It's not what the world needs right now(thebaffler.com) |
It's not what the world needs right now(thebaffler.com) |
I believe we won’t solve humanty’s pressing problems with more of the same.
We need more love and understanding for sure.
" more love and understanding"
Was not mentioned.
So I am not sure how your first comment could help, to make the world a better place.
"we won’t solve humanty’s pressinge problems with more of the same."
And generic statements like these maybe neither.
Because when people are hungry(many are), yes they need more food. More of the same.
But your comment implies there are also maybe too many people anyway?
So rather less food and then eventually less people? But still more of love and understanding?
Or maybe it all just ain't that simple?
May I ask how room temperature superconductors make the world a better place or help fighting hunger?
And what do room temperature superconductors have to do with art?
Those are your ideas, I never even meant to imply them.
But cheap highspeed trains (floating on magnetic fields) come to mind as a means of easy transporation around the world.
Sonder is defined as the profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing by on the street, has a life as complex and vivid as your own. They experience hopes, dreams, friendships, routines, worries and an inner life, all of which you'll likely never know about or fully understand.
The term was coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a compendium of newly invented words for powerful feelings that don't have a descriptive term in the English language.
I had a sponser do me a favor once and tell me "you're a special case of the same old thing." It helped me get over myself.
That's all? I always kind of assumed they had more going on. Hoped it, for their sakes.
One form is "besonders" which can be translated as particular, peculiar, unique.
In English maybe well known is "Sonderkommando" which can be translated as special troop.
Part five of this book is about Litost, a kind of misery-induced torment only known to the Czech people. You could see it is a Slavic thing.
https://fictionbeast.com/milan-kundera-the-unbearable-ligthn...
Something akin to how I felt trapped in my own drama
Is there some other way words are created besides people just sort of using them?
However, to what extent is this lifestyle necessary as an artist? A common piece of advice for many artists is to consider developing a steady career independent of one's art, which lets them afford their lifestyle as an artist (such as by writing, creating artwork, or performing during the evenings and weekends). But the effectiveness of this advice must vary for the individual: it's also common for many people to drop their artwork or stop taking it seriously in favour of their paying career.
For this artist in particular, I wonder if a steady job would have been a positive or negative to his art. In this case, the income would have reduced his suffering especially as he's dealing with medical debt. It could have even granted him additional artistic freedom, as he writes about the pressures to "defect" and his acceptance of more commercial work for money. Yet at the same time, it's possible that part of the desperation is behind his drive as an artist—though it's also risky to romanticize this desperation.
It is intellectually amusing to read, and I'm sure to write, a character that the reader hates. But the detachment becomes exhausting quick. It's a dead end; you spent all of this effort being clever, with what to show for it? After reading it, I find myself questioning which side of the joke is real and which is false, and whether I'm in the real part of the joke or the false part. Which is ultimately a fruitless exercise, since the whole thing is intentionally set up to be pointless. Got me, I guess?
I do like the visuals though.
But also the compulsive lying, the drugs, the weird lack of self awareness is cringe inducing here.
And honestly, that is why I like it. I really hope it cannot be taken at face value - that would be disappointment.
This is the price of computing’s success. It’s not all bad or all good, it just is a natural consequence of computing becoming an integral part of modern society.
“No one wants to listen to an artist describe their work, but everyone wants to be told my rib story.”
whereas artist recounting his struggles = a series of open-ended "why-did" vignettes with none offering escape from a cycle of precarity, except for the obvious solution to discontinue throwing oneself on the sword of Art. a solution which is intentionally and elaborately avoided by a narrator who does not supply a relatable (never mind satisfying) motivation or justification. I may be giving him too much credit, but there's a decent chance the vague sense of being stifled by this brief immersion in a world fundamentally unsuited to your own nature is an intended effect.
I can't believe I have to do the reddit edit postscriptum but really, does everyone dislike the author? I certainly could never be this sort of person, but what a story, living life on the edge and making it up as they go along. Do commenters never daydream, like just imagine how life would be if things had turned out differently?
Either way, interesting.
