You'll still have passion afterwards, right?
The worst is when people do apologia for the fact that nothing new has come out for the last ten years.
"I mean, do you think Disney shouldn't make money?"
This process infects the process of culture creation very deeply. Capitalism attaches itself to cultural signifiers like a virus and becomes a middle man for all social interaction. New culture usually emerges from scenes of energetic artists who are all immersed in their fields and making similar art. This is the process that’s disrupted by capitalism.
Scenes are formed less because people have less time to immerse themselves and are more atomized, so the social exchange doesn’t happen. When the scenes do form, people are incentivized to use preexisting cultural signifiers rather than create new ones. New signifiers fail to spread the majority of the time, so they’re not as useful to capital.
It’s this process of repeatedly encoding and decoding the same cultural signifiers that Capitalism uses to insert itself into culture like a dog who opens its mouth to get a better grip on the thing in between its teeth. But that process also degrades the signifiers over time like a video tape that’s been recorded over too many times.
Let’s think about Bruno Mars for a trivial example. His music and aesthetic isn’t about innovating any individual parts. The music that he borrows from belonged to its own cultural moment. All of those artists had their own imagery and sounds and life events and political relevance. That music’s meanings had been cemented in people’s minds. Those meanings are decoded into parts (ie funk guitars make you want to dance, the 80’s vocal reverb makes you feel happy, etc), shuffled up (the process of assembling these nostalgic elements into new songs), and then reencoded (the marketing and imagery surrounding the release of those songs). And each time the new meaning becomes less tethered to the original context, which makes the meaning less stable.
I always imagine it as a mycoidal web. This mindless thing that nevertheless manages to expand into all available space, sucking up nutrients as it does so.
I got a lot of this from the paper that the founder of buzzfeed wrote back when he was a Marxist. I’m pretty sure a lot of the theorists cited and discussed in that paper have a bunch of similar writings, particularly Deleuze.
back when he was a Marxist.
why would anyone stop being a Marxist?
You get the sort of capital and connections required to found buzzfeed and don’t fight the subsequent process. Once you get comfortable enough and immersed among other comfortable people, it takes active effort to retain that class consciousness.
Still remember my creative writing professor who shit all over one of my short stories because "It's genre fiction and genre fiction doesn't sell"
Single-handedly fucked up my creative drive for nearly ten years
...but isn't all fiction part of a genre? At least under the market paradigm where we classify art in that way for the sake of sorting consumption choices?
Yeah, all fiction is part of a genre. The term "genre fiction" just exists as a condescending way to separate "low art" from "high art", it's not especially coherent
Wait until you learn that academic musicians have a category of music called “art music”. Apparently music that’s enjoyed by the masses is inherently not art. I know that’s not the literal definition, but also they can still fuck off
Art snobs are one of the few types of people that are ultimately harmless but I still want to bash their heads in
Also doesn't "genre fiction" sell exceptionally well? Sounds like that professor had some complex copes going on
It's kinda the majority of book sales. Like, Dan Brown junk and tacky romance novels for lonely straight women make up a huge percentage of the market. Sounds like the professor was just salty nobody's buying their writing.
You’ll still have passion afterwards, right?
:side-eye-1: :side-eye-2:
My dead love of music is what channels my hatred of capitalism. Oh, and a bunch of trauma too. That helps
hey op why wont you lEt PeoPlE EnJoy tHInGs? anyway, superhero media nowadays has the whole range of artistic expression, from surreal avant-garde political thrillers to uplifting feminist action blockbusters, so what's the issue with the fact that 80% of creative media produced in the west is capeshit? :wojak-nooo:
love to turn every single thing i ever make into product to be consumed
If it makes you feel any better sometimes people do have a passion for retelling older stories in a new way.
And capitalism fucks that up too with functionally infinite copyright protection 🙂
Why would people create stuff if they didn’t have the incentive of making money?
