/lit/ - Literature

>>11398114
Literature is not dead. It's simply complete.

>>11398114

but it is better than ever

just because /lit/ doesn't talk about good contemporary literature doesn't mean it doesn't exist

>>11398114
I was reading an article yesterday about how most professional writers earn less than minimum wage. Unless you are in the top 0.1% top YA authors there isn't any money in writing. That's why it's dying.
Art on the other hand is alive an well. It grinds my gears that people know that to understand higher level math, science, lit etc... that you have to study it, whereas everyone who knows nothing about art feel like their opinions on modern art are worth something. And if course the rabbling masses who also know nothing about art all circle jerk over how stupid modern art is.

>>11398289
There are some great contemporary authors - I just finished Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and was bowled over by it.
Default setting on /lit/ is to condemn modern writers because you are sure to get a few people agreeing with you...

Painting is enjoying its semi-eternal unlife as a global money laundering operation. Literature has no such secondary use except as doorstops.

>>11398300
What counts as a "professional writer"? Hacks writing clickbait for internet rags are "professional writers".

>>11398337
People whose main income is derived from writing I guess. It didn't go into detail but it was clear that it meant people who are literary writers.

>>11398114
First define what "dead" means in this context, so we have at least some solid ground for debate.

>>11398300

>It grind my gears to know...

But maths and science claim expertise within incredibly narrow domains in incredibly narrow ways. While artists and humanitards claims that art is about "dude, like everything", i.e., implying that their knowledge of art gives them some sort of superior mastery or skill or set of meta-skills that mathematicians just don't know.

And then when someone humours them by joining in without adhering to current fashions, the artfags go crazy and demand you adhere to fashions and "learn" according to what they define as learning

>>11398114
>tfw when that painting is actually good

>>11398415
>not the best argument, but good point. Art in general is mystified too much and this false feeling of superiority is a huge problem. However, it is true that there is a pretty universal idea what "educated about art" means in the West, similar to other disciplines of humanism.

>>11398415
what if, hear me out, only the politically left believe "art is about everything maaan" and the others believe that art is confined within context, meaning that art speaks only towards art's own ends. Naturally people who study this strict context have a better view of what art is than those who don't?

>>11398114
You have no idea what you're talking about.

>>11398415
>>11398440
>>11398709
I'm into art, graduated in Visual Arts, had two sole exhibitions of my work (painting and sculpture), other 5 with other people, taught art and drawing informally and in schools to kids, and basically read and watch stuff about it everyday.

>While artists and humanitards claims that art is about "dude, like everything"
This is just an impression from the outside. Math is also "dude, about everything", but the way to tackle it is narrow, with its specific methods and language. If you ask such a generic question "what is art about?" you'll get a generic answer, because you can't possibly talk about it in depth in a punch. Actual artists are not that much into defining art as you think they are, they are too busy thinking of more specific things, whether they are technical, poetic or simply practical things.

>And then when someone humours them by joining in without adhering to current fashions, the artfags go crazy and demand you adhere to fashions and "learn" according to what they define as learning
This is basically the same mindset of a lot of shitty contemporary artists who don't want to get into classical art or history of art. I wouldn't call it "fashion", just communication. If you wear pants in your head, it doesn't mean you are retarded, you can objectively be smart and do it, but people will still think you are retarded. If I go into a physics class and say "what if we use black holes to visit another galaxy? have you guys thought about this before? huh?" I'd be laughed at.

Basically, it's great to try something new, but you don't know what's new if you don't know what's up. Sometimes people are just more of the same and it's fairly easy to blend in and be a mediocre artist or mathematician or anything, but if you want to go do something new, you'd have to excel in the area, hold your ground and push the boundaries. Otherwise people will most naturally reject you. They are not necessarily consciously excluding you from their circle because they are dicks, they just don't see how what you're doing communicates to all else that they are seeing, so they don't buy it.

>politically left believe "art is about everything maaan" and the others believe that art is confined within context, meaning that art speaks only towards art's own ends
It's not a left thing, bro. It's not even a thing, just a generic response to those who are not into it. It's like saying "poetry is about writing beautiful stuff in verses" it says very little on what makes a good poem or the history and variety of poetry.

