/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19484778]

Why are there so no geniuses in the arts like they were in the past? Surely there are people with the IQ and Ability of Shakespeare or Mozart amongst us yet they don't create anything? What changed?

[Anonymous No.19484795]

I'd say that the lack of investment in arts and humanities in general. Any activity that does not create profit inmediatly gets swept under the rug

[Anonymous No.19484825]

you're blind to the geniuses of today because you are a racist bigot.

[Anonymous No.19484829]

Art is dead

[Anonymous No.19484835]

>>19484778
no one is known (by the masses [us]) in his time

[Anonymous No.19484837]

>>19484795
What does it cost to write a novel or to buy a piano and upload the recordings?

[Anonymous No.19484839]

>>19484835
Literally 99.9% of the geniuses of the past were world famous and called geniuses in their time. Wagner literally had a fucking castle built for him

[Anonymous No.19484844]

>>19484778
they are too busy consuming mass media or engaging in whatever new trend instead. Or just tried and are now starving more than the artists of that time.

[Anonymous No.19484849]

shakespeare was born into the renaissance, with a brilliant woman on the throne

[Anonymous No.19484851]

>>19484778
Because no one fucking cares about art anymore and the only people who have the money to finance it would only do so in order to flex on other ultra-rich retards.

[Anonymous No.19484856]

>>19484795
You think their was some New Deal artist program in the 1700s?

[Anonymous No.19484869]

>>19484825
Octavia Butler lol literal YA tier. At least post a negro with talent like Richard Wright.

[Anonymous No.19484880]

>>19484825
weak falseflagging

[Anonymous No.19484930]

>>19484880
what's the matter big guy, being a superspade is no longer good enough for whitey?

[Anonymous No.19484983]

>>19484851

>>19484837

[Anonymous No.19485004]

Because no one reads them if they self-publish and to get traditionally published they have to win the approval of someone like this.

[Anonymous No.19485011]

>>19484856
Patronage was essentially state sponsored art, as most of the great patrons were members of the ruling classes or church or both. It was still highly competitive, though, to get patronage.

[Anonymous No.19485066]

>>19484983
So you write something or make something. Then what? What's the effect? There are no longer appreciators of art, nor fellow artists to engage with, nor is there any cultural space where art reigns. What would be the appeal of a marble statue in the middle of a dumpster?

[Anonymous No.19485140]

>>19484778
In the hyper-cosmopolitan age, only the artist can enjoy such production, those that are their own. He is the first man and as producer he is the sole end and beginning of pluralism shielded from the ill effects of his own craft
The second man is the cosmopolitan himself, who takes the artist's craft and tries to orient it as some enjoyment. Yet most cannot do this long or with any genuine interest to which they falter and only hold up a hollow attempt in re-creating the mindset of passions which they are so interested in captivating. Together the cosmopolitans are merely successful in their own positive reinforcement and generate the art of artfulness, the unobserved produce of gaping and money pushing
The third and most despondent is the flaneur who is engrossed in the pluralist plenty but for varies reasons makes no attempt to peer beyond as a consumer, onlooker, or Procter. All three roles are vital, but none include the full success of the generative artist or the half success of the cosmopolitan. As sleepwalkers, the flaneur moves with the productions of his time, not as a slave but not emancipated either. Yet the great masses of proctors are the harshest judges, who will at times rise up in harsh iconoclasm and smash the production of the artist in the inversion of passion and the justification of spectating nothing.

[Anonymous No.19485158]

>>19484778
usury and onanism

[Anonymous No.19485228]

>>19484778
Simple, the critical consensus is yet to be formed.

[None !mFZk5nchGk No.19485286]

theyre over working
or the internet has captured their gaze

[Anonymous No.19485297]

>>19484778
The symphony as an artform must be resurrected.

[Anonymous No.19486580]

>>19485011
Fair enough. But I shudder to think of the 'art' that would be venerated under our current regimes. Actually I don't have to imagine...

[Anonymous No.19486586]

>>19486580
he also pays chinks to paint it for him lmao

[Anonymous No.19487940]

>>19484825
Niggers are racially predisposed to low iq, sorry.

[Anonymous No.19487944]

>>19484778
They are all video game and porn addicts. You can’t create beautiful art if your soul is broken, “dark” periods like ours have occurred before throughout history.

[Anonymous No.19487948]

>>19485158
Usury is really fucking good for art though.

[Anonymous No.19487951]

>>19484778
There will always be geniuses and there are even more now. The further back you go the smaller the population and the easier for a genius to stand out and be recognized and praised. Maybe the level of genius needed now to advance mankind is too high at the moment.

[Anonymous No.19487989]

>>19484778
>he doesn't know about Steve Hackett and Tony Banks and Peter Gabriel and Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins and the masterfully virtuous music they created together
bruh

[Anonymous No.19488000]

>>19484837
Look up the price of a good piano and get back to me.

[Anonymous No.19488027]

>>19484778
20th-century Nazism and Communism, and contemporary capitalism killed art.

[Anonymous No.19488059]

>>19484778
Consider thyself lucky, the wonderful Thomas WANGENHEIM (pbuh) just recently made a video about this very topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayTYhzhW_sc
Long story short: we don't have the same order on a societal level as we had back in the day which allows the genius to flourish.

[Anonymous No.19488293]

I'll use this thread to ask this: I am reading "What is art" by Tolstoy. I find it extremely interesting because it covers a topic that affects me personally, and while I do agree with everything he's saying, and I admit that he enlightened me on a few errors of my own that I refused to acknowledge, at some point he starts doing his whole "muh Muziki" thing and says, paraphrasing loosely, that
>The elites are corrupt and the amusement-art made to serve them becomes ever more unrelatable and obscure, and it doesn't make sense to anyone but the elites
>That art is also pornographic and decadent
>Whereas art can only be good if it speaks to muh Muziki who are human and oh-so-moral and live hard lives toiling for the rich
He criticizes the "elite" art for being pornographic and catering to based instincts, yet bashes on modernism for being unintelligible. He hates - from what I gather - art that is subservient to religion, such as the Orthodox icons that are painted to be stripped of form so that they do not inflame the passions, because this denies the communicative role of art.
So what would Tolstoy think of current Top 40 music? A fat nigress twerking her ass to the camera while a primitive 4/4 beat hammers on and someone says "uhh nigga nigga fug fug mmmm Imma nut fug fug nigga fug" is absolutely understandable by even the most unrefined of plebeians. It's definitely art made for "el pueblo", and distributed for free. Everyone can enjoy it. Definitely everyone agrees with the values of the times, whereas he ascribed this sort of irreligious nihilism to the evil elites only, who "stopped believing in anything" while muh Muziki kept following Christ. I really love Tolstoy, he has a way to speak to the heart that nobody else is capable of, but I detest his worship of muh peasants as if they were all saints.

[Anonymous No.19488417]

>>19488059
Tell him to write an English translation of his book or he will never make it

[Anonymous No.19488441]

>>19484778
>If we wish to imagine a true paradise for the productivity of the human spirit we must transfer ourselves to the time before writing on parchment or paper was invented. That is where we will find that the whole of the cultural life was born which is now preserved only as the object of refection or some practical application. For poetry was here none other than a real invention of myths, i.e., of ideal processes in which human life was reflected in accordance with its varying character with objective reality in the sense of direct spectral apparitions. We see a capacity for this as belonging to every noble people until the moment when it acquired the use of writing. From then on it loses its poetic strength: its living language hitherto formed by a constant natural development degenerates into a process of crystallisation and petrifies; the art of poetry becomes the art of embellishing the old myths which are no longer capable of reinvention and finally becomes mere rhetoric and dialectic. But let us now imagine the leap from writing to printing. The Master of the House used to read to his family and guests from an expensive handwritten book; now, however, everyone can read silently to himself from the printed book and the author now writes for his readers. We must recall the religious sects of the Reformation era, their disputations and tracts, to gain an insight into the insanities that overcame people obsessed by the printed letter. We can assume that Luther’s splendid chorale only rescued the healthy spirit of the Reformation because it swayed hearts and minds and thus cured the mania for letters. The genius of a people was still, however, able to come to an understanding with the printed word, no matter how painful the process. But with the invention of newspapers and with the full flowering of journalism this good spirit of the people had totally to withdraw from public life. For nowadays only opinions dominate, ‘public’ ones – no less. These are to be had for money just like public prostitutes: anyone subscribing to a newspaper has, in addition to a lot of waste paper, taken on its opinions. He no longer needs to think, let alone reflect. How he should regard God and the World is thought out ready for him, black on white. Thus Paris fashion journals tell the ‘German Woman’ how she should dress, for the French have acquired the absolute right to tell us what is what in such matters by setting themselves up as the only true colour illustrators of our journals.
>If we now compare the transformation of the poetic world into a journalistic literary world with the transformation that the world has experienced as form and colour, we find precisely the same result.

[Anonymous No.19488446]

>>19488441
>Given the constant need for novelty (since fashion itself can never produce anything really new) an alternation of extremes is placed at the disposal of fashion as the only way out: it is actually this tendency onto which our creative artists, oddly advised, finally latch in order to produce once more noble art forms (though not of course of their own invention). The classical style and rococo, gothic and renaissance, now alternate; factories deliver Laocoön groups, Chinese porcelain, copies of Raphael and Murillo, Etruscan vases, medieval tapestries; also furniture à la Pompadour, plaster figures à la Louis XIV; the architect incorporates the whole into the Florentine style and crowns it with an Ariadne group. ‘Modern art’ now also becomes a new principle for the aesthetician: its originality consists of its total lack of originality and its immeasurable advantage lies in its realisation of all styles of art, which have now become familiar to all and sundry and usable by every one according to arbitrary taste. But it is now recognised as having a new human principle, namely the democratisation of artistic taste. That is to say: we should take hope from this development for the education of the people; art and its products are no longer available only for the enjoyment of the privileged classes; the humblest citizen now has the chance to look at the highest art on his mantelpiece, as indeed can a beggar at a shop window. In any case we should be pleased at this: it is simply inconceivable how, with everything displayed before us in total confusion, even the most gifted artist could arrive at a new style, whether for the visual arts or for literature.

