who is at the very bottom of "the curtains symbolize depression," I find that creatives such as yourself, those who actually want to say something that is nuanced, serve as a foundational touchstone for attempting to move forward into the realm of art. You are a massive influence upon me and this is definitely one of your best works.
i need more videos getting people to indirectly think about ways of seeing who may have otherwise not have encountered ways of seeing
So, are you saying poetic art needs to be treated more like a video game? Either way, I'll stay the comfort reader. If I want to read a book to think through, I'll grab a Real Analysis one.
I think in a way you answered a question that I pondered for a longtime. Is that why I never cared for “spoilers”. A good work of fiction is so much than its function of a plot line. Knowing what will happen later into the story does not take always anything that makes a story enjoyable, any sentimentality any “vibe” any imagination even inspiration it might motivate. (And I’d even argue“spoilers“ enable a better judgement of whether reading or watching in the first place based on personal preference.)
I always thought of myself as the “unable to detect let alone appreciate the subtleties ” kind of person. Maybe I should give myself more credit where it’s due.
Listening at 22:55 and trying to jog my brains' muscles for metaphors, I realized something. Minimalist art is in a way, rebelling against the capitalist need for functionality. I've never before had an interest in minimalist art but now I do. There must be a lot more depth in the metaphors of minimalist art than I first thought.
(Signal boost)
Good shit!
Standardized curriculum is turning kids into POW Picard about media literacy in a way that's too meta for them to cognivize. THERE! ARE! BLUE! CURTAINS!