entertainment
Well-known member
we argue because we presuppose that one of us can be right, otherwise it's pointless, boring.
The argument the book makes is that Joyce "dismantles the ideology of 'organic' art." So similar, in that sense, to what Gus wanted to do to the notion of organic self-expression in his Mask thread. The two things are closely related.
I’ve recently started to suspect that bragging about cultural omnivorousness has become its own form of snobbery, and that the new face of music-nerd elitism is not the High Fidelity bro but instead the Twitter user who would very much like you to applaud him for listening to Ke$ha and Sunn O))) and Florida Georgia Line and Gucci Mane and …
It gets you out of responsibility for what you writethe spontaneous and the automatic in Kerouac is another way to circumvent this problem
That's from Keith Johnstone's ImproSuppose an eight-year-old writes a story about being chased down a mouse-hole by a monstrous spider. It’ll be perceived as “childish” and no one will worry. If he writes the same story when he’s fourteen it may be taken as a sign of mental abnormality. Creating a story, or painting a picture, or making up a poem lay an adolescent wide open to criticism. He therefore has to fake everything so that he appears “sensitive” or “witty” or “tough” or “intelligent” according to the image he’s trying to establish in the eyes of other people. If he believed he was a transmitter, rather than a creator, then we’d be able to see what his talents really were.
We have an idea that art is self-expression—which historically is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated. He was a servant of the God. Maybe a mask-maker would have fasted and prayed for a week before he had a vision of the Mask he was to carve, because no one wanted to see his Mask, they wanted to see the God’s. When Eskimos believed that each piece of bone only had one shape inside it, then the artist didn’t have to “think up” an idea. He had to wait until he knew what was in there—and this is crucial. When he’d finished carving his friends couldn’t say ‘I’m a bit worried about that Nanook at the third igloo’, but only, ‘He made a mess getting that out!’ or ‘There are some very odd bits of bone about these days.’ These days of course the Eskimos get booklets giving illustrations of what will sell, but before we infected them, they were in contact with a source of inspiration that we are not. It’s no wonder that our artists are aberrant characters. It’s not surprising that great African sculptors end up carving coffee tables, or that the talent of our children dies the moment we expect them to become adult. Once we believe that art is self-expression, then the individual can be criticised not only for his skill or lack of skill, but simply for being what he is.
To put it another way, self-transparency is a social liability past certain pointsMy feeling is that when we say affected vs wholesome, when we say performed vs sincere, what we really mean is conscious and unconscious. I think Luka is onto something with his posts about how conscious things are chosen and therefore up for grabs and therefore manipulative or strategic whereas unconscious stuff, even though it is still computational and strategic, is an enigma to the conscious mind and therefore we see it differently. And that if you think about it this way, it makes sense we would evolve an unconscious and be self-deceptive. To better fool others