[Anonymous No.19488459]

>>19488293
>Moreover, it cannot be said that the majority of people lack the taste to esteem the highest works of art. The majority always have understood, and still understand, what we also recognize as being the very best art: the epic of Genesis, the gospel parables, folk-legends, fairy-tales, and folk-songs, are understood by all.
But they're not. Nobody understands the Bible anymore.
>How can it be that the majority has suddenly lost its capacity to understand what is high in our art?
He makes this rhetorical question because a point he raises is that the elites claim that in order to appreciate the great art, one must be equipped to understand it, and use this as an excuse for publishign unintelligible, opaque and decadent art.
So what about The Divine Comedy? A crapton of the subtext in the Divine Comedy, much like in the Genesis or the Psalms, is completely lost to someone who doesn't have a minimum degree of instruction. Did Russian peasants even read the Bible? Does Tolstoy's idea of peasants is that of people who actually understood the Bible instead of memorizing passages they didn't understand to get along with liturgy like 100% of rural people still do?
How are fairy-tales any different than Marvel Superheroes? Unironically, on the basis he uses to criticize the lack of relatability of more modern work, he ought to have supported the most braindead shit that is being pushed out today.
In a passage before he criticizes a play for being retarded, and saying the plot means nothing, "there's an indian king who disguises himself as a minstrel, his bride falls in love with the minstrel but it turns out the minstrel is the king and everyone rejoices" how the fuck is this any different than popular folk-tales? The most popular Russian tale is that of a lazy guy who sleeps on a magical wish-granting stove, thanks to which he eventually marries a princess. There is no particular virtue in him or anything.
I don't understand if I am getting filtered or he's completely irrational. He dismisses Liszt as a pianist twirling his fingers for a bunch of foppy, degenerate artistocrats' amusement but loves the analogue of some hick with a banjo singing about how fat is wife's ass is, because this is really what entertains the peasants. Is this guy living in a completely idealized version of poor Russia? Is Tolstoy the ultimate LARPer?

[Anonymous No.19488740]

>>19488293
>The elites are corrupt and the amusement-art made to serve them becomes ever more unrelatable and obscure, and it doesn't make sense to anyone but the elites
>That art is also pornographic and decadent
>>19488459
>So what about The Divine Comedy?
I think the actual issue is the kind of insular, exclusionary circle-jerking that results in trash like 'abstract expressionism' of the Mark Rothko or Willem de Kooning sort, which is claimed to be so brilliant and deep and revelatory, and lengthy exegeses are written about their every detail and they sell for ungodly amounts of money, but the works are actually just ugly shite.
I think a good test for what rises to great art is what you might call 'fractal meaning': that is, the piece can be enjoyed without considerable background knowledge, but has more value the more the viewer can bring to it. Here's a Simpsons example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcKWGJlhtxY
This is fine and amusing on its own; a child could understand it and be entertained; but the more you know, the denser and better it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailhook_scandal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MpweKyub7w
and that bit about torpedoing a cruise ship is probably a reference to this:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0613353/plotsummary#synopsis
All that, in 30 seconds—you can tell the writers were talented, and they cared, and took their work seriously.
The Divine Comedy passes this test: you can appreciate it without knowing all the references, but the more well-equipped the reader, the better it gets.

[Anonymous No.19488826]

>>19488740
>The Divine Comedy passes this test
Not according to Tolstoy.
Check this out:
>Lacking the capacity to be infected by art, they pay most attention to, and eulogize, brain-spun (he uses this in opposition to "sincere" works that come from the desire to transmit feelings experienced by the artist), invented works, and set these up as models worthy of imitation. That is the reason they so confidently extol, in literature, the Greek tragedians, Dante, Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare, Goethe (almost all he wrote) [...]
>It is solely due to the critics, who in our times still praise rude, savage, and for us, often meaningless works of the ancient Greeks: Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and especially Aristophanes; or of modern writers, Dante, Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare; in painting, all of Raphael, all of Michaelangelo, including his absurd "Last Judgment"; in music, the whole of Bach, and whole of Beethoven, including his last period [...]
He's been just flailing incoherently for the last few chapters, jerking off muh muziki who understood the Bible, yeah you can perfectly understand the Bible without context, this is why Protestants are all one compact denominations and poorly educated Americans in the Bible Belt live like quakers and abhor the sight of a gun.
Then with the same breath says that the Iliad or the Odyssey are "true art", despite being made by "savage" Greeks with no morality. I think he was completely high while he wrote this. Although he is right in general lines, and basically predicted the bullshit modernism that is just square blocks of color, but according to him basically all art is bad. I don't even understand what kind of art is supposed to be "good" art on what kind of basis except whatever he specifically thinks is "good art" despite being in contradiction with himself, going with the assumption that you can give a Russian translation of the Odyssey to a Russian peasant and he will understand it and appreciate it.

[Anonymous No.19488868]

>>19488826
What can I say? I agree with you; his standards are incoherent, and don't provide a clear basis for comparison and judgement.

[Anonymous No.19488881]

>>19488826
Then he goes to say that the only valid art is Christian art, that is OK, which expresses muh muziki's struggles and feelings of love for mankind, like Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol".
He was absolutely seething a few chapters ago at how the art of his time was becoming "a science" in the sense that artists were learning how to exploit people's ability to feel to produce endless works of art that pull their strings, and so on. He is horrified that a play portrayed a girl "dying on stage" being beaten by her father, because of the melodrama, then when he finally gives examples of good paintings he goes:
>a drawing by Kramskoy, showing a drawing-room with a balcony, past which troops are marching in triumph on their return from the war. On the balcony stands a wet-nurse holding a baby and a boy. They are admiring the procession of the troops, but the mother, covering her face with a handkerchief, has fallen back on the sofa, sobbing.
How is this not melodramatic? On what basis this is not cruelly pulling the viewer's heartstrings? Because the artist is your friend or something? He was friends with Ilya Repin, yet Repin painted all kinds of Biblical scenes, even later in life. Why not a single mention of such an acclaimed Russian painter doing one of the things you hate so much (he calls all the Christian art that represents "scenes" in a dramatic fashion bad). I was almost expecting him to mention his own works when listing the good stuff, right after Dostoesvski.

[Anonymous No.19488892]

>>19484778
Here's my post from months ago. Someone must have asked about geniuses or whatever. It's tiresome to keep naming names, but at least maybe you'll seek some of them. Here:

" The concept of genius is flawed, because it gives the impression that there is something that makes those artists inherently superior to other humans, which they are not.
Leonardo da Vinci wasn't even the best painter in his city, Mozart's works represent total decadence compared to Bach, much of Shakespeare is mediocre. However, they all produced great art now and then, and that art has been a source of pleasure and consolation for centuries, which is why they have acquired their status.
So the question is: so far, did we have people producing great art in the 21st century?
Yes, and I can name names:
- Novel: Krasznahorkai, Lobo Antunes, McCarthy, Sebald, Handke, Pynchon, etc.
- Poetry: Adunis, Simic, Carson, Transtromer, Hill, Ashbery, Bonnefoy, Luzi.
- Theater: Jon Fosse.
- Cinema: Tarr, Kiarostami, Resnais, Herzog, Godard, Polanski, Lynch, Ming-liang, Kaurismaki.
- Music: Arvo Paart, Reich, Glass, Penderecki, Ligeti, Boulez, Kurtag.
- Painting: Kiefer, Richter, Nerdrum, Barceló, Rego.

What changed? Consumer culture. Nowadays, the only people who receive any attention are YouTubers and tik-tokers. Great artists, however, still exist, it's just that they aren't noticed anymore. "

I'll only add that none of them are Dante, Cervantes or Joyce, because those are authors who happen once every few centuries. I won't comment on Shakespeare because I think he's a great writer, but inferior to the others, so my opinion will seem too biased.
There are other names I could mention too. Those are not the only ones, specially if you count people who died at the beginning of the century or the end of the last (Milosz, Herbert, and Schnittke for instance).

>inb4 someone dismisses all the artists above as 'mediocrities'
Yes, I could also dismiss Mozart and Goethe in one post if I wanted.

>inb4 they're old
Artistic fame comes late. Nearly always. Borges was just a provincial Argie short-story writer and ex-ultraist until his 60's.

[Anonymous No.19488943]

>>19488892
You view humans as children who are not able to accurately critique a work of art based on it's merits but that's just leftist horseshit. The people at the time of the greats in the past were able to accurately critique the work at the time and we're no different. The artists you posted aren't bad and some even made great work but they're no genius on the level of the genius in the past. No art critic is going around calling these guy geniuses like the art critics in the past would do.

>Yes, I could also dismiss Mozart and Goethe in one post if I wanted.
These guys were world famous. They had not only art critics who revered them but patrons. They were books, and articles written about their genius. Whenever conversation was going on these guys were discussed. Artists said they were their biggest inspirations and heroes. Who in anyone you listed has anything remotely similar to that? It's nothing but a list of not bad artists. I could make a list of anyone I wanted and do the same shit you did and act like they're Gods that no one has realized yet.

[Anonymous No.19488947]

>>19484778
Mostly because I’m too busy indulging in hedonism to get anything done

[Anonymous No.19488963]

Spirituality is dead, true genius is only achievable by channelling Olympian daimons

[Anonymous No.19488974]

>>19488892
Great post! i still see absolutely no value in Godard.
>>19484778
Here's Weininger on Genius:

>First we must draw a line of demarcation from the concept of talent. In the popular view, genius and talent are almost always connected in such a way as if the former were a higher, or the highest, degree of the latter and capable of being derived from it by intensifying or concentrating the various talents of a person to a maximum, or as if at least there were some transitions mediating between the two.
>This view is totally wrong. Although there are certainly many different degrees and intensities of genius, these gradations have nothing at all to do with so-called “talent.” A person may have a talent, e.g., a talent for mathematics, to an extraordinary degree from birth. He will then be able to master the most difficult chapters of this science with ease, but that does not mean that he has any genius, which is the same as originality, individuality and the condition
of productivity.
>Conversely, there are supreme geniuses who have not developed any specific talent to a particularly high degree. Novalis or Jean Paul (not sartre, though i couldn't tell you exactly who, i forgot) may serve as examples.
>Genius, then, is by no means a highest superlative of talent. The two are separated by a whole world; they are absolutely heterogeneous in nature, not to be measured against, or compared to, each other. Talent is hereditary and may be the common possession of a family (the Bachs): genius is not transferable, it is never generic, but always individual (Johann Sebastian).

Nietzche BTFO >To many easily dazzled, mediocre minds, particularly women, wit and genius generally amount to the same thing. (...); they mistake the actor for the dramatist and make no distinction between the virtuoso and the artist. Accordingly, they regard a clever man as having genius, and Nietzsche as the prototype of genius.

French Theory BTFO >And yet those who merely juggle ideas, who follow all the French fashions of the intellect, have not the remotest affinity to a true elevation of the mind.

