Anonymous asked:
Right then, let’s see what’s in this box you’ve brought us, my dear Anon-kun.
Hmn, yes, this is a good find. Go now, and be proud of yourself, my little grey sphere friend.
Anonymous asked:
Yes.
What is visual art about? At its barest - color, shape/form, composition…
Abstract art, when it is good, is about these things, the far end of a continuum of realism vs abstraction.
And I think a lot of the pushback really is about seeing some kinds of art as a scam, defined totally by the artist’s popularity.
Anonymous asked:
A few of them have certainly been cleaned up, like a dropped sandwich would be, after being “mistaken” for food waste. And in another case, a dropped food item that had nothing to do with the installation was assumed to be part of it.
(Fortunately, the last time I heard about cleaning staff cleaning up an exhibit of this kind by accident, they did not get fired for it.)
Anonymous asked:
Ugggh. Who do you think you are, Google?
Come back when you’re a multinational corporation physically embodying the threat of a societal panopticon in order to more efficiently sell Authentic™ skinny mom jeans to hipsters, loser.
Anonymous asked:
argumate answered:
That’s why most Japanese stuff is anime instead of live action: too expensive to fake the backgrounds and keep finding Chinese actors who can pretend they speak “Japanese”.
I can’t believe you would publish such a slanderous ask against the country that was once the 大日本帝国, you treacherous kangaroo farmer, the light of their mighty rising sun nearly covered all of Asi–
* gasping *
* coughing *
* wheezing *
Phew, don’t know what came over me, there. One moment I was just reading Tumblr and then I just… blacked out. It was almost like that time a foreign hypernationalist ideo-virus got past my memetic barriers and infected my cyberbrain. But fortunately I got that removed. No traces left.
A-argumate, why are you looking at me like that?
Argumate-kun? Is something wrong?
[soon your askbox would be full of shitpost asks like Argumate’s and] you’d be tempted to make an ms paint collage for every single one.
This television show blog doesn’t have that kind of animation drawing budget.
But don’t worry. Most anons on this blog do not get a Full Custom™ MS Paint.JPG for their asks. It’s just the rate of images per ask that would reduce.
Anonymous asked:
A monarch is nothing more than the crown jewel worn by the State.
Dual Monachy? I’ve got anons inventing entirely new forms of government right here in my askbox.
Truly lovely. Sometimes it’s a drag, but I’m glad I live at the end of the great era of popular art.
Why do you think this is the end of the great era of popular art?
I’m too tired to fully explicate this, but the idea in my head is something like this. The great era of popular art (movies and pop music [that is, anything from jazz to rock to rap – anything with a backbeat], mainly) that’s lasted for a century or so was the product of a few one-time technological innovations – the reliable recording of audio and images plus the ability to distribute those recordings en masse. Mechanically reproduced art, basically. As soon as these technologies became viable there was a great wave of cultural innovation. Genre after genre was created and explored by artist after artist.
Think of the way that rock music developed from a primitive (not in a bad sense) model in the 50′s, to something more fully fleshed out in the 60′s as artists figured out what rock was, to all sorts of weird and baroque experimentation in the 70′s. That’s crude, but you get the basic idea. In an incredibly short span of time artists were figuring out what rock music could be, what its limitations were. There have been spasms of creativity in rock music since, but it’s fair to say that rock has slowly been drying up as a source of innovation since the 70′s. Why? Well, like I said, artists figured out what rock music was. There was less scope for things that were both novel and good. It’s still possible to make great rock music, even albums that stand up with the original greats, but it’s harder to surprise. Not impossible, but harder and harder. And so the culture moves on. Just as importantly, Real Artists move on. The productive subcultures go away, one by one. Hence why people say that rock music is dead. It isn’t dead, but it is eternally senescent in much the same way that classical is. All rock is now made in reference to the past.
