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PaperclipPerfector
1d ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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At least in the circles I've run in, the idea of "cultured intellectualism" that sticks today has a lot to do with knowing prominent but countercultural figures, movements and pieces of art that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, e.g. New Hollywood and independent films (such as knowing the oeuvres of Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich and John Cassavetes), the Manchester and London punk and post-punk scene (listening to and appreciating the Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd, The Fall, Joy Division, etc) and other such things. Knowing critical modernist and abstract-expressionist artists and designers such as people involved in the Bauhaus movement and de Stijl, as well as Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and so on is also a big part of it.
In general, the art that we venerate and consider intellectual says a lot about the aspirations, beliefs and general zeitgeist of our society, and it certainly applies here. Any such aristocratic Victorian ideals that persisted in the early half of the twentieth century were all but swept away by the counterculture of the post-war period, and by the time the third millennium began it had largely been replaced with an... entirely different set of ideals and hierarchies. All of the stuff that is considered intellectual today was explicitly about "breaking from tradition", breaking from conventional notions of beauty, prioritising the individual artist and their subjectivity over the consumer, accepting the strange and absurd and even the outright ugly. That goes along with a zeitgeist that's typified by a blank-slatist idea of the human mind wherein all aesthetics, beliefs and social structures are fully enculturated, it embraces absurdism and subjectivity to the point that it claims that truth is unattainable and morality is merely a construct (used primarily as a rhetorical device to undermine and expose the previous system as fake, all while the ideology contradictorily makes its own sweeping claims about truth and morality and imposes its own social stratifications that are elevated to the level of dogma), and it's so beholden to its roots and needs something to be in opposition to so badly that it's unable to stop LARPing as subversive and countercultural even after it has ossified into every institution and become the hegemony. I find it very funny that progressive media and art now finds itself in the strange position of having become an institution with its own stringent and limiting criteria for deemed excellence.
I think there is a nascent counter-counterculture forming at the moment in certain very online dissident right and dirtbag left spaces with their own distinct mannerisms and aesthetics, but it's going to be a good long while before they take the world by storm in the same way that the 1960s and 1970s saw.
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