[Anonymous No.19488999]

>>19488947
I doubt that a genius would be so easily enslaved by vice and vice alone. I'm not a genius and my desire to create is far greater than the desire to indulge in pleasures. What actually defeats geniuses (as well as lesser people who have something to say) is that inspired art is usually edifying, while today it is expressly things that are not edifying, but vile and sensual that are praised and sought after.
Speaking of Tolstoy above, he is completely right when he says that the art of his time was becoming "like a science", in the sense that artists were incapable of producing real art that sprung from within, but compensated by learning how to produce "imitations" of art, by breaking down the technique to extort a reaction out of an audience. This is extremely relevant to this day in commercial art, where every single thing you wish to represent must be represented in "the best way". If you paint a face, you must add certain splashes of tone because that's the best way, if you paint a scenery, you must also employ certain techniques because that's the best way. "The best way" is the way that elicits the greatest possible reaction out of the spectator, but it is practically impossible to make art that is "true", that is made according to a feeling that I feel that I want to express, and going through a paint-by-numbers procedure that is not functional to communication but eliciting a reaction, much more basic, watered down or sensuous than something human.
He also commented on the whole narrative that would metastasize in modernist art, already present in his time, where increasingly unintelligible art was made in order to make aristocrats feel sophisticated. This art can only be understood by a smaller and smaller circle of people, so much that without the figure of the critic telling you what everything means, you wouldn't understand a thing. This idea that if you don't understand a work of art you are stupid or unsophisticated is bullshit, we can see how cancerous it is, art should speak for itself, yet this is very convenient for aggrandizing the elites and also money laundering (which he seems to be unaware of).
When someone sets out to create art because something within urges him to do so, it is impossible to pass this urge through the industrialized procedure of commercial art (as all art that isn't modernist art for money laundering) will inevitably become something entirely different.

[Anonymous No.19489004]

>>19484839
Most geniuses were quite underappreciated in their own time, Mozart is a prime example. Also, Wagner did not have a castle built for him. Ludwig II built a fantasy castle based on the same myths and legends that inspired Wagner.

[Anonymous No.19489016]

>>19489004
>Mozart is a prime example.
He literally worked as the court composer for a monarch

[Anonymous No.19489021]

>>19489004
>Ludwig II built a fantasy castle based on the same myths and legends that inspired Wagner.
It was his castle that he made and dedicated to Wagner. It's literally his operas on the wall.

[Anonymous No.19489024]

>>19489016
Yeah this guy obviously has never read a biography on Mozart. He thinks he was some Bohemian toiling in poverty unknown by anyone lol. Fucking retards on this board man

[Anonymous No.19489025]

>>19488293
Tolstoy was a hypocritical confused retard who made great art in spite of his own beliefs.

[Anonymous No.19489028]

>>19485011
this but unironically, most high art was made for the upper classes as today there are only nouveau riche guppy's such art cannot exist and shouldn't we don't deserve a caravaggio or a bach we deserve what we have soulless pointless vanity

[Anonymous No.19489035]

>>19488943
Your post is very strange.
You're saying Geoffrey Hill wasn't a genius because critics and patrons nowadays don't call him that? Can you even read a text and arrive at your own conclusions?
Well, to your information, Harold Bloom literally did just that, and not only with Hilll, but also with Saramago and Anne Carson. He called them geniuses, explicitly so. And if Saramago and Carson are geniuses, what are Lobo Antunes and Adunis, then, who are so much better?

>>19488974
Have you watched post-70's Godard? Stuff like King Lear, for instance. His use of cinematic language is very unique. His style is one of the most distinct in cinema, from his funny use of audio (I genuinely laugh watching his films, and it's not a forced laugh either), to his approach to painting and traditional narrative techniques. Godard does to cinematic cliché what Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov and others did to literary ones.
Of course, it's a cinema that presupposes cinema. You need to know what the clichés are before knowing how Godard breaks them.
Still, I do somewhat agree with Welles, who considered Godard a great director and a bad thinker. When he's not being too political, however, he can make some really good work, even in the last decade, though he was in his 80's.

[Anonymous No.19489037]

>>19488974
Continuation and focalisation on the nature of the genius prototype by Otto: (i've taken liberty with regard to titles)
>Great men take themselves and the things around them too seriously to be “clever” more often than once in a while.

More Nietzche bashing or "Do not force it":

>People who are nothing but clever are impious people; they are people who are not really overcome by things, who never take a sincere and profound interest in things, in whom there is nothing struggling long and hard toward being born. Their only concern is that their thought should glitter and sparkle like a brilliantly cut diamond, not that it should also illuminate anything. And that is because their thinking is above all focused on what others will “say” about these thoughts—a consideration which is by no means always “considerate.” There are men who are able to marry a woman who in no way attracts them—merely because other men fancy her. And such marriages also exist between many people and their ideas. I am thinking of the malicious, loutish, offensive writings of a certain living author, who thinks that he is roaring when he is only barking. Unfortunately
Friedrich Nietzsche too in his later writings (although he is incomparably superior to that other writer) sometimes seems to have been interested mainly in those aspects of his ideas which he suspected would quite shock people. It is often precisely where he seems most ruthless that he is at his vainest. It is the vanity of the mirror that fervently begs for recognition by what it reflects: look how well, how ruthlessly, I reflect!—In our youth, before our character has become firmly established, we probably all try to acquire firrmness by attacking others, but really great men are never passionately aggressive except out of dire necessity.

Goethe praising or "Be the Anti-Cynic"
>(...) The man of genius has revealed himself in the above examples as a man who understands incomparably more than the average person. Goethe is supposed to have said that there was no vice and no crime for which he had not felt a predisposition in himself and which, at one point or another in his life, he had not fully understood. The man of genius, then, is more complex, more multifarious and richer; and a man must be regarded as having the more genius, the more human beings he unites in himself and, it must be added, the more vividly, the more intensely he has the other human beings in himself. If his understanding of his fellow-humans were only like a feeble flicker, he would not be able to set the life in his heroes ablaze like a mighty flame, and his characters would be devoid of strength and substance. The ideal of a genius, in particular of the artistic kind, is to live in all human beings, to lose himself in all, and to emanate into the multitude, while the philosopher has the task of finding all the others again in himself and to absorb them into a unity, which will always be his unity alone.

[Anonymous No.19489042]

>>19489035
If you look at the list of geniuses that Harold Bloom lists it's almost zero compared to any time in history. Weird guy to bring up.

[Anonymous No.19489078]

>>19489035
Godard is technical but like you said is a bad thinker. It makes him works a chore to watch as you know it's just a midwit trying to show how philosophical he is. I feel like one problem in this type of conversation and all conversations is our frameworks. We have completely different frameworks as to what makes good art so we will never be able to agree. You see breaking the mold and being "unique" as the ideal and I don't see any value in that unless your really making something worthwhile. I do enjoy some of his stuff though.

[Anonymous No.19489082]

Tim Henson's alive bro.

[Anonymous No.19489084]

>>19489025
>retard who made great art in spite of his own beliefs.
I would agree but I'm also not sure if it is right. I do not believe that someone can make great art "in spite" of being a "hypocritical confused retard". He does strike true on so much about what he says. Certainly all that he says on the side of the "elites", which he knew well, is extremely lucid. Everything he says applies to XXI century art (considering that even poor people's lifestyle in the West is "aristocratic", we do not have to toil in the fields to feed ourselves like peasants anymore) and it's obvious that he is right when he describes the phenomenons that were taking place.
Commercial art made by the dozen, pornography entrenching into art to stimulate godless degenerates, vapid nonsensical masturbation designed to appease sophisticated city-dwellers. The increasing reliance on the same few subjects (sex and "weariness of life" being the main ones) to please people who dismiss simpler lives as boring. He's right on everything.
But when he starts jerking off MUH MUZIKI he suddenly takes this schizophrenic turn, stretches his discourse to include basically all art that requires any knowledge to understand just to spite his idea of the nasty spoiled elite, and generally speaks like some kind of cultural primitivist. Then he contradicts himself on the arbitrary basis of what he perceives the goal of a piece of art he imagines in his head, rather than what it is in fact. You cannot tell if a painting was made sincerely just because you happen to like its execution. Feels like he's ascribing good art to whatever he thought his imaginary model of Christian peasant would appreciate, whereas it's specifically the plebs who love degenerate or industrially made art the most. If I told this to a layman,
>>19488999
>This is extremely relevant to this day in commercial art, where every single thing you wish to represent must be represented in "the best way". If you paint a face, you must add certain splashes of tone because that's the best way, if you paint a scenery, you must also employ certain techniques because that's the best way. "The best way" is the way that elicits the greatest possible reaction out of the spectator, but it is practically impossible to make art that is "true", that is made according to a feeling that I feel that I want to express, and going through a paint-by-numbers procedure that is not functional to communication but eliciting a reaction, much more basic, watered down or sensuous than something human.
The peasant/layman would say "and who the fuck cares about YOUR feelings? I want to have MY feeling, and the biggest possible feeling at that, and that feeling would specifically have to be PP BIG, the biggest big peepee."

[Anonymous No.19489114]

>>19487989
I like Genesis but they’re far from modern Mozarts. Modern Mozart played jazz

[Anonymous No.19489119]

>>19489114
Modern Mozart would probably make movie scores.

[Anonymous No.19489130]

>>19489114
jazz is dead and buried long time ago. no modern genius would do jazz.

[Anonymous No.19489140]

>>19489042
His book explicitly excluded living authors. He only mentions Saramago, Hill and Carson in passing, as examples of (then) living geniuses he could have chosen. There were literally dozens, maybe hundreds of contemporary authors he greatly admired. He was an admirer of Marquez, Ashbery, Wilbur, Octavio Paz, and many others, and those in turn were admirers of many living authors, and so on.

>>19489078
For me even the technical innovations are highly interesting in themselves. They give me a specific kind of pleasure, similar to that of a mathematician learning some new mathematical fact.
I do think that original philosophical ideas can also be important for aesthetic appreciation (because they add to the feelings of novelty and surprise, which means they don't even have to be true), but why would we listen to music or look at paintings if the lack of non-artistic ideas is so damaging to an artwork's value?
To put it in another way, Godard may have not-so-good political/philosophical ideas (and he probably recognizes this, given his love for quotes), but he has incredible cinematic ideas. I know that if I were to direct a film someday, he would definitely be an influence in the language I'd try to develop for myself.

[Anonymous No.19489145]

>>19488974
>>19489037
>>19489130
Here's another pertinent Otto Weininger quote: (sorry, i'm having fun with this)
>That is why universality is at the same time the mark of genius. There are no special geniuses, no “mathematical” or “musical geniuses,” and no “chess geniuses” either. >There are only universal geniuses. The man of genius can be defined as the man who knows everything without ever having learnt it. “Knowing everything” naturally does not refer to the theories and systems imposed on the facts by science and learning, neither the history of the Spanish War of Succession nor the experiments in diamagnetism. The artist does not acquire his knowledge of the colors of water when the sky is dull or bright by studying optics, and there is no need to delve into characterology in order to depict people consistently. The more endowed a man is, the more things he has always reflected on independently, and the more things he relates to personally.