Btw, I'd be the first to criticize contemporary art. It really is a bubble, a very annoying one and I personally want to get out of this area and do something else at this point while continue to paint as a secondary thing. But I have no illusions that the art world was always a small bubble to some extent and also that there are a lot of good artists today doing very different things, thinking in very different ways.

>>11398796 here

Also, on OP's thing, I don't buy absolute shit like "hurr it's dead!", but it does make some sense in painting. Except it's not that "this shit is accepted, therefore the craft is dead!", it's kind of like the other way around.

Painting was once a way to reproduce the visible, mark history and places, portray important people, promote knowledge of stuff you wouldn't know otherwise, etc. After the industrial revolution, the fall of a bunch of empires and monarchies, the possibility to just click a photo, or to take a train, ship or plane to visit some place else, and so on, that aspect of painting turned futile. It is only then that abstract painters emerged, with varying discourses, but mainly saying that if you just paint with that past mindset, you are obsolete, you are competing with more efficient ways to access those subjects and you are holding on to spook values. They were just trying to make some painting that people would want to look at, if not for the previous reasons, then for new reasons.

This is more evident from the impressionists onward, who were then rejected as shit painters mostly because you could see their brushstrokes, whereas today people jizz over them, rightly so because it's more interesting to look at a Monet than to look at actual leaves floating in lakes. They were already exploring ways to make painting alive.

>>11398300
It's not dying though. The fact that author pay is so low these days is because there are so many more authors than in the past.

In the past there were like 10 good authors

Now there are 1 million authors, and 999,990 of them are terrible, and deserve to make less than minimum wage

>>11398114
>>11398158
do you even try to read new books?

>>11398114
It is obviously true, when future civilizations pick the best art from ours none of it will be from the 20th century. Probably very little from the 19th as well

'Western European Art' will be represented by like Rembrandt, Dante, and Bach(or whatever), and the rest will be more or less forgotten except to specialized scholars.

>>11398315
no, its more like most people here feel much safer reading classics because it is guaranteed 'quality' (which is why they are classics in the first place), as opposed to trying a potentially bad contemporary writer whe they have a big list of classics they want to read.
I remember when Jerusalem came out, a bunch of people here read it straight away but most people said they were waiting to see if it was good before even considering it

>>11398960
Nothing new is good, it's not even worth trying. Art has degenerated just like western civ.

>>11398114
your opinions on art are just slightly more worthless than someone feeding their dog a vegan diet. stick to what you actually know, which is humping your parent's novelty couch pillows and then avoiding their direct line of sight.

>>11399055
This but unironically

>>11398982
Yeah, I too was born in the wrong generation..

>>11399135
if you wanted to be one of the representative artists of Western civilization, then you objectively were, though you would have been shit back then as well

>>11399143
did you sleep through every single history lesson you've ever been in?

>>11398982
>and Bach(or whatever)
stunning, here we see the middlebrow specimen giving himself away so easily it does make us wonder whether we are being baited or not

>>11398982
this is what some people actually believe.
absolutely amazing. what does it feel like having a severe brain deformation? can you actually feel the yawning space between your actual brain the lining of your skull, or what?

>>11399160
>>11399201
you can be mad but you know deep down nobody will give a shit about Picasso and Joyce, while the Gothic cathedral and the plays of Racine will live on forever as symbols of the West

>>11398114
This is always the refrain of the creative. Those who see art more like fast food.

>>11399230
Holy shit, sorry dude, I thought those people who were born without brains entirely were just creepy rubber dildo babies with pug eyes that died after three days of horrific agony, but apparently they post their shit opinions about something they know nothing about on 4chan.

>>11399251
you wouldnt be this upset if you didnt know i was right, it causes you anxiety because you base your self worth on the hope that you can succeed in a field that is dead

>>11398830
>>11398796
Well written. Very lucid and rational.
As an artist in training I must say I agree completely.

>>11399256
I'm sorry about your gross vestigial limbs

Literature is dead and publicly funded libraries killed it. There's no real profit to be had as a novelist so the only people who can really devote a lot of time to the craft are rich people. Perspectives are limited to that one class of people and the medium as a whole is suffering for it.

>>11398315
>1989
>contemporary
boy that book was published almost 30 years ago. thats like saying Thomas Hardy was a contemporary of Joyce.