> I fly Spirit to Chicago, where all my friends are too busy buying property or accepting professorships to try the ketamine a guy gave me for letting him suck my dick.
> At the end of the shoot, I’m $40k in debt and severely constipated.
> There’s the explanation: Blaze broke Hollywood’s dick off, and now he’s dead.
> My therapist suggests I take a trip to see friends because I keep calling myself an incel. I have a feeling she’s sick of watching a grown man cry about how hard it is to poop and wants new material.
> I tell them God will use the bone to create a third gender.
> Even if it doesn’t work out between this new being and me, I’m able to autofellate. I now have half an hourglass figure and, naturally, am starting an OnlyFans.
I feel like I know so many people with 1/10th the spunk/pizzazz/personality/attitude of this author. How did one person luck out and get such a "concentration" of unique-ness?
Probably asked a woman model not a male model. Women get double what men get for modeling.
More likely because it was an advertorial, both for the brand and the “models”.
Fun read.
Pretty fucking disgusting that someone would openly say that to him.
I believe this train of thought is called “entitled”
there's also a big difference between "one guy supposedly stealing one thing as a part of a story" and "let's all go steal"
Beauty is subjective and all that. I liked some of them and disliked others.
The story about Hollywood was fun.
It's entertainment, not true confession or activism, and it delights in getting under the skin of squares who can't tell.
No need to push back on the people reactively criticizing the character or writer -- that's the point.
Why would a corporation deliberately hire a video artist and music video director instead?
The fact that his character is completely insufferable is, of course, the point.
I don't think he's claiming a hallucinated skin as a business expense. Rather he's saying the Turbotax UI has some slider in it, and he hallucinates that Turbotax is instead DJ software, and he slides that slider around like a DJ would slide a sound modulator slider around, arriving at a fraudulent number.
All people, artistic or not, have a certain tolerance for ignoring social standards. Some of the best artists are known to have a very high tolerance. But there's millions more people with similarly chaotic existences that don't care about art and creative activities at all.
So, it’s a rare person indeed who can be a serious artist and support themselves financially some other way
I have no idea how everyone ended up doing what they are doing, but I know that mine wasnt dictated by that at all. At 18, when I was about to graduate high school, I had absolutely zero sense about who I can or cannot be. Over a decade later, I have a slightly better grasp on it. But it barely moved the needle, and I still have no idea who i can or cannot be.
I picked CS (computer science) as my degree. I had almost no experience with writing code (turbopascal 5 years prior for a semester doesn’t count), and i was behind most of my classmates in that aspect (who tested out of the first two intro courses, since they either had HS internships or AP CS credits or just personal projects like published apps and guthub repos).
Well actually, originally I picked EE (electrical engineering), but then I switched during the second day of the summer orientation for incoming freshmen to CS. Once we got to registering for the first semester of classes on the second day, I saw the choice of classes I had vs. what CS students had. The descriptions just sounded more interesting to me.
Did I base my choice at any given point based on who I thought I could be? Not at all. I had zero knowledge that led me to believe I would be a more capable CS graduate (as opposed to EE). I also chose not to go for pre-med, despite my parents’ wishes, but it also had nothing to do with who I thought I could or couldn’t be. I am glad I didnt go that route, because after developing an ongoing friendship with a guy who eventually became a licensed dermatologist, I learned a lot of things that led me to believe I couldn’t be a doctor (not without losing my sanity, at least).
I guess the point along this longwinded reply is, I don’t buy it even for a second that a significant number of artists picked their field because they didnt think they could be something else. Most of them are people just like you and me, and I believe they are just as aware that they have no idea as to whom they can and cannot be. At the very best, they would have a short list of who they know they cannot be (just like i know i could never be a doctor).
I have a stable career and lots of disposable income and I've been to 1/10th the places this guy has been to / done 1/10th the things / probably have 1/10th the stories/life experiences/friends
This man is hustle culture personified. What's the problem?
Alternatively, he's the epitome of a "disruptor". What's the issue?
