transcript
“Pretty shitty how baseline human activities like singing, dancing, and making art got turned into skills instead of being seen as behaviors, so now it’s like ‘the point of doing them is to get good at them’ and not ‘this is a thing humans do, the way birds sing and bees make hives.’”
Before late capitalism forced most everyone to make their art more “commercial”, there was this thing in modernity called symbolic capital, and in the artistic fields this brought the cons of competitive spirit, but a pro - in my view, at least - was enabling approaches to art which are more sophisticated, albeit requiring specialization also on the part of the reader (for the pleasure of “writerly” texts see Roland Barthes; for why many people want to passively consume elite art rather than participate in democratic art, “The Weak Universalism” by Boris Groys is some food for thought). More exactly, modern artists placed their bets on getting recognized by critics and historians for their efforts at innovating art without the pressure to always meet halfway the audience.
Downsides included the possibility - in bourgeois capitalist societies, not so much in, say, Yugoslavia - to starve before receiving due recognition, being dependent on the critics’ whims or agendas… and being dependent on there being an infrastructure for the art world, gatekeepers - which suffered from more or less systemic biases such as sexism, though sometimes sexually transgressive authors got away with upholding the idea that somehow art is never moral, but instead quintessentially aesthetic - and all… And, of course, in the background should still lie classical education of sorts, in the lack of which today some might end up believing they’re reinventing the wheel or that it’s nonconformist to be conformist, aka hip to be fash square…
At least these are my (more than) two cents as a writer from Eastern Europe who witnessed the fall of the traditional literary system - which in other circumstances could have been enabled me to secure a modest but content existence through a stable job in one of their state-funded magazines - and read Pierre Bourdieu and Pascale Casanova to make some sense of all this. As a lower middle class person, I was privileged to have been supported by my parents to pursue literature for years without the pressure of making it on the job market - now I work almost 7 days out of 7, leaving me in no mood to read or write books… Alas, I was looking forward to UBI or negative income tax, but it seems like we have to fight a techno-feudal dystopia first.
My baby niece started bobbing up and down when a song came on, happily waving her little fists and shaking her little diaper butt.
I was like “that’s terrible, you’ll never be a star, keep your day job you untalented hack!”
thought i was on linkedin for a sec
Lemmy is LinkedIn for NEETs
Honestly I’d bet the average lemmy user is more likely to be employed than the average LinkedIn user. My experience on LinkedIn was a bunch questionably effective recruiters who rarely even understood the words in the job requirements they were trying to fill, where my lemmy experience so far has been “all of the people working in tech who hate silicon valley technofeudalism”
It was just a half baked joke, NEETs are based anyway
LinkedInLunaticks (no idea how to link that)
I’m terribly bad at all three by societal standards but I enjoy all three when no one is around.
(Or atleast I did, before I got a chronic illness that prevents me from doing them)
Sounds like a job for AI! That way we’ll have more time for washing dishes and folding clothes.
Only if you let them. I do all these things without regard to skill. Maybe surround yourself with more laid back people?
I don’t get it. Do all of it if it makes you happy, but get paid if you can and love doing what you do…
Birds sing and make hives literally with purpose, what a stupid example to use.
And if you show any ability above terrible, everyone starts telling you about how much money you can make.
Fuck off. I do this for me.
I’ve mostly heard that from boomers. I thought it was some weird post war mentality and upbringing that you need to be doing profitable work all day and sleep all night and breed and that’s all that matters.
Real I’m 14 and this is deep vibes.
Nobody’s gonna stop you from doing any of that. Well, maybe from singing in public but that’s less about skill and more about not disturbing others by being loud and obnoxious.
And making art in public is vandalism, dance and maybe someone will think you’re on drugs and call the police. Spend your time doing human things alone for no profit and maybe society won’t let you have shelter or medicine. People are absolutely going to stop you unless you’re really good at fighting for it.
Capitalism causes us to commodotize everything. I saw this switch as well during the 2000s in Internet culture. It went from people making websites about their cats and stuff to people chirping out “but how will that be profitable?!” in response to most ideas.
I remember 11 year old me trying to monentise a crappy weebly site I made.
This only applies if you give a shit what other people think of you doing innocuous things.
Paint a terrible picture and have fun doing it. Dance your way down the sidewalk when the mood strikes you. Sing whenever you want. Sometimes I’m in the grocery store and they start playing a banger on the speakers, damn right I’m gonna sing along to it while I’m evaluating the pros and cons of competing spaghetti packages.
some people make steel frying pans all day to pay the bills, some people sing at restaurants to entertain them, others people work in the kitchen to fry them both their dinner
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.
He’s clearly educating us on the lifecycle of metal cookware. Fascinating stuff.
I think these things still exist on the full spectrum of “feels human, so do it!” to “you’re so great, it’s a skill you can use to earn a living.” There are tons of things like this. Cooking, massage, comedy, playing an instrument…nearly any service or entertainment skill. Believe me, ain’t nobody gonna pay to hear me sing (maybe to stop…), but I still sing along at the top of my lungs (when it won’t torture anyone) because it makes me feel happy!
ETA: This is nothing new. See “bards.”
“ETA”?
“Edited to Add”
Be the change you want to see, no one will stop you. I certainly won’t.
My partner made up a word - Dysfunctionlust: the pleasure you get from doing something that you feel no pressure to be good at.
She’s quite a good writer but super hard on herself about it, whereas drawing is a dysfunctionlust for her and so quite relaxing.
It’s based on the German word funktionslust: the joy of an organism doing what it’s meant to do, like a dog running.
Can’t not see the “Dysfunctionslut” in there, though. 🤷🏽♂️😅
That’s also great! Dysfunctionslut is much cooler than just saying “I have really bad ADD”
I was envisioning those select few who, born with genes that make them sexually attractive to most others, seem to apply just as much effort and skill to the act itself — often to the ironic disappointment of fellow participant(s).
I’m German and I never heard of Funktionslust, neither has my Autokorrektur. Still, that makes sense.