>>11398415
p sure this is literally the argument plato uses in the ion and republic. based false equivocation.

>>11399262


Literature is becoming a niche interest but it's far from dead. The issue is it's an active form of entertainment in an exhausting society glutted with passive forms of entertainment. Reading will be something like hiking, which a passionate subculture participates in and benefits from. There's little opportunity to read as well as to write because the middle class that demanded and wrote the novel is in decline due to income inequalities.

The rise of reading as a form of mass entertainment is actually a quirk of history. Read The Rise of the Novel. There's always been a smaller group writing ad reading. That group will have actually expanded somewhat because of the invention and popularization of the novel in the last 200 years.

If anything the novel at least is in an ideal place where it is still seen as something everyone can enjoy - compare it to poetry or drama - and try to do. It's hard enough to do, unrewarding enough, that only people who truly want to write will do it - as well as the insulated shits. It's just the issue of distribution now.

fuck off minteu

>>11399411
How does income inequality discourage people from reading?

>>11398300
>I was reading an article yesterday about how most professional writers earn less than minimum wage
The situation in the past wasn't much better, though. Most writers belonged to the higher class (nobility, clergy) that could afford writing... The ones who didn't were often on the verge of poverty. Today they have other jobs, they are professors or something else. (My psychiatrist is a poet.)

>>11399230
>the plays of Racine will live on forever as symbols of the West
Top fucking lel

>>11399262
>Literature is dead and publicly funded libraries killed it
Any data to back that up?

>>11399042
>most people here feel much safer reading classics because it is guaranteed 'quality' (which is why they are classics in the first place), as opposed to trying a potentially bad contemporary writer whe they have a big list of classics they want to read
This. They don't dare touch it, while the old texts have the Harold Bloom seal of approval. Nobody is defending the new works, so the easiest path is to preemptively shit on them and ignore instead of leaving your comfort zone and actually reading a new book.

>>11398796
>>11398830
Good posts

>>11398114

>>11399496
>Any data to back that up?

What specifically are you looking for? Confirmation that modern authors don't make a lot of money? That making a product free will reduce the profits of people attempting to sell the same profit? I don't think either of these things are controversial.

>>11399509
Confirmation that modern authors make less money than the old ones and that the drop correlates with appearance of public libraries (which have existed since the 15th century, publicly funded ones since the middle of 19th).
Otherwise this is on the level of claiming that the lower numbers of pirates cause global warming.

>>11398114
rothko is good though

>>11399580
I don't where you would find such data and I think it's ridiculous to demand it. That making a product free will decrease the demand for people selling such a product for money is a perfectly reasonable economic assumption. If you're selling lemonade for 50 cents and I set up a stand right across the street and begin giving the lemonade out for free, how much lemonade could you possibly expect to continue selling? You might be able to continue selling some lemonade by dressing it up but the overall market for your relatively expensive lemonade is reduced drastically.

>>11398158
Does that mean that humanity's imagination has already shown everything it had to offer? Have we reached the peak?

>>11399251
big fan of this post

>>11399481
book cost money
labour job make person tired when come home

>>11399496
Personally I just feel like my time is very limited and I don't want to invest a lot of it into an unknown quantity. I appreciate Bloom listing his favorite living writers (Roth, McCarthy, Pynchon and Delillo, I think), and James Wood seems to have good taste as well. I wish I knew more reliable critics like them, they do a lot to help separate the wheat from the chaff with respect to contemporary lit. If you have any recs for critics or writers I'm sure people would appreciate it, personally I just finished Krasznahorkai's War & War and it really renewed my faith in the possibilities still open to us.

>>11398436
tfw brainlet detected without radar on.

>>11399732
But all those authors are pretty old men who've been writing for the past five or so decades. What about books being written by young men?

>>11399370
contemporary is from the 70s on

>>11399768
what a naive, not to mention arbitrary, view

>>11399774
its an arbitrary word

>>11399781
it's an arbitrary worLd

>>11398796
How do I become smart about art like you?

>>11399766
Yeah, that's true. I think the internet, economic desperation, and the state of the culture in general make it really difficult for serious writers to get started anymore. It'll take a singular type of person to rise out of this environment and write something worthwhile, but I think that as long as some interest in literature survives, it'll happen. The state of publishing is also obviously disgusting, but the upside of the internet is that there are other avenues for people to share their work (it's possible that those would really be the places to look for young writers, although they have plenty of their own problems).

