“art”, media, whatever you create you create as a mode of expression first and foremost (which, imo, is why we all have a semi-innate distaste for work that feels derivative, disingenuous, or commerce-oriented claiming to be art.)
i think the arts landscape we find ourselves in (and the postmodernism of it all) incentivizes art that inspires dialogue, that is meant to captivate an audience and ideally a large one in both the fine arts and pop art arenas, and so we often congregate to forms like moving image, and other easily disseminated, easily digestible forms to express what is capable of being expressed through a variety of forms
if no one was there to receive our art we would still express ourselves. people expressed themselves before we had comms tech enabling immediate, mass dissemination. per meagre_graeme’s rec, forms with an emphasis on utility such as cuisine, materials work, etc. would certainly be viable and more “optimal” modes of expression, but writing would not go anywhere. photography would not go anywhere. the means by which people who do not consider themselves “artists” express themselves and use their creative faculties to capture and romanticize their lives would become the means by which we’d all express ourselves in the absence of an audience… so per taterhole… does the audience even matter?
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i think a lot of people still have this very conservative view of art. sure, drawing, painting, sculpture, and all of those mediums that have been seen as legitimate forms of art for thousands of years, are art. i feel like some people still view those as the ONLY legitimate forms of art. i think most people can agree we have accepted photography as art in the past century. why is our idea of what art can be, so narrow ? performance can be art, social media posting can be art, group blogging can be art, cultivating an affective commons can be art, hanging out can be art. you are no better than those who say a blue square cannot be art.
Jan 2, 2024
Something I've been noticing a lot in any sort if discourse on art and pop culture is a shift from seeing things as art to seeing them as simply media. This essentially combines all art forms while also including other "consumable" forms of expression such as news. While this is useful to talk about their similarities (a recent post here talked about collecting physical media such as CDs or DVDs), it seems to me like it degrades art of its value. Maybe this is the result of a history of debates about what's "real" art and what's just dumb entertainment, or maybe the roots of this lay in our increasing focus on constant consumption. I think the grouping of information and art (entertainment?) is sad enough as is, but it also creates a strange link between art forms that have little in common.
Am I just misunderstanding a term here? Who knows. Here's a sun bear I named Media
3d ago
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Practising creativity with a sense of giving your audience want they want. Its okay to create in such a way that fulfils your wishes and interests but at a certain point you must realise that the audience matters.
We’ve all been a part of the crowd and have known what we’ve wanted to see as a member of said audience. Taste, and the creators habits can only show so much, sometimes you must also joyfully do your job.
Give the people what they want in a way that leaves you fulfilled and excited to experience your own art from the perspective of the audience.
Oct 7, 2024
Top Recs from @alaiyo
Mar 23, 2024
a treatise on the attention economy - checked it out on libby and got through it over the course of a work day, a lot of really interesting social and cultural explorations about how time itself is the final frontier of hypercapitalism and what decommodification of our attention and time should look like
the book starts with a story about the oldest redwood tree in oakland and how the only reason it’s still standing is bc it’s unmillable, and how being uncommercializable is essential to our survival. it ends with an exploration of alt social media platforms (mostly p2p ones) and what keeping the good parts of the social internet and rejecting the bad ones should look like
all in all a super valuable read; my only nitpick with the book is that odell isn’t just charting the attention economy but also attempting to “solve” it and relate it back to broader concepts about labor and social organizing, but her background is in the arts which leads to some really wonderful references to drive the points home while also missing some critical racial + socioeconomic analyses that one would expect (or at least really appreciate) from the book she promises to deliver in the introduction. but this does also make the book easier to read which is good because everyone should definitely engage with what she has to say
will definitely be revisiting
Mar 25, 2024