The Digital Narcissus

Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Corpsey said:
People outside of America are never overconfident and immunised to reality.
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Leo

Leo

Well-known member
droid said:
Nope. Its the American syndrome, bestows utter confidence whilst immunising you from reality.
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the self-consciousness and low self-esteem are there, we're just in perpetual denial. also, who gives a shit what the rest off the world thinks? MAGA, bitches!
 
yyaldrin

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/22/art-aura-doomed-search-perfect-selfie

I’m not above taking photos at art exhibitions. There are some very good arguments for doing so: to capture detail for research, to linger afterwards on what you particularly appreciated, to show friends and family, or to post on social media. A curator friend also notes that it can help with gallery communications at a time when budgets are being slashed and the pressure to increase footfall is more intense than ever. Being allowed to take photos and post them to social media often boosts visitor numbers quite dramatically. But the proliferation of photo-taking – and selfies – now seems to have reached a critical mass, to the point where there is no longer either mental or literal space for direct engagement with the work. Instead, that engagement is mediated by a screen. It is disrupted and distanced – leading to the kind of detachment the Marxist theorist and philosopher Guy Debord presciently identified as a condition of the mass culture of late capitalism, when he wrote The Society of the Spectacle in 1967. “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,” he wrote.
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Yet it’s not a new observation to say a simulacrum of the work lacks the power of the original. We all know this, otherwise why go to a gallery at all? In his 1935 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, cultural critic Walter Benjamin reflected on the impact of photography, writing: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space.” Art removed from its context is stripped of what Benjamin termed its aura, that almost supernatural, unique quality.
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luka

luka

Well-known member
I was up at the point (a hill in Greenwich overlooking London) at midnight NYE and seeing the view multiplied by the upheld mobile phones of the crowd looked the absolute bollocks. Miniaturised high resolution Londons as the fireworks went off. Many times more seductive than the real thing
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Leo said:
the self-consciousness and low self-esteem are there, we're just in perpetual denial. also, who gives a shit what the rest off the world thinks? MAGA, bitches!
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a nation teetering perpetually on the edge of a nervous breakdown, sustained only by wealth and cultural hegemony. Could be worse, could be Britain.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I only ever hear from britons and americans on how shit their countries are, because that's who i am talking to most of the time on the internet.

Are other countries really so great?
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
No, but they don't have the disadvantage of a total lack of humility based upon being, or having been top dog. That's the difference imo. When America falls from grace, it will be spectacular in pscyhological terms - 'empire was great' Britain x 100.

Plus other countries often have greater respect for everyday pleasures, the simple sensual pleasures of being alive. US and UK pour scorn on this ridiculous notion.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Corpsey said:
I only ever hear from britons and americans on how shit their countries are, because that's who i am talking to most of the time on the internet.

Are other countries really so great?
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You probably find a similar thing in other countries that have had big empires in the relatively recent past, which is most of Western Europe. Germany forms a special class by itself, of course (though obviously only outright neo-Nazis there consider that part of their history to have been "great" - for the rest it's more about guilt, and a new right-wing reaction to that guilt). Dunno about non-European ex-imperial powers (Japan and Turkey). I read an interesting thing the other day about a psychological similarity between Russians and Brits (especially the English), linking Empire nostalgia over here with nostalgia for the Soviet heyday over there. Putin clearly appeals to people in similar ways to the Brexit cult, at any rate, never mind the actual connections between the two.
 
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