However, at some point it’s not just that individual genres are losing their potency, it’s that the whole grouping of genres enabled by this new mode of artistic production are losing their potency. Punk was an interesting challenge to an overblown status quo. Grunge was a less interesting challenge to an overblown status quo. The third time will be utterly predictable and boring. Rock and rap and electronica are all different, but the parallels are obvious and at some high level things start to blend together. It’s predictable. You can still make good movies, but it’s hard to make one that’s unpredictable. What was the last new movie that surprised you in that way? Even the languages of shock and irony become played out. You can’t get heavier than doom metal without going below the range of human hearing. You can’t get noisier than noise music, or more ambient than ambient. Both popular music and its more experimental derivatives have been explored at this point. Not totally, but to an ever-increasing degree.
It’s taken a century, but this is the end of the line for innovation in popular art, the end of the golden age.
Or so the theory in my head goes. The other option is that the rate of cultural innovation has genuinely permanently increased and that we’ll see new and interesting popular genres get churned out indefinitely. It’s possible – it’s hard to distinguish between an S-curve and an exponential one when you’re on it – but I’m doubtful. It would hardly be the first time a whole style of art similarly lost momentum. I already mentioned classical music. Think too of the deconstructive impulse of Modernism. Exhibiting a urinal in a gallery is a genuinely interesting gimmick, but only for the first time.
In the end, there’s only so much you can do with a backbeat. Or with the shot reverse shot.
Which isn’t to say that art is dead forever, mind. (Or that pop art is going away. It’s popular for a reason!) That sort of mindless declinism is just tedious. I have no doubt that there will be equally interesting artistic innovations sooner or later. Though it is hard to see from where. So far video games have fallen woefully short of being Art Art (even the best written games are terribly mediocre compared to anything else), and the internet has been useful for distribution but not really for artistic innovation, with minor exceptions. So I dunno, we’ll see. But I don’t think there will be another rock music.
(Thanks to @argumate for some of the ideas here. I don’t think I’ve written this post before, but who can be sure of that kind of thing anymore.)
The future is more art and more customization.
The use of algorithmic tools and other software allows for more creators to use less effort to create more art. That leads to a greater volume of art and a potentially faster exploration of micro-genres. These micro-genres will more closely suit the preferences of individual readers.
However, it is impossible for one individual to view all of this art. There simply isn’t enough time, even for a NEET.
This will allow shocks to occur when viewers leave their micro-genres in order to explore new ones.
Anonymous asked:
If funding could be secured, it would be possible to start a think tank, because there is a lot of work to be done. These ideas are exotic, they escape the Overton Window by travelling orthogonal to it, but they have to be refined, tested, and experimented with.
The goal would be to synthesize a new scientific art of organizational design and policy incentivization from a diverse group of fields, including political science, economics (particularly behavioral economics), psychology, philosophy, and mathematics. Most existing organizations and politics are running on pre-digital organizational technology, and very few people even think of “organizational technology” as even being a concept.
Various proposals would be drafted, analyzed, refined, and then simulated using human testers (against competing speculative policies) before being refined again cyclically and suggested for institutions smaller than the US Federal Government. To improve efficiency, various competing domain experts would be hired for short periods of time.
Actually improving governance in the United States would require doing things that deeply offend both the Democratic and Republican parties and which are at odds with their ideological pre-commitments. Formation of a political party is right out due to the First Past the Post System which makes success with policies that are only inspiring to the kinds of people that read this blog extremely improbable. Policy advocacy should therefore focus on attacking avenues which are not sufficiently defended by partisan trench warfare, municipalities, and shifting politicians on individual issues through lobbying and electoral guides, functioning as a Special Interest Group.
Until then, one can follow this strange political time travel blog and dream of the future, if one wishes, in addition to whatever political activity one normally carries out.
Anonymous asked:
The grand irony is that all the other medical technologies acquired along the way as part of the general pattern of technological development necessary to achieve enhanced lifespans would very well allow me to achieve much more of my potential.
…to have energy, to have focus, to have executive functioning, for all these to be much less of a battle, why did you think I wanted to live so long in the first place?
There’s a lot of art to make, way more than can be crammed into a single human lifetime, much less a single dysfunctional human lifespan.
The “but living longer will remove meaning from human life!” arguments were always somewhat bizarre to me. Making a book, or a comic book, or a movie, it takes a long time!
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.