[Anonymous No.19489157]

>>19489140
Bloom has said interviews that there are only 4 real great works of art in the our time.

[Anonymous No.19489158]

>>19489016
>>19489024
No, it is you who know nothing. Being a court composer was not a high achievement at that time, it was a sign of status for a noble to have a composer to the point that any talentless hack could get patronage; see the endless list of people you've never heard of who were court composers before, during, and after Mozart's short life. Mozart himself was forever travelling around in want of money, often lured by the Webers to partake in schemes that benefited themselves at his expense. He died in poverty, partly as a result of his own coddling by his father, but mostly because he was paid peanuts. I guarantee you, even with classical music crushed under the weight of pop culture as it is today, Mozart is better appreciated now than he was in his own time, save for by scant few of his fellow musicians.

[Anonymous No.19489168]

>>19489158
Mozart was rich at the time he didn't have money be cause he kept blowing it at all because he had no self control. Everyone knew his name and he was talked about by everyone. You have no idea what you're talking about.

[Anonymous No.19489204]

>>19489158
He had 5 years of tremendous success in Vienna when he was arguably the most popular composer in the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, he could afford a huge apartment and even a horse with carriage. The reason his popularity waned is contested, but some suggest because of the war Austria-Hungary was involved in, and the concert format going out of fashion. He loved the fine things in life and spent more than he earned, hence his debts. Had he lived longer it's probable he'd have gotten out of the economic slump he was experiencing, the last year or so his economic situation was getting better. Maybe his true genius was not appreciated by the concert going public, but he was a very popular composer for a time.

And being a court composer was a pretty big deal, something Mozart and his father aspired to.

[Anonymous No.19489226]

>>19489157
What? Was he mentally unfit we he gave that interview or are you misquoting him?
Please give the source.
I know for a fact that he praised more than four books by Saramago alone, and Saramago wasn't even the best Portuguese of his own generation.

[Anonymous No.19489259]

>>19489226
I'm mistaken sorry he said there were only 4 living Americans who wrote Canonical work. Still though the modern writers overall he listed were almost nothing compared to any other period.

[Anonymous No.19489265]

>>19484778
Art is progression by transgression of influences. You take the old masters, add/remove/modify something and become the "new master". To the next generation, you will become the old master which influences them and which must be transcended. This is how art moves through history, of course certain things are recycled but never exactly in the same way. The problem is eventually you run out of room upon which "transgression" can move into, as the space in the art medium becomes progressively smaller, art becomes increasingly niche. A great work of art like that of the Old Masters becomes impossible because the medium offers no "space" in which such a work of art could reside. It is inconceivable that an old medium such as poetry or painting could produce a Great Work in 2021, except as a small part of a bigger picture ie by being part of a work that is in a different medium. The utilization of new technology and mediums is necessary for a great work of art to be produced today and we are too early here. Some have mastered film, some photography, some audio, some electronics, some visual phenomena, but nobody has yet emerged who would combine all of them in a Great Work of Art. Only a new theater could do this, by taking advantage of not only classical forms such as poetry, acting, and music but by adding the audio-visual atmospherics the modern technology allows for, could we ever produce a new great work of art. The downside is technology is capital-intensive, so it will become a basic fact that to be a great artist, one needs to have surplus capital. Already, this is clear with music production, where studio quality music will always sound better than a low-capital alternative which constrains the artist into playing into a pre-established aesthetic ie only that which is possible by low quality equipment. The second part of this post is speculative due to how recent certain technologies are, but what is clear is that in 21st century, the idea of a great painter or a great writer are patently ridiculous.

[Anonymous No.19489298]

>>19488892
>doesn't cite Sanderson as one the greatest of our times
Opinion absolutely discarded

[Anonymous No.19489320]

>>19489204
>>19489158
Regardless of the facts you're discussing, popular success has nothing to do with genius. Longfellow was much, much more popular than Melville, *including among so-called critics and the so-called educated class*. The list of second-rate artists who were highly regarded because they offered something easy enough such as memorable meters, patriotic and sentimental rhetoric, or catchy tunes is endless.
Mozart wasn't praised by the public for the right reasons. Had it been the case, then the public wouldn't have forgotten Bach, and would in fact have erected public monuments to him. There would have been Bachomania instead of Lisztomania. (Liszt himself agreed that the public was more impressed by superficial aspects such as how the pianist looks while he's playing).
Hugo was considered the top French author in an age of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé.
It's possible to praise an artist for wrong reasons, and 90% of the time this is just what people do. Artists get praised for superficial aspects. Fellini gets praised because of his "visuals", which refers to the fact that his women are hot, and Kafka because of his supposed "messages" on bureaucracy.
The public is artistically illiterate and most critics aren't much better.

[Anonymous No.19489332]

>>19489265
Technology art is always soulless though

[Anonymous No.19489339]

>>19489320
The point is that geniuses who were lasting were also praised at the time. The point is that now no one is praised. The two answers to this is there is no more genius (the right answer) or there is no such as lovers of art anymore (wrong).

[Anonymous No.19489368]

>>19487944
>“dark” periods like ours have occurred before throughout history.
Not on this scale and not in this way. Even during the plague or during the worst wars, humans always had their spirit intact. Even the poorest peasant, even the slave, even the sick always had their spirit, their hopes, their aspirations; be it a revolt, surviving a war, caring for their sick family members, going to church or just hoping to see the next sunrise, they always had something to do, to hope for, to strive for, to exercise their passions on. You can find many great songs, plays, poems and fairy tales written by fucking unknown peasants. In my country we have a shitton of poems and ballads written by unknown peasants collected un published by some of our greates authors. In any other time in history people were forced to face their emotions and hardships head on without helping wheels. Now when you come home from your miserable wagie job in a world where nothing ever happens and thinking of killing yourself you can just kick back, load up a video game or a porno and distract yourself from those unpleasant feelings without ever doing anything about them; just to repeat it all the next day until your soul rots and you get reduced to the state of a flesh robot only to obey a few simple commands: eat, drink, sleep, work, consume media. Not even the elites will make anything of worth because they are too busy exploiting jaded masses and fucking children. There will never be another renaissance. Unless it's not about money, tech or easy pleasure people will never care what you do. All the great art that could be made has already been made.

[Anonymous No.19489428]

>>19489339
All of the names I mentioned are widely praised, talked about and translated to dozens of languages. Lobo Antunes was introduced by President of Portugal at an event. McCarthy gave an interview to Ophrah. Pynchon appeared on The Simpsons. Handke won a Nobel and co-wrote famous films. Krasznahorkai also co-wrote famous films. Godard constantly appears in "top directors" lists, even in ones made by more commercially-minded people. Odd Nerdrum was David Bowie's favorite painter, and I could go on and on.

Those people do receive recognition, the difference is that nowadays mass culture (such as Ophrah) has occupied most of the cultural space, which is probably a result of the masses having learned to read. But so-called high culture still exists and is being talked about and praised by many, many people.

[Anonymous No.19489446]

>>19489259
No, his democratic age list in The Western Canon is the longest of them all.

>>19489298
What Sanderon? I am not familiar. I don't know all the artists, I suppose nobody does. There are so many...

[Anonymous No.19489511]

>>19489204
>18th century
>Austria-Hungary
you wot m8?

[Anonymous No.19489537]

>>19489428
None of these people are making the same caliber of art. Odd Nerdrum is not a good painter.

[Anonymous No.19489567]

>>19488892
I appreciate your effort, anon, but I must disagree. No one you named holds a candle to even the most mediocre peer from 200 hundred years ago. To argue art has not declined is absurd.

>What changed? Consumer culture. Nowadays, the only people who receive any attention are YouTubers and tik-tokers. Great artists, however, still exist, it's just that they aren't noticed anymore.

There were always midwits, but their opinions were ignored. The problem is not at the bottom, but the top. Elites only care about midwit culture, too. Why is that?

[Anonymous No.19489620]

>>19489567
Really just the democratization of culture.

[Anonymous No.19489626]

>>19489620
Actually no, it's democratization of culture + godless society.

[Anonymous No.19489788]

>>19489537
>>19489567
As I said, you can dismiss them with one post or with one common expression ("can't hold a candle" etc.) if you want.
As for me, I consider Geoffrey Hill a better poet than Tennyson, Krasznahorkai a much better novelist that Stendhal or Balzac, McCarthy as good a novelist as Melville, Pynchon better than Hawthorne and so on. You're free to disagree, I don't mind.
Nerdrum is not a particular favorite of mine (I cited him to please more tradition-minded people as I wanted to make my list somewhat diverse), but I think Kiefer and Freud and (early) Hockney etc. were better painters than Fragonard and most if not all of his contemporaries.
Where does that leave us? We have different aesthetic parameters, end of question; and honestly, pardon me my doubting, but have you guys really read Antunes, Adunis, Geoffrey Hill in order to dismiss them so quickly that you think they couldn't even hold a candle to, say, Tolstoy? I think Antunes is better than Tolstoy, and I don't even like him all the much, as I think he's too sentimental sometimes, but Tolstoy is even more - and at any rate I suppose sentimentality is more a matter of taste than aesthetics (although aesthetics is also a matter of taste, but it's more rationalized), but the way Antunes structures his books and cleans his prose down to the essentials makes him a great novelist, according to my parameters. And, to me, Krasznahorkai's stories in Seiobo There Below are at least as good as anything I've read by Chekhov or Maupassant, possibly better.

>There were always midwits, but their opinions were ignored

No, "midwit" opinion was often the consensus. Longfellow was considered a great poet and Melville a minor writer. Bach's sons were more famous than Bach himself.
The only people who thought otherwise were the few experts, that "happy few" to whom Stendhal dedicated his book precisely because he knew the stuff he was doing wouldn't be understood by everyone even if the book sold well. And the experts today tend to praise Adunis, Handke Vargas-Llosa etc. Even the experts of the past, as a matter of fact: John Barth is still alive and was a favorite of Nabokov's, for instance.
Even among experts, of course, there's room for disagreement. Tolstoy didn't like Shakespeare, Eliot didn't think much of the Russians in general, Hemingway hated Faulkner and vice-versa, while Nabokov tended to dislike both and was disliked by Borges.
Which is why the very concept of genius strikes me as relative to what your own parameters are.

[Anonymous No.19489874]

>>19489428
Nothing more than service given to artists because they're modern and the best we got. None of these guys are on the level of the masters of the past and we know that based on the reaction from people today. No one sees McCarthy as a genius of the age like they saw Goethe. He just a good writer and gets awarded for being the last bad writers of our time.