>>11399850
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3ne7Udaetg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzFeuiZKHcg
https://www.youtube.com/user/wapangacy08

>>11399870
Thank you! Are you the Cesar guy? Damn ways of seeing has been sitting on my watchlist and hdd for too long! Enough!

>>11399639
>make a concrete claim regarding economy
>it's ridiculous to demand data to support this!
This isn't philosophy, we're talking about material events and you're supposed to support the conjectures that you pulled out of your ass with some data. If you have no data, how do you even know that writers are making less money at all? You didn't define anything, you have absolutely no data and don't seem even to know when libraries came into existence.
I offered some data - public libraries have existed since the 15th century. Writers must have been doing pretty fucking fine for centuries, even though their books were freely available. But maybe they weren't that accessible, maybe there were too few libraries to supply people, who would instead buy the books? This is a pretty complicated problem, there's a lot of data that should be taken into consideration before coming to a conclusion (how many libraries existed and where, how have people been obtaining books over the centuries, how did the book market function overall etc). You can't just throw two things together (libraries=writers make no money) without any sort of context whatsoever and call it a day.

TWT

>>11399909
You're asking for scientific data to prove that giving things away for free makes selling those same things more difficult. That is a ridiculous demand and you are a ridiculous person. This is philosophy and the fact you realize it is another demonstration of your ridiculousness. When libraries began to exist is completely irrelevant because the argument is that the existence of libraries themselves reduce the market for authors attempting to sell more books and this would have been true back then just as it is now.

I think the truth is you just don't like the conclusion but you're incapable of addressing it so you try to play this game where you demand scientific evidence for non scientific arguments. It follows that if giving a product away for free makes it more difficult to sell that same product, like in the lemonade analogy, then giving people free access to books will make it more difficult to sell books. This is a very simple argument based on a very uncontroversial premise.

>>11399764
Sorry you can't handle abstract art.

>>11399251
based

>>11399901
>Are you the Cesar guy?
lol no, I just discovered his channel a couple weeks ago and liked it, so it was in the top of my mind and I think he is very straight forward and accessible.

Ways of Seeing is a great intro to what I think is essential to accessing visual culture. There is a book by the same name as well. If you want to know more about art, visit museums, ask for guided assistance. Get involved.

Good luck anon!

>>11399642
There are select few creators who provide, but they are not wildly well known.

>>11398982
Did you know that Bach was mostly forgotten for a century and only truly rescued by Mendelhson, but now it seems he was always here. Mozart and Beethoven weren't even influenced by him.

Did you know ancient greek art was not valued until the renaissance, that's like several centuries of being mostly forgotten or deemed as degenerate.

Did you know that europeans hate on muslims entering their country now, but at a time they were sitting on top of europe and actually producing really nice art, architecture, math and music.

"Future civilizations" will only remember what they resonate with and that has less to do with quality than you think. History is not homogenous and there is no end. Things can be forgotten and remembered several times and each time, they have a different impact.

t. 35th century martian yogi who listens to jethro tull and enjoys his somalian architecture home from the 23 century and has no idea who jesus was

>>11399230
Nobody cares about your dead old white men, we will piss on their graves and tear down your cathedrals.

>>11399766
Sam Pink and Blake Butler come to mind right away as contemporary writers /lit/ basically ignores.

>>11400045
based

>>11400045
Dante was also completely irrelevant before he was ressurected so to speak.

>>11399251
fucking savage m8

>>11400077
>>11400045

So were many, many painters. El Greco, Velazquez, even Rembrandt, if I remember correctly.

>>11400049
I probably don't dislike the quirky/edgy alt-lit style as much as most people on here, but do you think Sam Pink is a genuinely good writer? I've never read him, but I can't really tell just based on reviews whether or not I'd enjoy or hate his writing.

>>11398114
I know this is probably bait, but sometimes I wonder if it's true. I can probably think of 100 truly great films made since the year 2000, yet I struggle to think of 10 great works of literature made since then

>>11400261
How many films since 2000 have you watched? How many books have you read?

