Rosencrantz2
2hr ago
Lots of it may not have been good but probably none of it was degenerate, and probably degenerate art isn't really a thing.
Rosencrantz2
3hr ago
I think the traits that are stable throughout life are often at a higher level than what we think of as taste. You discover when young that you like it when a movie surprises you, and you like the twist in movie x. A year later you've seen a lot of movies, and movies like x no longer surprise you at all. You've learned the structures and tropes. You're still you. You like being surprised. But your knowledge of film and your expectations have grown and your responses are different. It takes more subversion to surprise you. Your taste has changed.
Now if you have no taste for novelty, learning new perspectives or gaining new insights from the art you consume, then you may go ahead and like the same thing throughout your life. That's not wrong, you can like what you like. But I think most people do change their tastes as a result of their understanding and expectations changing. And even if they have very fixed tastes, on some level they do require novelty. They need more slightly different romance novels for example. Why would they crave that, if their response to the stimuli of the story is unchanged each time they read it?
Rosencrantz2
4hr ago
I saw it as a teenager in reproduction. I was very interested in how someone who was really into making drawings, philosophy and music and ceaselessly inventing new styles was villified by the Nazis as creating 'degenerate art' despite the inquisitiveness and sometimes humour of his overall project.
Did I gain from viewing that individual image by itself? Not really. It's not my favourite or anything. I'm arguing against the position it is harmful.
Rosencrantz2
4hr ago
I don't think it is weird – we've all been massively oversaturated by visual imagery and it's phenomenally hard for an image alone to have an emotional impact outside of a great deal of surrounding narrative. For example, I was just now pushed to a heightened level of emotion by a shot in the show DTF St Louis (this is probably weird of me) of just David Harbour dancing, but the shot isn't inherently that special, it's just lent its power by the story (and yet the story without that image would not have half the impact). Images in stories are powerful because we allow ourselves to view them as component parts of something bigger. Life isn't a story, it's too fragmented, but every experience e.g. of food, is either good or bad, but only really gets value by being part of a whole moment. I agree food isn't that emotional, but I can't say I don't value a certain piece of fatty tuna sushi I had emotionally, because of the moment of my life it recalls.
A lot of this conversation is just people trying to experience atomic sensations and rate them. You can't do this, they're rarely that special. You have to give in to the right brain and experience wholes all at once.
Rosencrantz2
5hr ago
I think there are still visual combos of technique and modern subject matter/point of view to explore, even in traditional figurative painting. See for example Dana Schutz, someone who is making exceptional, critically acclaimed paintings that are stylised but not abstract.
I like the idea of artists coming up with generative AI btw. I wonder what they'd have done with it? Probably they would have tried to monetised the output instead of the mechanism.
Rosencrantz2
6hr ago
I read this post with something close to physical revulsion. (It is the culture wars thread so perhaps that's par for the course.) Not because I dislike those older pictures, I love them. I don't even like Novus Angelus that much. But Klee is a for-real artist who devoted his life to his work and if you look across his oeuvre, you can't deny he was pursuing his interests and exploring interesting themes with craft and intensity and a deep aesthetic sense. To think that an example of his work would be corrupting to teenagers, 'evil' or 'filth' is offensive in its own right. He was great artist even if you don't like the work. And you certainly don't have to find it beautiful. But "filth"? "Evilness"? Absolutely, disqualifyingly, ridiculous.
Rosencrantz2
8hr ago
But a restaurant critic certainly could do a double blinded taste test to judge how good the food is,
Could they though? I am imagining a blindfolded critic being spooned with two mouthfuls, not knowing what they are going to be. With classic dishes I suppose it might work. They could say 'This tastes like lasagna. I preferred forkful A over forkful B as it tasted cheesier'. With unique dishes I don't even know what the test is supposed to look like as there will not be an obvious control dish to serve alongside it.
Rosencrantz2
10hr ago
the background of the work cannot modify the experience of a blind sampler
You'd have to do an analysis of what counts as 'the background of the work' to determine if this is true. If I am recruited as a blind sampler in a trial but not mind-wiped first, my experience of other art or the subject of the novel is still going to have massive impact on whether I like it or not. I may not enjoy certain historical novels if I start from zero knowledge of the relevant bit of history, but is that really an indictment of the novels? If I were a caveman I expect I'd be totally bowled over by the most rudimentary drawings, but so what?
Ultimately the question is who is a blind sampler? I feel like Scott is imagining a child with uncultivated tastes, and supposing that such a child lives inside all of us. I guess this is what you are talking about above when you mention 'a bare, brute fact of sensory pleasure'. To me that seems obviously falsified by facts such as e.g. I liked very sweet desserts once and now I find them sickly. It seems to imply an 'accumulative' model of how people grow (each layer of the self stays the same but we add on layers as we gain experience) that is very contrary to my intuitive sense of myself or others.
Then again it's the strength of intuitions here that makes it such a debated topic.
Rosencrantz2
10hr ago
I suspect you're 90% wrong. If it were this taste-centered, you'd see all the tables at fancy restaurants filled with people on their own and you'd see very fast service geared to deliver as many delicious tastes as quickly as possible (i.e. you'd get McDonald's). The vast majority of people going to a good restaurant go for a social experience shared with the people at their table, the others in their restaurant, the city they're in, the culinary tradition they're participating in etc. The taste is really important but you can't even decompose it as an individual factor as delicious food in a shitty, antisocial environment doesn't bring that much pleasure, and shitty food in a beautiful environment ruins everything.