[Anonymous No.19490006]

>>19489874
1. We are not romantic, so the concept of genius sounds outdated for us. Few people see Roger Penrose as a genius, he's just a very good scientist. Do you want us to bow to Terence Tao and make sculptures of him and kiss his feet? He'd be first to say, No, because that's how we are in our more or less post-Romantic age.
Harold Bloom, who was a neo-Romantic, believed in genius and applied the concept to many contemporary writers, as I have already mentioned.
2. McCarthy is one of the "least bad" according to your parameters; to my parameters, he's better than Twain, Defoe, and other novelistic "geniuses" of the past, and he's not even a particular favorite of mine, but I think he has mastered his craft.

[Anonymous No.19490053]

Thread derailed by a bunch of pedantic faggots. good job

[Anonymous No.19490060]

>>19489874
>>19490006
To add to what this anon said, it's harder to have canonical geniuses when the amount of art (or science) being produced is orders of magnitude greater than it was in the past. People break off into their own sub-sub-genres and everything becomes more and more atomized. Penrose or Tao are never going to be as famous as the scientists or mathematicians of the early 20th century despite being comparable in any metric of intelligence. There just isn't much room for lone, mythologized figures in a world of almost 8 billion people. The best you can hope for is to be famous within your own niche community.

[Anonymous No.19490132]

>>19489788
Incredibly based effortposter.

[Anonymous No.19490146]

>>19490006
I'm not here to argue that one writer is a genius or not it's about quantity.

[Anonymous No.19490240]

>>19490146
But the discussion will again revolve around what parameters we have.
To my parameters, there were few great writers in the 18th century (when rococo and neoclassicism were dominant styles, both of which I consider somewhat sterile), with a few obvious exceptions (Swift, Sterne etc.), while nowadays we have a least five or ten great living writers, *and this is limited to the ones I've read*, because there are many others I haven't read and some that I have not even have heard of. Maybe we have 50 great living writers, which would be more than in any other era according to my parameters, and I just don't know them all.

[Anonymous No.19490354]

>>19490240
Let's bring the discussion to painting. What great painters do you think exist today or is painting as an artform dead?

[Anonymous No.19490367]

>>19489788
Anon here has the upper hand until an objective aesthetic value poster appears and tries to combat him

[Anonymous No.19490380]

>>19490367
His only argument is that he likes some writers more than previous ones which is meaningless. I can say the opposite doesn't make them any more genius

[Anonymous No.19490988]

>>19489788
Writing is hard to quantify, but let's take music. Mozart is far more technical and complex than most modern music (sans metal and some electronic). More importantly, it evokes a far stronger emotional response than some pop song that makes you want to shake your ass. Even modern composers seem soulless compared to anyone pre WWI. The general response to this is these old symphonies were composed in a more agrarian time and now cities are ugly, as if people can't leave the city and see beauty anymore. As Schopenhauer would argue, music now reflects the most basic reality, simple melodies reflecting simple desires. Gone are the soaring arias of opera reflecting man's highest goals. And yes, opera is still made, but none if it is up to par, and I doubt you will find anyone who argues it is.

For writing, you bring up Pynchon. He is good, but pop culture references no one will understand in 100 years is sad compared that even someone writing for proles like Voltaire who referenced Greek and Roman history instead.

>>19490367
I respect the anon far more than some dumb pol user who might agree with me, but >>19490380 is right.

[Anonymous No.19491075]

>>19490988
Metal, even at its most "progressive", is not complex in any real sense, rather it presents busy surfaces. Look at the structure and you will find invariably that there is no greater depth than what is readily observable on first listening. I don't say this to attack it as being lesser, but it is silly to pretend that mechanical technique and compositional complexity go hand in hand.

[Anonymous No.19491697]

bump

[Anonymous No.19491735]

>>19489788
This kills the pseud

[Anonymous No.19491742]

>>19490380
That's literally his point though, hes arguing there hasn't been some provable decline

[Anonymous No.19491875]

>>19484778
Two words.
POST-MODERNISM.

[Anonymous No.19492368]

>>19484778
There was a deal made with the future: that with it's exponentially efficient grip on all information, there would be no more Geniuses. The mysterious force that shone on men has in it's bid to keep itself sacred, evaded our sights, and for good reason. Isn't genius in between the lines? But man tries to quantify it, and in doing so keeps his analysing lenses clocked in a delayed rhythm, missing what could be before his real person. If you asked someone exactly what genius would look like, they wouldn't be able to tell you. Because if they could, it would be more information fed back into data points, and they would become hungry again, and you would ask them again and they wouldn't be able to tell you. All the chirping mouths pull around appearances of the mighty force like slaves. As soon as one becomes privy to a specatcle the language that is only appropriate to understand it appeals to make itself more comprehensible to the mechanism (the computer) that creates it. You're talking to yourself whenever you bring forth your perception of spectacle into the computation, and then you question why it has vanished from your grip. Genius could only be only remarkable, thus it is always further out of sight.

[Anonymous No.19492712]

>>19490988
>>19490988
Mozart is relatively simple. It's just classical formulas. You use complexity as a standard, but contemporary composers like Boulez are way more complex than Mozart. Mozart can sound like a child compared to Boulez or Stravinsky, in terms of complexity. Stuff like the ending of the Jupiter symphony is relatively rare and even then it's still somewhat primitive compared to atonality, or to a Bach fugue.

>More importantly, it evokes a far stronger emotional response than some pop song that makes you want to shake your ass.
Totally subjective. There is no inherent emotion in the musical notes. It's objectively just notes. The emotions are in your head and there are people who cry, make love, or commit suicide listening to Nirvana or whatever.
In me, Mozart often causes boredom. Sometimes I love him, but this too is subjective.

>Gone are the soaring arias of opera reflecting man's highest goals
What goals? Totally subjective.
And why are those things even aesthetic criteria?
Complexity? The minimalists disagree.
Evoking deep emotions? Boulez would perhaps disagree, or at least rephrase.
Reflection of man's highest goals? Every composers has a different definition of that. Still, many would probably say music shouldn't reflect anything other than itself.

>He is good, but pop culture references no one will understand in 100 years is sad
Reducing Pynchon to that is stupid.
Also, any good Italian edition of Dante will come with thousands of footnotes.

You have your own parameters, which I think are rather shallow, and I have mine. None of us can prove who's a genius or not.

>>19490380
Wrong, because having aesthetic parameters isn't the same as liking.
I hate Jane Austen, but she's a good writer, according to my aesthetic judgement which is ALSO subjective, given that I am free to choose my own personal parameters, but is also different from mere liking. Conversely, there are things I like, such as Beatles songs, which I think are not so good according to my parameters.

[Anonymous No.19492719]

>>19492712
>Totally subjective. There is no inherent emotion in the musical notes. It's objectively just notes.
You lose the debate automatically here by being a postmodernist who sees no difference between Lil Uzi Vert and Bach

[Anonymous No.19492727]

>>19492712
>Evoking deep emotions? Boulez would perhaps disagree, or at least rephrase.
If Boulez evokes deep emotions for you then you might need to see a neurologist. I'm not kidding man. When people get addicted to eating shit we don't say taste is subjective we have them checked for mental illness

[Anonymous No.19492736]

they are around but you wont see them because the current world hates geniuses and true creatives

[Anonymous No.19492737]

>>19484778
I assume the internet and the endless distraction it creates
>Be loser today
>Watch youtube/scroll twitter/netflix/vidya etc everyday and never run out
>Be loser 200 years ago
>Have to do something productive or just stare at the ceiling
If you ever lose power for a day youll understand

[Anonymous No.19492773]

>>19492719
The emotions *are not* in the music.
Some sequences of sounds *tend to* cause certain emotions in humans, for instance a loud airplane *tends to* cause discomfort (not if you're nearly deaf), and so on, but the emotions themselves are subjective, and this is specially the case for more complex sequences of sound, such as those of music.
You can't honestly say emotion X is contained in Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. Is it languor? Is it sensuality? Is it sadness? Is it aesthetic contemplation? For many people it would be just boredom or impatience or disagreement (if they have a divergent aesthetic) or memories of old days (if they used to play that piece in school) or excitement (if they enjoy that aesthetic as composers), it's all very subjective.

>>19492727
Learn to interpret. My point is precisely that Boulez wouldn't think music should be emotional, at least not in the traditional sense of the word.
But yes, one can feel emotion with Boulez, but of course it would *tend* to be something "colder", similar to the emotions mathematicians feel when looking at a beautiful proof.

[Anonymous No.19492795]

>>19492773
I can just imagine you sitting at speakers listening to Boulez and going "Exquisite". I always wonder with people like you if you actually delude yourself into thinking it's beautiful or if it's just posturing from deep insecurity probably from abuse as child.

[Anonymous No.19492827]

>>19492795
You have no serious arguments whatever.
People who enjoy Boulez (why do you assume I am one of them? Maybe I am, maybe not, but why do you *assume* I *enjoy* his music?) are usually looking for new musical structures, techniques, sounds. This very complexity and originality gives them pleasure, while sentimental kitsch like Tchaikovsky annoys them.
You are saying Barenboim, Stravinsky etc. should have their brains checked, because they were admirers of Boulez.
And do you even understand Bach? 80% of his more complex works, like the Art of Fugue, is about *structure*. Most people who talk poetically about the "beauty" and "splendor" of classical music know very little about it.
Now, I am no musicologist and read music badly, but even I can understand the appeal of Boulez.

[Anonymous No.19492844]

>>19492827
You can't argue with a postmodernist. We have such different framework it's like trying to argue with a schizophrenic.

>And do you even understand Bach?
You don't have to understand Bach that's the problem with you guys. It's about understanding and applying philosophy to everything and not just enjoying the beauty.

> should have their brains checked, because they were admirers of Boulez.
They were probably the posturing types not the delusional types.

>but even I can understand the appeal of Boulez.
There is no appeal. Any justification is people trying to be "intellectual" it's about "complexity" like that makes it sound better. If I take a shit upside down it doesn't mean it's not shit because it was harder to make.

Side note do you make the same arguments about painting? Are you one of those blank canvas as one color is genius type of person?

[Anonymous No.19492878]

>>19492844
>post-modernist
Who said I am one? Scruton?

>such different framework
Yes, isn't that what I have been saying since the beginning?
You can't prove yours is better than mine, and I happen to think mine is very rigorous and feel aesthetically satisfied with it. I also think yours is probably infantile, no better than mine when I was a teen a thought the same things as you do, but that doesn't make it worse, only different and less informed.

>you don't have to understand
You have, if you wish to prove it's superior to Boulez.

> should have their brains checked, because they were admirers of Boulez.
were probably the posturing types
>were
Barenboim is alive and well, do you even know who he is?

>There is no appeal
There is.

>Side note do you make the same arguments about painting? Are you one of those blank canvas as one color is genius type of person?