>>11400261
If you mentioned some memento shit I will sewer side you

>>11398960
I do, but it’s hard to go from classic to contemporary
>>11398114
Also the rise in the popularity of the ereader says otherwise

>>11398114
There are some good books that come out every now and then, every few months or so, but you have to look reeeeaally hard to find them. Most of them don't get any traction. It means going through hundreds of shit books but that's what it takes.

I think literature critics in the 21st century are becoming dumber and dumber, not the books. The same with art.

>>11398337
Yeah, they're the ones actually making money.

>>11398948
Yet the 10 good ones earn the minimum wage.

>>11400047
the greek temples were mostly torn down but theyre sitll remembered for their beauty. So it will be with the cathedrals. Your people on the other hand have never made anything of value, you just destroy

>>11400049
Where do I start with these two lads?

>>11400528
Anon, think about what you're saying, there have been plenty of civilizations which were completely obliterated and nothing was left. You never heard of them because, obviously, there is nothing left.

Tru, words are a pretty shit medium, we should admit this

>>11400045
None of this is true.

Literature died with Beckett, OP, and we're all doomed to play in its rotting corpse. This ain't news.

>>11400758
There is a Beckett saying that goes something like "everything was already told by everyone, but it is not yet told by me".

>>11398114
Lit and painting are in a coma, now theatre, that's dead.

>be me
>painting is my passion
>all I do is paint
>love painters like da vinci, michelangelo, the list could go on
>spend youth in painting courses
>get a degree in paintin-related shit
>perfectionate my technique so much that I can paint wih my eyes closed and still nail it
>knowledgable in all styles from any era
>still I choose to paint lines and squares to represent the complexity of life and shit
Here's my latest masterpiece, faggots

>>11401243
>properly lit
nice.png

>>11401243
it’s no good sorry

>"modern art is shit"
>posts abstract expressionism, an art movement that started almost literally a century ago and died nearly 50 years ago

nothing exposes a pseud whose opinion is as common as it is trite quite as quickly as this one. up there with remarking that austen is shit, a waste of time, made no contribution to fiction or something equivalent. you think you have a hot contrarian take but it just belies grave dilettantism

>>11400981
You bet your ass it is.
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf9vLUXZcC0
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic7NqP_YGlg
Would you like to take a guess as to what I got my associates in? And would you like to guess how much money I spent on furthering that associates as a transfer student this past year?

>>11401358
I'll wait.

>>11401362
Oh man that would actually be a neat play, was it Julius Caesar or hamlet?

not quite. modernity killed humanity. literature and painting just express that death.

>>11401368
Caesar, but i think trump is more a hamlet

>>11401281
modern art ≠ postmodern art ≠ contemporary art

Nothing exposes a pseud as quickly as an idiot who brands others as pseuds, but knows jack shit himself.

>>11401243

>love painters like da vinci, michelangelo, the list could go on

You must be the most sophisticated man in the world.
Also, it's Leonardo or Leonardo da Vinci, never just Da Vinci.

>>11398114
>>11398158
>>11398289
Honestly, how could you possibly want for stuff to read in this day and age? There is a fucking insurmountable catalog of shit written just prior to the 19th century, and you're complaining.
>caring about what is current

Shiggydiggydoo, friendo.

>>11398415
>But maths and science claim expertise within incredibly narrow domains in incredibly narrow ways. While artists and humanitards all conform to my retarded strawman so I can pretend that I'm not a pretentious twat

>>11398436
Lol go stare at a Matisse for month straight then come back and appreciate it in its full glory

>>11401720
>implying I can't appreciate both

>>11398796

So how do you explain the pic in the OP if you're all in such agreement? So EVERYONE agrees that it's an incredible work of art? And if a 15 year old says it's rubbish then he merely hasn't learnt enough?

And what about Pynchon books? If you read a review of any of them, you'd think they were advanced treatises on philosophy, society etc. Are these reviewers artistic outcasts who haven't "learnt" enough?

>>11398158
>literature is complete
>new literature is produced every day

>>11401765
What the fuck are you even saying man

>>11398114
literature was already dead before literature for its is the spew of reality. A graveyard of verbification and we are the morticians who are looking for the gold pieces left over by the past.

>>11401765
Rothko is generally well-regarded, if a bit pleb. Abstract expressionism in general is not that popular right now.