Rosencrantz2
10d ago
You probably need a lot of men to produce just a few geniuses, so if you want to keep the discovery rate as is, you may not be able to reduce the male population all that much. Also, you might also upset some of the women who wouldn't like the lack of men, so some negative hedons there.
In terms of the moral principle violated, however, I think the small matter of forcing your vision of reproduction on billions of non-consenting people would be the main one!
If you can get everyone to agree to it though, have at it – I'll even sign your petition.
Rosencrantz2
12d ago
It's vice versa: he shortcuts his supporters' brains with these three techniques, and in so doing drives his opponents crazy.
Rosencrantz2
14d ago
Good does mean bad though, and has done since Michael Jackson.
Rosencrantz2
15d ago
Why can't you let Trump's objectives be an ineffable and possibly divine mystery?
Rosencrantz2
16d ago
I can agree it's a euphemism treadmill and that euphemism treadmills are in a sense pointless. But there remains a problem of the commons to solve -- we can't just decide to get rid of euphemism treadmills. You would need a campaign to encourage people to keep using outmoded slurs, and a majority of people would need to care more about ending euphemism treadmills than they do about maybe offending others. Not easy to coordinate.
Rosencrantz2
17d ago
Yes, it's additive. Any sexual abuse that is filmed and shared is graver, even if only slightly, than the same sexual abuse that's not filmed. I really doubt the judges were saying that the distribution component alone is worse than the rape component?
Rosencrantz2
17d ago
I am not too sure what you find objectionable or funny about this? (Unless you assume the bolded sentence is about children viewing pornography rather than being in it?).
Rosencrantz2
19d ago
Yeah, I was thinking about levels of necessity too. Coal mining was possible without slavery and people were distressed when this nightmare job was taken away. Orwell quote, just because the writing is good:
“…each man is shifting coal at a speed approaching two tons an hour. I have just enough experience of pick and shovel work to be able to grasp what this means. When I am digging trenches in my garden, if I shift two tons of earth during the afternoon, I feel that I have earned my tea. But earth is tractable stuff compared with coal, and I don’t have to work kneeling down, a thousand feet underground, in suffocating heat and swallowing coal dust with every breath I take; nor do I have to walk a mile bent double before I begin. The miner’s job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on a flying trapeze or to win the Grand National. I am not a manual laborer and please God I never shall be one, but there are some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At a pitch I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few weeks.
Rosencrantz2
23d ago
I heard Anthony Scaramucci on his podcast give the theory that Trump would have posted the image (and done all the other recent catholic-baiting posts) in order to own JD Vance and maybe Rubio as well, who as the most prominent catholics in his cabinet will be obliged to defend Trump instead of their own religion. I can see how putting them in that demeaning position would satisfy Trump, don't know if it's really plausible though.
My own take would be that pushing the boundaries further and further to gauge pushback and keep going whenever there's not much resistance is just what he does. If people had liked these images he'd have been able to go full 'I am your God' cult leader, but sadly he didn't get a warm enough response.
Rosencrantz2
24d ago
I don't think it has to be all that deep. It's not like you require a truly Freudian and unfalsifiable notion of a subconscious to understand the idea of someone who has a false narrative that gives them a license do what their baser self really wants to do. Confronting the fallible bad guy with a truth about themselves that they can't handle but deep down know is true is a common part of thousands of thrillers.
As you say, we're deep in the weeds here though.
Rosencrantz2
25d ago
Just because someone thinks they are doing something for good doesn't mean it's their true motivation though. People who enjoy cruelty, find purges orderly and tell themselves they're helping could also be included in a definition of evil. This would cover e.g. a sadistic cop.
Rosencrantz2
28d ago
One aspect of this is that it's plausible that men are fundamentally more violent and prone to criminal behaviour than women, outside of extraordinarily unusual cultural circumstances. Whereas it seems more likely that Islam is not fundamentally violent insofar as it can over time evolve to be less violent than other religions. It's a cultural superstructure of a type that can change radically over the centuries – we see this with religions across history in a way we don't really with gender differences.
This distinction can be hotly debated of course but one of the thoughts at play is that suspending prejudice helps allow what can improve to improve, whereas if there's not much chance of improvement, there is less motivation to suspend prejudice.
Rosencrantz2
30d ago
The US does this too, no? We're on this slippery slope already.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
It's not okay, but it's self-evidently better. With great power comes great responsibility etc.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Will need some kind of truth and reconciliation process after this. Can't have another weak Democrat administration pretending it never happened.
I grant you that your examples are degenerate and at least some of them are kinds of art. But they aren't what the Nazis called "degnerate art", which was, broadly, all modern and abstract art, as well as art done by Jews, people with mental illnesses, Communists etc. This art was deemed evil largely independently of its content or intention, but because of who did it and the fact it was in styles other than the approved realist style. I don't think this was a coherent concept, and the elision of aesthetically displeasing with morally bad was all kinds of fucked up.
I realise I should have used my words more here instead of saying degenerate art wasn't a thing, as I have caused you to write quite a lot of stuff I fully agree with. Art is vitally important and has moral valence. It can be powerful in bad ways as well as good. That just doesn't apply (at all) to Klee, and a new term needs to be found for art with a clearly pernicious effects as with some of your examples. The Nazis have claimed "degenerate art".
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