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Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 21, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Avant garde art is all about the meta. It's not about painting an object, it's about exploring the idea of what a painting can be (by making a painting). Ditto music, sculpture, dance, photography, cinema, fashion, design etc etc etc.

The problem in my eyes is that it's experimental and by their nature a lot of experiments fail, but people laud them for their sheer experimental-ness and stop short of judging quality. The number one thing is to do something that nobody has done before and worry about if it's any good later if at all. People neglect that at this point being challenging and shocking is ironically nearly as boring and stale as the sacred cows it once aimed at. We've had an entire century of this. We've even meta'd the meta and had silence-as-music, blank canvas-as-painting, and empty room-as-sculpture. The navel has been well and truly plumbed.

It's funny that you bring up beer because I think that cooking is one area where there's a natural limit on how far the boundaries can be pushed before people literally won't swallow it ("It's rat poison on rusty screws. Go on, try it!"). It's where taste runs up against physiology and not mere cerebral semantics.