>>11401362
>>11401423
I'd legit watch this. Caesar is an ambiguous character and it'd be fascinating to see how the ideas of the play reflect the current world.
But everything people know about Caesar is that he got killed, so everyone seems to simply be shocked by the play.

>>11401765
>So how do you explain the pic in the OP
What's to explain? I don't get it. Formulate a question or something.

>So EVERYONE agrees that it's an incredible work of art?
No, not everyone likes it, most people are not into it at all. It was recently sold for a gazillion dollars but you should never pay much attention to that as if it was a thermometer of acceptance. The high art auction world is a money laundry scheme, they speculate artists and it has no bearing on their quality. An inner circle of collectors buy a bunch of art from some guy, then they hype it up, sell to each other for the highest prices, the paintings then become much more valuable than before. That's what happened to Rothko. It's particularly cruel to living young artists though, a collector may buy all of your work for cheap (which to you is still a lot of money, so you are happy thinking you're a successful artist) and keep it in a safe where no one can see. Then years later they make an exhibition of your work as if it was hot shit and sell for them for 10 times that price and the artist doesn't get anything.

>And if a 15 year old says it's rubbish then he merely hasn't learnt enough?
A 15 year old hasn't learnt enough regardless if he like it or not. Anyone can think it's rubbish, or good, you are not entitled to force that. But 15 year olds don't make art or buy art so people won't care for his opinion anyway.

>>11401666
why do you think i attached a painting from a living painter? im not saying modern art = contemporary art. thats what OP and others like him say all the time, literally "modern art is shit" while referencing an abstract expressionist painting thats at least 50 years old. often comes with a comment like "a 5 year old could paint that." the green text is quoting, are you new to 4chan or something

Is that a Nintendo 3ds?

Literature is dead. Here is the proof.
>>11398767
>>11398960
>>11399112
>>11399135
>>11399160
>>11399201
>>11399219
>>11399251
>>11399643
>>11399994
>>11400095
>>11399261
>>11400045
>>11401281

>>11402145
>But 15 year olds don't make art

>>11398114
>not knowing how to appreciate Mark Rothko's works, which are one of the most demanding and complex paitings in modern history
Seriously you are fucking stupid

>>11402200
>Implying ye olde Picasso senior didn't lend a hand in the creation of this...

>>11398436
Rothko paintings are nothing more than pieces of canvas used to launder money and dodge taxes by the rich. The sheer retardation of beatnik hipsters and "patrons of art" who intellectualized and praised color field abstract and made his works a big fucking meme. His message was nothing more than.
>Large patches of color can kinda make you feel a feel LMAO
He killed himself because he knew he was art's most overrated fraud.

>>11398948
the problem is that there isn't any incentive for possibly good writers to become one, and the already good writers have to sell themselves to off to MFA programs so they can eat.

>>11401243
rothko is good, tho

>>11402566

Quality art is still being created. It's just that they're not as visible as we wish they would be.

>>11398300
devoting yourself to art but expecting a fat check in return, what are you, some kind of jew?

>>11398114
>post painting by a guy who died 48 years ago
>"painting is dead"
could you be any more out of touch

>>11402635
whatever man, his paintings are fun

>>11402473
Every kind of art is used for laundering, this and the CIA funding meme are just lazy byways of criticism, most often directed at abstract expressionism, minimalism, and conceptualism (not "modern art," as you mongoloids like to generalize).

>>11403117
This. How do you launder money with performance art and happening anyway, why do those forms exist?

>>11398415
t.literally the guy the poster you were responding to was talking about

>bang bang, bang. Bang
>pam pam pam, pam pam

i like modern art and literature, i will never have friends

>>11403601

>>11398114
>Literature is dead
Yeah, and so is every other creative media that somehow keeps shitting new stuff every day...

>>11398300
Because there's nothing to study. Art is not a science, there's no wrong or right, only relativity.

>>11402509
>the problem is that there isn't any incentive for possibly good writers to become one

and there never has been
and there never should be
people whining about how hard it is to be a successful artist should neck themselves

>>11401243
Paintings don’t always need a deeper meanings, pleb.

>tell girls im a painter
>they all want to pose for me
Its great being a necromancer :DD