Oh, perhaps it's that he's holding up a light at what is at the end of the tunnel if we keep going the way society is--complete instability for the peons who are completely at the whim of a small number of the rich.
I get that the lobby of the Hilton is not an art gallery, but an artist stealing a sculpture is not hustle culture personified, it's theft of the exact kind he should hate most.
The story is great and I appreciate it on its own merits but he's kind of a dick.
Also how is he a disruptor? It seems like he's someone that has been VERY lucky to get opportunities many people strive for and he has fucked them up.
Then he acts like his only options are fraud and theft because there's always someone closing the door on him for being himself.
There’s a lot to read between the lines here, but if I were a betting man, I wouldn’t put a lot on the author being the sort to maintain a steady job for the long run.
I don’t mean that as a critique - the world needs all sorts, but capitalism’s got more strict opinions.
Especially since the popularization of AI image generators, many folks in the tech crowd-- few of whom could name a single influential work, author, or organization in arts scholarship-- have unwarrantedly strong opinions on the nature of art. They tend to cite the lack of market value in fine art as justification for neither paying artists for their ingested works, nor for the amalgams the produced models spit out. But when confronted with the fact that most artists are not working in fine art, but working commercial artists, they will cite their commercially concerns as evidence that modern art and artists are soulless and not worth protecting to begin with.
Honestly, the longer you work in the arts the more you shrug your shoulders at it. People have spent millennia holding all but the most famous artists and designers in contempt while art in some form, deliberately and thoughtfully made by someone with great skill, imbues nearly every aspect of our cultures. There's always a new cohort of people wanting to extract more out of artists for their own gain-- either in art or income-- while calling artists selfish for wanting a slice and telling them to get a "real job". Such is life.
Most artists I know would love to have stability, yet in society there is rarely space and funding for the things they are doing. I know people who had to move their ateliers 4 times in 10 years, just because the landlords use them to make the rental/area more attractive to a better pating clientel and then kick them out.
That said, he said two specific relationships with real people that I know, by name, and you know what? He’s telling it like it was in those cases.
The least real thing about this is that, reading carefully, the only antagonists are the occasional grant committee members who reject him. To me, in real life, fine artists are quite opinionated and tend to beef with a lot of people; or have no opinions, and are pigeonholed into doing the same exact thing that once, long ago, got them an audience, over and over again. Andrew does not belong to this latter group.
Who knows about the individual details in it. I'm sure it's sort of directionally true. It's believable at any rate.
Reminds me of some of Hunter S Thompson's writing (who always insisted his sordid semi-autobiographical tales were drawn directly from even more depraved true events).
Well, he has one other post on the same site that is explicitly marked fiction, where this one is not. That may be a clue.
I suspect both, and I’d suspect the author’s the sort who wouldn’t stay in one category no matter the circumstances.
The world was lucky to have Van Gogh, but Van Gogh was very unlucky to have this world.
People never appreciated him but at least Van Gogh could say he’s doing something groundbreaking and new.
Whereas the artist in question here, I can’t imagine they’ve ever legitimately thought that of their own art, it’s just not that groundbreaking or good.
Maybe they just realise that they’re unemployable elsewhere so they may as well carry on
The slang term for this is literally "hustling"
can things be bad without being the worst possible thing?
what i'm hearing: its bad but it's not bad because there are worse things that are bad and also I'm "looking the other way"
whether or not it was made up was irrelevant to your initial claim. the proposition is identical in either case.
(None of this is to say you need to like the blog post, you might hate it on its own merits, but I definitely think there are a lot of people here who think it's a bad piece because they disagree with the choices the protagonist makes, which I think is a very limiting view.)
You're right, and it's what edgy teenagers can do in their sleep, aka middle school math class. I would much prefer he created actual art (written or visual) I could care about.
Imo the story could have easily been a piece of poetry and I would probably have enjoyed it more.
I'm also not sure what your suggestion is. Should aspiring artists create corporations and live from the labour of other people, to create something you'd consider freedom for themselves while intruding on the freedom of others? Or do you consider it freedom to be in someone else's service under the threat of poverty?
