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Notes -
There's certain content -- certain types of gore, certain furry content, etc -- that gives me "the ick".
Sometimes I remember that many people get the same "ick" feeling from anime art in general, particularly the type of anime art that gets criticized as "overly-sexualized".
What are some times when you were reminded of the unbridgeable gap between different modes of perception?
Avant-garde art.
I'm a chronic philistine that Just Doesn't Get It, and looking at most of high-brow art made after the turn of the 20th century fills me with a sense of not just indifference, but mild rage.
Every time I step into a modern art gallery or watch an artsy movie I feel like I've become the main character of The Truman Show, with the people making that stuff, critiquing it and respectfully looking at it all engaged in a giant, elaborate troll aimed at convincing me that any of those works are actually good.
I'm not proud of this trait, and I've tried reading up on art, but I just can't reject the evidence of my eyes and ears. I simply can't see it. I'd rather look at anything else – modern imitations of classicist paintings, Kinkade, AI art of big-ttited anime girls – on the wall of that art gallery than a Picasso. Because all of those look much better to my eye than any of Picasso's work.
I imagine that's how a child who got a taste of beer from his dad at a family gathering feels.
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.
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