Why do you care?
And the answer is no.

[Anonymous No.19492904]

>>19492878
Again no point in even conversing because it can never go anywhere which is I support authoritarian governments forcibly deporting anyone who listens to Boulez. You can have your schizophrenic opinion somewhere else. One can dream.

>And the answer is no.
You sure? You're making the same arguments. What do you have against them? Everything they have said to me they would say to you you know?

[Anonymous No.19492948]

>>19492904
>What do you have against them? Everything they have said to me they would say to you you know?

I think it's been done and predictable.

[Anonymous No.19492966]

>>19489368
>You can find many great songs, plays, poems and fairy tales written by fucking unknown peasants. In my country we have a shitton of poems and ballads written by unknown peasants collected un published by some of our greates authors.

Can you poast some

[Anonymous No.19492972]

>>19492966
Not him, but Scottish (ballads) and Spanish (romanceros) poetry are full of those.

[Anonymous No.19493002]

>>19487940
This is a rather complex topic that I won't get into with you here, but what I will say is that even if you were correct, it wouldn't prove anything. If you were correct, there would still be blacks with extremely high IQs; they'd only be statistically rarer. Try harder.

[Anonymous No.19493011]

Atonality killed classical
>bbbut Wagner
You know there’s gulfs between Wagner and tone row bullshit

[Anonymous No.19493015]

>>19490354
The last genius painter was Beksinski who was stabbed to death in 2005.

[Anonymous No.19493095]

why would there be genius artists in a merchant age of hyper capitalism?

[Anonymous No.19493373]

"A preoccupation with urine and feces: Again, postmodernism continues a longstanding modernist tradition. After Duchamp’s urinal, Kunst ist Scheisse (“Art is shit”) became, fittingly, the motto of the Dada movement. In the 1960s Piero Manzoni canned, labeled, exhibited and sold ninety tins of his own excrement (in 2002, a British museum purchased can number 68 for about $40,000). Andres Serrano generated controversy in the 1980s with his Piss Christ, a crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist’s urine. In the 1990s Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary (1996)portrayed the Madonna as surrounded by disembodied genitalia and chunks of dried feces. In 2000 Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi paid homage to their master, Marcel Duchamp. Fountain is now at the Tate Museum in London, and during regular museum hours Yuan and Jian unzipped and proceeded to urinate on Duchamp’s urinal. (The museum’s directors were not pleased, but Duchamp would be proud of his spiritual children.) And there is G. G. Allin, the self-proclaimed performance artist who achieved his fifteen minutes by defecating on stage and flinging his feces into the audience.

[Anonymous No.19493396]

Here lies the real problem, art criticism became awful:
>>19493373

[Anonymous No.19493461]

>>19489788
Compared to Fragonard Hockney, Kiefer, Nerdrum are profound painters for sure. Fragonard is technically inferior kitsch though, so the comparison is dishonest.

[Anonymous No.19493496]

i'll let Bob handle this one

[Anonymous No.19493642]

>>19484778
Just a guess but I think it has something to do with modern upbringing. A lot of our would-be great geniuses got ensnared by video games, the internet, smartphones, and television. Bored kids aren't spending their time sifting through the library, they're spending it goofing off. It seems many of the geniuses of the past started out as kids that were simply bored and began to read serious texts at an early age. I don't think that happens too often anymore. The best you get are kids reading something like Harry Potter. Plus, parents and the modern school system are partly to blame too. Parents push their kids in the wrong way and school systems often times completely neuter any motivation a kid may have had towards a subject. Nobody has the patience, time, or energy to sit down and think about a complex subject while drawing on a strong foundation of previous work. I think our world is also geared more towards STEM subjects now and the magic that is needed for genius in the humanities is getting snuffed out. I know this is kind of a lame answer because it's an extremely common viewpoint, but it is what I honestly think is the main problem.

[Anonymous No.19493659]

>>19493496
why are nerds so hung up on having their superficial entertainment validated as art?

[Anonymous No.19493738]

>>19493659
Cultural insecurity. These people are of the same class of idiot as those who think metal is the classical music of our time.

[Anonymous No.19493867]

>>19493011
Schoenberg's developments were a logical response to, or rather continuation of the increasing fragmentation of tonality over the course of the 19th century. Debussy got there first, with neomodality in the 1890s. Both were ultimately responding to Wagner. Neither of these "killed" classical music, classical music rather found itself a specialist art form cast out from a new world of pop music in which simplistic, unintrusive tunes designed for mass marketability became dominant. This was always the case, but the rise of market forces brought forth the democratisation of art; "folk" music became the norm, "art" music retreated to the periphery, yet still remained at the forefront of musical development.

[Anonymous No.19493876]

I think you're looking in the wrong places.

[Anonymous No.19493905]

>>19493496
>>19493738
Although I still hate the comparison with Marvelshit, why doesn't he have a point? Since I read that Tolstoy essay I've been ruminating, and I cannot find any part where he was wrong except when he starts making excuses for certain specific things that he believes are "good art" based on vague intent of representing the struggle of the proles. But if I cut his retarded anprim LARP off the end of the essay I cannot really find a counterargument to what he says. I either accept The Divine Comedy as well as modernist poop-on-the-wall shit or I cannot accept either, because pretty much they stand on the same premise, that you need some sort of cultural framework to figure out what they're saying. The poop sculpture guy can tell me the same thing I would tell an uncultured swine who says the Divine Comedy is shit: you are ignorant and you have poor taste. And unlike Tolstoy implies, this works for pretty much all of art, including the Biblical parables, Dostoevski, and so on, if not because of the cultural requirements per se, because these cultural requirements an only happen with a structured form of government. There would be no literacy if we went back to living in the jungle. The mass literacy, the presence of the Christian religion itself, and so on, all stand on the foundation of hierarchical civilization. The Bible does not depict hunter-gatherers but people who are at the stage of agriculture, as well as their kings and so on. These two things are inscindible and Tolstoy does not understand it. Everything about art stands on the shoulders of the "elite" he hates so much, and without that "elite" no art at all would be possible, not even the folk stories, because even those, in primitive society, are perpetuated by the elders in a community. He does not say anything like that only folk stories are good art though, and he cites "intent" at the base of good art, like the intent to portray the struggle of humanity. What about the early propitiatory art made by cavemen, then? We undoubtedly call this art, but as far as we know this art, the most primitive and "pure" art we can imagine, was made for ritual purposes, not to tell a story. So there's really no art at all. Nothing is art. Everything is just different shades of entertainment, sitting somewhere on the spectrum of degeneracy and vice.
Please someone wake me up and save me, this is too much of a blackpill

[Anonymous No.19493992]

>>19493905
Allow me to clarify. I don't think that metal is "bad art" and rather hate the pedestalisation of classical music. Classical music is pretty much all I listen to, but I believe that, aside from truly mass market product of which the music is at best a tertiary component (e.g.: pop rap), there is no really existing hierarchy of value that should impose insecurity upon anyone regarding the stature of their music of choice relative to Beethoven's late quartets or whatever.

[Anonymous No.19494054]

>>19493992
My situation is that I've progressively discarded more and more art until I was left with a handful of things I valued very much, upon which I was building my own concept of "true" art, as well as my own work. Tolstoy was the final blow, I think. I ultimately think he was wrong on his own definition of art, but as I said, up to that point, he is perfectly right, and what this means for me is really that there is no such thing as art that is edifying for me, and so whatever is made with the intent of art will be incompatible with a virtuous life, both for the consumer and for the producer. There's no way around it, unless you are a nihilistic hedonist there is no option but to abandon the pursuit of "art" entirely, because there is nothing else that art serves but nihilistic hedonism. My whole life was a lie.

[Anonymous No.19494067]

>>19484778
there are but the medium has changed. now they make anime

[Anonymous No.19494076]

There are many people doing great things. You just don't know about it, probably because you're uneducated (unironically).

[Anonymous No.19494091]

>>19494067
>>19494076
Evangelion is garbage, Rei worst girl, Misato > Asuka.

[Anonymous No.19494110]

>>19494091
Agreed. The scientist lady is also hot, and Shinji's mom of course. Also that brunette girl at their school.

[Anonymous No.19494126]

>>19494054
Why should art be edifying? One of the reasons I love music so much is because it innately transcends quotidian concerns. It seems silly to me to say that because art does not serve a practical purpose that it is antithetical to living virtuously.

[Anonymous No.19494131]

>>19494126
Because if it's not edifying it can only be a self-serving sensory stimulus, and if that is so, then how is Bach any more valuable than degenerate pornography?

[Anonymous No.19494172]

>>19494131
I assume you speak of value in universal terms. If so, why should Bach be more valuable than pornography? His music is far more valuable to me than pornography, but my experience, my taste and temperament are not universal.

[Anonymous No.19494182]

>>19494091
>>19494110
spot the amerishits

[Anonymous No.19494233]

>>19494172
The problem is not whether or not Bach is more or less valuable than pornography in terms of taste or merit, but whether or not it has the same purpose as pornography. Pornography is vile, there is nothing good about it. It is a thing of vice, it's nihilistic, it's inhuman, love-denying, addictive, unhealthy, and so on. I cannot possibly say that pornography is "good" in any way, and it is pretty relevant that it is not, because much of art today has veered into the pornographic, shocking, or some other flavor of the same intention, which is to extort a stimulus out of the spectator. This is highlighted by Tolstoy in his essay, and I've come to the same conclusion over the past year or so. When art is made to extort something out of a spectator, it is vile. It is a mere stimulus-trigger that does not fulfill anything but the triggering of stimuli. People think this is art. The majority of art today is made to do this. As I said, I was convinced that there must be a distinction between "good" art, art that is edifying because it "gives" rather than "extort", and uses the sensory stimuli to deliver a message, or edify, and art that is a self-serving stimulus-trigger. I have concluded that there is no such distinction, and no art is edifying. The only reason why any art can be perceived as edifying is not the art itself, but the cultural subtext of the art, e.g. when I see an image of Christ, in a scene from the Bible, if I am a Christian, I may be edified by the message expressed in the artwork, but this has nothing to do with the artwork, and it is instead of my own cultural projection onto the artwork. Culture isn't necessarily art. Belief in a religion often generates art, but it is not art per se. In the same way, someone who sees the same scene but is not a Christian, or does not care for the message of Christianity, or is alien to Biblical context, will look upon the image and see it only for its stimulus-giving qualities, e.g. the realism of the picture, or the colors, or the drama from Christ's wounds, or some other thing that is just sensory. Art serves no purpose but sensory extortion.