Some people also agree with songs like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFkmRp_G2uo
Sure the art scene in parts has become entrepreneurial, but quite frankly most commercial art is either tasteless shit for tasteless customers, the works of old artists who are two decades away from dying or the works of a popular one-trick-pony on borrowed time. Who has a more hard time here are the newcomers or people who are doing it to hold up a mirror to society. But your society won't get the artists that are two decades from dying if they didn't make it somehow up to that point.
Now I gladly live in a european nation where society means that we look out for each other and I'd have no problem if more of my tax money goes towards culture. Now I know the sentiment towards commons and investing in your own infrastructure and society is way different in the US, but I don't even see it that way. I profit from the money I put there by being allowed to live in a society where people can dare to try things that are the opposite of commercial no-brainers.
To me the history of art is quite a bit broader than european elites wanting to protect their investments and tax evasion schemes, basically 'haussing' the value of what their predecessors commissioned from painters.
Among other things, there's what might be called 'folk art'. Songs and music that narrate more or less mythical history, a practice predating european urban elites with their mecenate style of commissioned paintings. 'Street art'. Drawing a dick on a random brick wall is a very old tradition.
Personally I'm not sure I believe in commercial art. That would be an expression and possibly an exploitation of economic relations, and not an expression or invention of humanity. In part my suspicion against the idea that relative wealth and convenience would be good for art stems from this, it implies a disconnect from most of contemporary and historic human life.
then demand and programming platforms that take care of the heavy lifting opened the door for normies.
how can you tell an extrovert at MIT?
he looks at your shoes when you talk to him
Unfortunately what I’ve found in the past decade of working in the field is that we are no longer in the exploration era of computing. There is still much to explore, but the problem is that the metaphorical frontier has been largely bought up by large corporations and funding agencies, and thus exploration has been restricted. The days of unfettered research at places like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs are long-gone; it’s all about quickly delivering results in areas that promise to have a direct, immediate impact on the bottom line. Academia is no better with its “publish-or-perish” demands. Even working as a software engineer has less exploration today than it did in the past. The developed world is jeopardizing its future by relentlessly pursuing short-term gains at the expense of the long term.
It’s disappointing to see computing “colonized” by business interests who have no love for computing and who don’t understand that research and software engineering are creative endeavors that cannot be treated like an assembly line, but I’ve come to terms with this recently and started rethinking my career. I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to separate my passion for computing with making a living; trying to make money from research leads to pressure from funders. I need to pursue my true research callings the way an artist pursues art.
But a thought just occurred to me when typing all of this. In a way, though, hackers and artists are back to the days of the Homebrew Computer Club of the 1970s, where hobbyists pursued their craft and showed off their work without any expectation of monetary reward. These hackers were distinct from the stereotypical IBMer. The rise of Apple and Microsoft changed this, but something interesting happened in the past decade; working for Apple, Microsoft, and other Big Tech companies today is akin to working for IBM in 1974. What was once the counterculture has become “the man.”
It’s not a perfect analogy; AT&T and Xerox were definitely “the man” 50 years ago, yet they ran research labs that offer levels of freedom that cannot be found today. But I believe that us hacker/artist types should take inspiration from the hobbyist communities of old. I’m unqualified to take on modern capitalism and its effects on research and the software industry, but if I could make a lasting contribution to society by doing great “artistic” computing, then I could die satisfied.
Thanks for giving a positive counterpoint; while there’s much to lament about modern computing, there’s also much to praise.
On the contrary if you are in a place where no one really works a normal job and things you bought or paid money to do are rarely topics of conversation then the interactions feel much more living.
I think the "golden rule" has been often misinterpreted as " treat people how you want to be treated" which leads to this misunderstanding that you called out. If we change it to being empathetic towards them and treating them how they want to be treated, the NPCs seem to become fully fledged characters.
Then it's obvious that I'm not one of them because their needs and wants are different from mine.
I don't want to get to far out there, like in Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions." The protagonist wanted to kill himself because he thought everyone except him was a robot.
Embarrassing. And untrustworthy, to boot.