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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   32886 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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No not at all. "Suspension of disbelief", as if you were hoping that you could be "taken for a ride" if you could only make yourself believe that the story really was a window to another world, is an immature way of approaching art (immature in the sense of pre-critical, pre-reflective, pre-self-consciousness).

The fact that a magic trick falls apart if you look at it too closely doesn't mean that wanting to see a magic trick is immature. Sometimes the point of an experience is the visceral immediacy of it.

Thinking that wanting to be immersed in a fiction is the same thing as that fiction being real is how a lot of media gets ruined by people who now feel they have to manage your perceptions.

I recently watched F1. The movie, like Top Gun before it, is bullshit in its specifics. And there's probably an interesting critical take to be written about what it says about the generational conflict in the West right now (both movies represent a rejection of the need to pass the torch, which is itself a backlash against "woke" reboots which also functioned as forced retirement for the Boomer celebrities and their IPs)

But I don't give a fuck about any of that, because I wanted to see fast cars and improbably skilled and handsome people in an IMAX theater. I wanted to be so engrossed I didn't care. And I was. Mission accomplished.

The fact that a magic trick falls apart if you look at it too closely

Various 20th century artistic practices that are now grouped under the heading of "abstraction" could be described in precisely this way, as an attempt to "look at the magic trick closely". Artists set out with the self-conscious intent of "breaking the illusion", of foregrounding the process of creation that normally remains hidden; in painting this took the form of abstract painting, painting that embraced the "flatness of the canvass" instead of trying to retreat from it into the illusion of 3D perspective, painting that owned the fact that it was nothing more than blobs of colored goo.

The idea was to ask whether it was possible to construct an art without illusion, an art that would endure even when the magic trick was ruined. Surely you can agree that this is at least an interesting question, even if you think it must ultimately be answered in the negative?

It's not so much that I have a definitive stance on the question (which I can grant with no issue is interesting) and more that I don't think all forms of art are or need be set up to deal with that challenge.

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