[Anonymous No.19494304]

>>19494233
I think you've lost me. What exactly does art "extort" and to what end? Art merely exists, it can't do anything, so what would it need something from me for, indeed how could it take anything from me? As far as I can see, when I engage with a piece of music, I am the only one who is getting anything out of the exchange. Even to call it an exchange is misleading, since the music does not gain my time, my time simply ceases to be. I exchange my time for experience, but the time I gave simply ceases to be, and the experience was already mine to have, and when I finish listening to the music, the music still has nothing but its existence. What then has been extorted from me?

[Anonymous No.19494337]

>>19494304
>As far as I can see, when I engage with a piece of music, I am the only one who is getting anything out of the exchange
My reasoning is that all amusement is self-serving. You are not getting anything, it is amusement that is taking your time. We live in an era of constant consumption of new material, producer at a faster and faster pace, yet people are not edified by this. Instead, they are spent out, constantly dissatisfied. If you pardon the food analogy, wouldn't it be strange if you ate food, a feast actually, and became hungrier afterwards? No matter how much of this "art" you consume, all you end up with is a craving for more. It does not edify you in the sense that it is not adding to your life, but taking it from you. This is achieved supremely by pornography and other drugs, or gambling, which are literally made to consume you. These addictive drug-models are increasingly being adopted by the arts. Games are increasingly adopting a gambling model. Art is becoming more pornographic, or shocking, or politically indignating (adrenaline is also addictive). Why do you think it is developing in such a way, if not to imitate the true drugs, that reign over the people who use them?

[Anonymous No.19494633]

>>19494337
You seem to be shifting from art in itself to how people engage with it or (shudder) "consume" it. For me at least, music, though I compose daily, is no longer something I listen to every day. Yesterday I listened to Mozart's Jeunehomme concerto, but that was the first full piece I had listened to in about a week.

As for amusement, can I ask what you are getting out of posting here?

[Anonymous No.19495095]

>>19494633
>can I ask what you are getting out of posting here?
I feel very alienated and this is the only community where I can express my thoughts and get something reasonable back. I haven't actually tried Reddit or other things like that but I just find them abhorrent at UI level, and I don't want to have a visible history either.
I'm just not ready to pull out entirely from the internet / IRL and go full monk mode.

[Anonymous No.19495154]

>>19495095
>I'm just not ready to pull out entirely from the internet / IRL and go full monk mode.
I hope you never do. I appreciate the hell out of you, random anon.

[Anonymous No.19495454]

>>19495095
Then I wish you the best in coming to a decision on that point. Farewell.

[Anonymous No.19495504]

>>19488059
fucking kek
this is what is meant by
>Fahrvergnügen
Not revving in the middle of town on a Tuesday night or going way too fast on a desolate strip, but reflective discussion in a calming vista.
Of course non germans don't understand this.

night drives are not the same, burgers

[Anonymous No.19495606]

>>19488974
>>To many easily dazzled, mediocre minds, particularly women
Made me laugh

[Anonymous No.19495607]

>>19495504
please anon vocaroo me a "Weltschmerz" in your most sensual German voice

[Anonymous No.19495613]

>>19484778
Supressed by modern culture. Even newspapers have been enormously destructive on literary life.

[Anonymous No.19495632]

>>19495607
Just tried it. Sounds way too gay. I won't send it.

[Anonymous No.19495636]

I'm going to add my conclusions reading this thread, having not engaged in any of the discussion:

There is art which adds — understanding and empathy — and art which extracts — feelings and sensations. All art of the first kind is also of the second kind, but the opposite isn't the case.
The validation of a certain object or act as art is not in the art itself, but in the subjects who consume it as art. The artistic thing being actualized as art is dependent on the culture the consumer already has, then; without cultural subtext, the art is merely sensorial, aesthetic. There is a distinction between those types though, based on the process of creation of them. A book, painting or song made privately is infinitely more ethical than a literal work of pornography.
The first consumer of art is always the creator, and so he is the first one who's responsible for the art piece being art; but someone else can be a better consumer of it than the creator himself, by having a better context than he does, thus making the art more artistic.
The lack of edification in art is a consequence of the lack of cultural and social engagement of the contemporary people, not in a sense of lack in socializing, but in a lack of understanding about the world they live in, simultaneous with a lack of understanding about the human nature and its universals. Current concerns are more provincial and myopic.
All art becomes more specific, more sensorial, in a way which can be described as pornographical and scatological(forgive those ugly words).
This is because knowledge and culture necessarily precede the consuming of elevated art, which is now sorely associated with technique. Such can be seen in people like Cesar Santos, an example of a painter with incredible technique, but juvenile expression.
I conclude the level of knowledge and culture of the composers of art is the main cause of the problem and where the solution lies, too.

[Anonymous No.19495697]

>>19484778
>What changed?
the west abandoned God

[Anonymous No.19495722]

>>19495632
I am feeling so much Weltschmerz for being denied this, anon

[Anonymous No.19495800]

>>19484778
No one cares about great artists when they're alive. They can be propped up as a meme with full control.

[Anonymous No.19495854]

>>19495800
This is false, as proven in this thread, literally all the greats of the past until the XX century were regarded as the best of the best. In the XX century you have industrialized, commercial, novelty-based art forms, constant deconstructionism of art, the artist's dramatic life or his politics as a substitute for his art, and last but not least, the "art critic" authority who explains why this or that thing is great art and worthy of praise. In this period you start to see the Bohemienne "starving artists" who are recognized posthumously. I wonder why.

[Anonymous No.19495864]

>>19484778
>Why are there so no geniuses in the arts like they were in the past?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOqGXhn7YBA

[Anonymous No.19496075]

They're working in the financial sector, writing banking software, and designing complex algorithms designed to psychologically trick peoples' brains into buying things they don't actually need.

That's late stage capitalism, baby!

[Anonymous No.19496080]

>>19495864
>30 minute video
nigga I ain't watching all that shit

[Anonymous No.19496083]

>>19489368
Not to be the usual preachy Christian but it's crazy what going to church and even the most shaky faith does to the usual broken nihilist. I broke an uninterrupted 10 year stream of seemingly unbeatable suicidal thoughts overnight.
But you are mostly right in that the majority of people are just defaulting to nihilistic materialism as their lifestyle and unless you actively fight against it you are subjected to a constant bombardment of it 24/7. The average person doesn't even know what an adblocker is. If you have ever handled a normal person's phone you know how horrifying it is. Ads everywhere, spy apps, constant notifications. They turn on their TV when they get home and there are ads built into the TV's menu. It's absurd per se but the idea that millions of people have adapted to this is insane.

[Anonymous No.19496096]

>>19484778
There are too many distractions. If you study the lives of brilliant men you'll notice that most very diligent workers. Genius alone isn't enough. You need the impetus and discipline to devote several hours every day to your creations.

[Anonymous No.19496126]

>>19496096
This is wrong since those people lived a much slower life, marked by many little rituals that took a lot of time. Consider that a good Christian like Bach would NOT work on Sundays. That's one whole day a week where no work was accomplished. Same with Newton and others. It used to be a fairly strict thing that Christians would do. No work of any kind on Sundays. This alone means that the average industry worker in whatever creative industry works more than Bach. There are absolute workaholics employed in the high ranks of creative industries. They do not laze about. People like Lady Gaga or those Kpop taxidermy experiments make godawful music, but they work themselves to the bone, 7 days a week. Since we're on an anime board you probably know what kind of lifestyle a mangaka burns his life for. Yet no mangaka achieves anything within his medium that stands on the same ground as, say, Repin's works.

[Anonymous No.19496143]

>>19493373
>comparing gg allin with all that baby artists

[Anonymous No.19496145]

>>19496083
>It's absurd per se but the idea that millions of people have adapted to this is insane.
try billions

[Anonymous No.19496149]

>>19496126
It's not just about the hours put in though. It's about working diligently free from distraction. Today's workers are only ever able to produce superficial work because they lack the concentration required to penetrate the deeper layers of their chosen subjects. You need an autistic-like focus to produce a work of genius.

[Anonymous No.19496151]

>>19484778
Why do pseudo tryhard normies jump to Mozart and Shakespeare when they talk about great art? It’s like saying nickelback is the best thing happen to rock music or Harry Potter the best to fiction?

[Anonymous No.19496178]

>>19496151
>It's like saying nickelback is the best thing to happen to rock music or Harry Potter the best to fiction
It's nothing like that. In fact there are no contemporary analogs to Mozart or Shakespeare, which is precisely OP's point. I assume you only made that comment because Mozart and Shakespeare were popular. And really Mozart wasn't that popular and Shakespeare was better known for his poems than his plays.

[Anonymous No.19496179]

>>19496149
Anon these pop music people collaborate with absolutely monstrous, world-class musicians and in many cases are world-class singers themselves. I hate the music but discounting the level of their work routine because you find the music objectionable is just wrong. They are insanely focused and insanely good at what they do, and they do have that "autistic focus" because they work tirelessly at it day in day out. It's really the music that is garbage, not what is around it.

[Anonymous No.19496186]

>>19493905
>but as far as we know this art, the most primitive and "pure" art we can imagine, was made for ritual purposes
there you have it retard. art its just a sophisticated ritual. doesnt make any sense if its not.

[Anonymous No.19496226]

>>19496149
>>19496179
An example: the drummer in this is Dennis Chambers who works routinely with top 40 popstars. You cannot tell me that this guy isn't "autistically focused" on what he does.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QABB599Abow
The guitarist, Greg Howe, toured with Michael Jackson. These people are the best of the best, they play their instruments in the same way as you or I breathe.

[Anonymous No.19496232]

>>19496179
>still believing stars work hard to be stars
capitalism rot your mind

[Anonymous No.19496237]

>>19496179
There's a qualitative difference in the time they spend, influenced in large measure by how they spend their time when they aren't working. When your head is filled with so much noise you cannot reach those autistic levels of focus. It's also not hard to assume the people in the commercial music industry aren't geniuses to begin with, since the music industry seeks marketable talent rather than genius, so that even if they were focused and hard-working they wouldn't be able to produce great music. And there are some very bright marketers writing shallow pop songs but they're paid to write shallow pop songs. The incentives are all wrong.

[Anonymous No.19496254]

>>19487940
but your post shows you're predisposed to live a life of low iq. sorry.

[Anonymous No.19496289]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6GlFrI--7M
(that's a nice solo)
>>19496232
It's just dumb to believe that they don't work hard. Yes there is marketing but the talent and work element is very real. I'm not saying this in admiration of Beyonce or some other pop music thot, but they are not random people.
>>19496237
My argument was against the post that dismissed the quality of the actual time involved in the work. There are people working tirelessly on producing - that was my example - pop music. You can find the same level of commitment in the art for crappy Disney movies, or visual development for movies or video games. None of the people who work on this are lazy, it's impossible. They work themselves to the bone to produce a specific kind of product. It's the product that is flawed, not the quality of the work involved, or the skill of the workers, and I would also say that talent isn't an issue because there are many people today in music, painting or what have you, that are as technically skilled and "talented" as the greatest masters of the past. The issue is literally all in the intent, none of these people are moved by a voice of their own, they just execute. Many of these jazz musicians are pretty much locked into this technical performance aspect of their music because they sell tutorials and merch as if buying a guitar that looks like the one they play makes you as good as them.

