Do aesthetics map to politics?

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Luka's whole moral map of the world is essentially aesthetic. Fat-bottomed Tories in plum corduroy vs scratchy-jumper perverts - which side are you on?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Your personality - your interest in discipline, for example, and how that tracks to aesthetics and politics.

I see what Luka's saying, it's too simplistic to directly link the two. Still, I'm nothing if not simplistic.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
In software we often fall into using aesthetic terms - "elegant", "clumsy", "clean", "smelly", "tangled", "clear" - to describe properties of a codebase that please or displease us, that we feel good or bad about. We don't see software itself as an aesthetic object, a work of art, but we convey technical value judgements which might be difficult to justify in detail via this sort of terminology.

The theory that people's political leanings are just proxies for their deep-down yucks and yums isn't quite right, I think. it's more that we have intuitions about what's good and bad in social organisation and public life that would be onerous to justify in detail, and resort to the language of yucks and yums to convey those intuitions. The real value judgements involved are quite conflicted and contradictory, and making them explicit would involve tremendous work.
 

luka

Well-known member
Yes they are pre-verbal 'knowings' pre verbal aversions, pre verbal desires, completely impervious to rationality, whatever rationality means. It's not that they are aesthetic judgments but that they exist as part of the same complex structure built on top of some very basic foundations.

How we make discriminations, judgements, what is just enough, what is too much, how taut we pull the line
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's no big secret that this thread is a spin on my old quest to understand why hippy art is so eyebleedingly awful.
 

luka

Well-known member
And your abiding love for nazi uniforms. ..

I like the line pulled fairly taut. I like tension. I prefer to exist in a state of tension. Hippies like it slack.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
When a Tory likes jazz, I assumethat means that they like Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, et al. When a Commie likes jazz I expect they like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman.

But I might be wrong!

"Ken Clarke and Soweto Kinch discuss the relationship between two jazz pioneers (Charlie Parker and Miles Davis)."
 
It's no big secret that this thread is a spin on my old quest to understand why hippy art is so eyebleedingly awful.

Is it partly because much of it involves no-budget, low tech failed attempts to represent the impossible shifting geometry of psychedelic vision, and it's spurned out into a sometimes quite non-judgmental environment (not enough constructive feedback, the discipline that would be enforced by hierarchy or cash incentive)
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
And your abiding love for nazi uniforms. ..

I like the line pulled fairly taut. I like tension. I prefer to exist in a state of tension. Hippies like it slack.

See this is good, you're turning my shit thread idea into something gooder.
 

luka

Well-known member
When you work in a 'public facing role' for any length of timd you soon learn you can determine everything about a person at a single glance from taste in music to political orientation.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
It's no big secret that this thread is a spin on my old quest to understand why hippy art is so eyebleedingly awful.

The absolute acme of this is the art you see on and in buildings used as community spaces by people who are a bit alternative*, or businesses such as cafés that operate as adjuncts to these sorts of spaces. It's the same aesthetic in Brighton, Camden Town, the studentier/cheaper parts of east Oxford, much of Bristol, bits of Birmingham. The elements are always the same: flying saucers/aliens/robots, goblins/pixies/fairies/wizards/witches, big spotty mushrooms, cannabis leaves or giant spliffs. The odd pyramid or Stonehenge trilithon in the background. Not usually much that's politically explicit, unless it's a CND logo. There's one near where I live that shows an anthropomorphic brain running joyously off in the horizon, having broken out of a brain-prison.

*It's never specified what they're an alternative to - it's a word that functions as an adjective in its own right: alternative qua alternative.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Is it partly because much of it involves no-budget, low tech failed attempts to represent the impossible shifting geometry of psychedelic vision, and it's spurned out into a sometimes quite non-judgmental environment (not enough constructive feedback, the discipline that would be enforced by hierarchy or cash incentive)

I like this -

So in this analysis, there are plenty of hippies in attendance who can see the painting is hideous, but are simply too nice to say so?

I was operating under the assumption that their aesthetic taste is fundamentally blasted.
 
Fascist art is aggressively saying ‘this is the best way’, psychedelic art aims to represent infinite possibility and perspective (and almost always fails because you obv have to eventually pick one)

I was thinking about this in the context of the acid communism thread on here. And thought that if you take the principles of that approach to their logical conclusion (the idea of the individual being the problem) then should the artistic / aesthetic approach aim to destroy the figure of the artist completely? Would it move into new collective forms of authorship and ownership? Is that kind of what the early surrealist movement tried to do?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
An example of a collective art form might be the ancient Egyptian style, which remained more or less unchanged for centuries. There was no room there for the individual genius of an artist. But it was also very very disciplined. There was A WAY to do things from which no Tiye, Nkosi or Ammon could deviate.
 
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