[Anonymous No.19496346]

>>19496289
>but they are not random people.
they literally are. you really think lady gaga work harder than a mcdonald employee?.

your point about drones working in disney movies having talent and skill... you understand there is and always will be people who play mozart better than mozart?. skill is not what make the artist.

[Anonymous No.19496377]

>>19496126
>a good Christian like Bach would NOT work on Sundays.
He was a cantor, he worked every Sunday...

[Anonymous No.19496383]

>>19484778
O. K.

[Anonymous No.19496384]

I think that the answer is simple. Instead of merely bemoaning the loss of great artwork, we should seek to draw upon inspiration within ourselves, and channel this inspiration in our own works, that we might have the possibility to inspire posterity beyond our age. what we consider great artwork is something which is nourished by those that have come before us, and matured in the society within which we have grown within. Perhaps it might be deduced that great artwork is only a consequence of social conditions or the like, or a type of struggle or purpose or willpower, often in societies where the long arc of history is drawn upon as a well for one's own expression and nourishment of maturity. We might consider that our commodity culture discourages thoughts of the deep or introspective and that moral relativism demeans such works and ideas. In expressing some sort of inner truth or the divine or sacred there is a type of innate beauty which we recognize as giving a type of meaning to life or the human experience, this is considered great artwork.

[Anonymous No.19496410]

>>19496384
The deepness is something which is conducive to great art because it hearkens to the true and eternal, it speaks to an impulse of life within us which seeks to create and find meaning to our existence. What is enjoyed is not merely some sort of pleasurable fleeting aesthetic experience, but rather an aesthetic object is an expression of the longing of the human soul to satiate this craving for life.

[Anonymous No.19496478]

>>19496377
Didn't he play in churches only in the first stages of his career?

[Anonymous No.19496483]

>>19496384
Of course, we mustn't overlook the role of popular culture and media. What type of experience is expressed within culture? Music? Tiktok? That is not to deny that the kitsch gallantry does not bring a type of everyday laughter to many. But, we must draw upon this wellspring for the nourishment of inspiration for the ages.

Now I don’t mean to shill but I think in the context of geopolitics we often miss the more meaningful big picture of why the ‘east is ascendant’. This is something which is obvious when comparing the popular culture. When classical poetry and deep and existential themes are quoted in popular music this is to me more meaningful than some song which might be fun but merely waxes on about drugs, sex, or breakups.

Take this song for example. The title is 与她宴 which means ‘to feast with her’. The style is a Chinese popular music style called ‘gufeng’ 古风 which became popular in the last few years. This type of genre draws upon the traditional Chinese classical music tradition of thousands of years and infuses it with the energy of modern popular music. This pop song hearkens to the Tang dynasty about 1000 years ago

Now take merely the first stanza:
> 佐酒欲飞天,纸醉迷人眼。
> 望穿、望穿,爱、怜、恋。
> 牡丹赠夜宴,挥毫笑诗仙。
> 嗟叹、嗟叹,繁华终焉。

the lyrics are poetic and deep especially for a pop song
> to drink and ascend to heaven, that wine-drunkenness confuses our eyes
> to expect, expect love, pity, romance [望穿 here references 望眼欲穿 from a Tang era poem by Bai Juyi]
> peonies give way to a night feast, by brushstrokes laughing at poets and immortals
> sigh, sigh, that which thrives one day fades away

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16fYGx9aeIg

[Anonymous No.19496583]

>>19496346
I was not comparing those people to the greats in terms of overall artistry, I was focusing on some anon's point where he claimed that people have become lazy or unfocused and they party instead of working like the great geniuses did. The drone artist working on a Disney movie or a thotty popstar are awful, I do not like their work, and I do not even like the work of the jazz musicians I posted above, my point was simply a rebuttal to that anon's claim. These people all work very, very hard, and they are very skilled at whatever they are doing. That is it.

[Anonymous No.19496584]

>>19496384
Nowadays we are often afraid to express a serious opinion because society does not value this, instead it gives it a strange look, or mocks it, or demeans it, you are crazy for thinking too deeply. The fact that this conversation is happening on 4chan, of all places, means it is already siloed off, as 4chan is website with a rather dubious reputation in the popular conception. Such ideas are not to exist in the mainstream as to threaten the status quo, but are to quarantined to corners such as this one. Everything is meant to be commodified: ideas, human relations, art, culture, ideology. This is the core of why it is difficult for us to produce great art.

[Anonymous No.19496609]

>>19484778
>lack of struggle and physical strife (war, hunger, disease)
>infantilization of modern men and women
>the dumbing down of masses via public schooling
>the destruction of muses via the rape of femininity, destruction of masculinity, and end of nationalism
>opera, theatre, and writing is dead, only Marvel and Cardi B matters
>muh STEM, muh diversity, muh metaverse
Gee, I wonder why....

[Anonymous No.19496644]

>>19496584
>Nowadays we are often afraid to express a serious opinion because society does not value this
Do we not express our serious opinions all the time? What are the serious things that we can express these days other than "I am weary of life", really? Actually there has never been such a massive amount of open-hearted confessions being sent to the world as it's happening today. And people do like these things quite a lot, because they are relatable. The internet is full of "serious opinions", it's not just post-modern irony. And everyone absolutely hates - at least in theory - the establishment, the "status quo" and so on, only in a completely misguided way that perhaps they do not understand is being used to sell them products. Either way there's no shortage of seriousness on the internet. What do you want to comment about? I think the problem is really that there's nothing to say. What can you say that hasn't been completely turned inside out a million times, in times when that specific subject was more relevant or vivid than it is today? I guess you could spin narratives on relevant events unfolding today, writing journalistic nonfiction novels, memoirs. That's one thing you can do to produce art, assuming that you will be able to experience enough of what you're writing about to write something that looks like a work of art. Other than that, what can you say? Lives really are dull. Even the lives of rich people are dull. Drugs and sex with whores is nothing worth talking about.

[Anonymous No.19496682]

>>19496644
I suppose you have a good point vis-a-vis seriousness being expressed on the internet. And well, 'lives are dull' and that perhaps being a reason why people cannot create great art. This reminds me of back in the 90s how Francis Fukuyama promoted his theory of 'end of history', which at the same time would be a crisis because with nothing to struggle against (no more big bad commies) what would people do? Human beings will strive to create and stir conflict where there is none just to have something to do, just like an old married couple arguing for their own entertainment.

[Anonymous No.19496685]

>>19496644
I would also say that the anon who mentioned the falls of things like nationalism and so on is right, not specifically becuse of nationalism but because the combination of all the things he mentioned caused one specific thing, that is, the extreme focus on individuality. If you are community-minded like people of ages past were, you were necessarily more humble and receptive to what others said. This made one a good receptor for stories. People were more easily captured by what they read, because they were prone to these communitary sentiments, that in a way formed a bridge between people, and just the same between a writer and the public. Right now everyone is an extreme individualist, much like some kind of solitary animal. When you do not see others you expect entertainment to stimulate your senses. Since there is no real ability in the individual to perceive life as lived by others, or to assimilate ideas, to conjure imagery and so on, entertainment can only hope to offer one of the universal stimuli that work on man: sex, anger, and so on. Politics are extremely effective at inflaming hearts. Picture some kind of hateworthy strawman and you can immediately rouse someone's heart in indignation. Of course then you have pornographic imagery and thoughts, and so on. It makese sense for the absolute individualist whose existence is entirely self-centered. Why would I hear YOUR thoughts? I want you to agree with MY thoughts. Why would I want to hear about YOUR experience? I want to feel something I know already. And so on.

[Anonymous No.19496700]

>>19496682
>19495095▶
alienation is real

[Anonymous No.19496717]

>>19493905
the main difference is our society is much less religious and our art is more materialistic and less self-reflective, marvel+ and american pop culture in general suffers from excess egotism

[Anonymous No.19496730]

>>19496717
>>19496685
people are much too proud and self-centered to seek greater inspiration from others, and how can self-centered art really inspire others? a great humility is necessary and homage to masters past and also the common people of the society we breathe and live in is the bedrock for one's own art and expression

[Anonymous No.19496735]

>>19496609
>muh STEM
The fuck? The only threat STEM could pose to general intelligence is popscience, and the embarassing embrace of nihilism we've seen recently. The public school system is also much better than homeschooling, I'd say, unless you approve of education being walled off from the masses, though I understand if you mean the public system is being used as a tool and isn't flawed on its own.

[Anonymous No.19496755]

>>19496644
>>19496682
but this fits the point exactly, on that internet it is more anonymous so we can do so easily, whereas in person or eg. "posting on main" on twitter etc, this is difficult for the fear of reprisal and judgement, especially the danger that we get drawn into the endless culture wars for expressing a simple opinion, such that it can only be expressed safely anonymously

[Anonymous No.19496776]

>>19496735
>only
a subtle point I want to make which I hate about this idea of STEM today, is the divorce from philosophy and even religion, linked to the greater secularization of the west. it is not necessarily requisite that STEM people are dead regarding philosophy or metaphysics etc and many scientists, mathematicians up until the 19th and early 20th century were also philosophers, but nowadays this is rare. this goes back to what was said earlier that religion and philosophy are too 'serious' to be linked to something such as science, science is supposed to nowadays stick to the technical, when before we would consider of course that the mysteries of the natural world would be of deep spiritual significance, science was borne as an art once upon a time as while, whereas it consciously practices detachment nowadays which seems 'soulless' to those not in the loop of the latest science fads

[Anonymous No.19497009]

I think there are two factors:

-Entertainment. There is a lot of it nowadays and people spend a lot of time on it. Meaning they wont create, think.
-Education. Education has ironically killed talent. Nowadays you need to go through grades on school, highschool and university. Do already established things. You cant pursue your own interests and inspirations. Back in the day, at the age of 30 you could’ve already have 20 years of experience in painting or sculpture. Now, you need to get to university and get into graduate school to do your first sculpture. So much time wasted.

I think another factor is, how much effort are you willing to put into your work? Take Dante and the Comedy for example. The work of a lifetime. Even though it took him around 15-20 years to complete, every book he wrote before was to write the Comedy. This is one of the reasons there is no equivalent to the Comedy. No writer wants to take on such titanic task.

[Anonymous No.19497092]

>>19487940
He's met you?