We’ve discussed before how Millennials and Zoomers suffer from a peculiar aesthetic disability. Unlike past generations, many of them seem unable to engage with artistic works on anything but a subjective level.
A Big Brand X viewer from Generation Y on back would say, “I want to be devoted like Spider-Man.” “I want to be brave like Luke Skywalker.” “I want to be a good leader like Optimus Prime.”
But listen to members of the two most recent generations to reach adulthood when they discuss pop culture consumption, and chances are you’ll hear, “I’m just like (Andrew Garfield) Spider-Man.” “I’m just like Anakin Skywalker.” “I’m just like (Beast Wars) Optimus.”
Readers may be tempted to blame this shift from aspiration to identification on a lack of fantasy heroes worth emulating. Contemporary fiction has lapsed into a crisis of virtue, without a doubt. But that failing is a symptom of a more foundational problem.
In his recent debate with Milo, Beardson highlighted the primary fault when he implied that art is subjective. As Milo alluded to, Church teaching disagrees. Beauty is not subjective. It resides in the object. Even someone who says, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” appeals to a real quality called “Beauty” that he assumes is accessible and intelligible to everyone else. Otherwise, he might as well claim that “Smurfiness is in the eye of the beholder.”
Comedian Sam Hyde expounded on this subject with his typical blend of forthrightness and elegance. He has noticed a lack of interest among new artists in putting in the hard work to master their skills. Instead, they obsess over cooking up novel ideas as a means of self-expression. The professional artist he quotes diagnoses their problem as an unwillingness to go beyond easy subjectivism to discover what is beautiful about the object.
That diagnosis rings true from my work as a professional editor. In recent years, my colleagues and I have seen a troubling increase in new writers who just vomit rough first drafts onto the page and pass them off for editors to whip into publishable shape. The rapid-release indie model may be contributing cause, but a tendency to mistake professional writing for a means of self-validation instead of a job is a consistent factor that keeps turning up.
Whether you’re a maker or consumer of art, do yourself a favor and watch Sam Hyde’s video.
The dissident creator’s road is steeper and more difficult than we’d thought. If a parallel culture is to exist, let alone thrive, artists of the new counterculture must first break their subjectivist conditioning and embrace objective beauty.
“beautiful in a grim way. Give it a shot!”
He can’t keep getting away with it
…I can’t help but see the more inferior works in the Superversive Anthologies called out in this critique. I wrote nothing for those anthologies and would never try to publish without at least a basic copy-edit, but somehow I feel as personally ashamed as though I had.
Zwycky is no part of it, mind. Ear of tin, heart of purest gold – and it turns out even an ear of tin can be transmuted into a finer metal if you make a musical composition of it. I’ll hear nothing against Zwycky.
As you’ve pointed out before, art is work done to a standard. We can see this shift in poetry as well. The classic poets of previous centuries – the ones who have stood the test of time – crafted their poems carefully to match a standard. The romantic sonnets of Shakespeare or the Holy Sonnets of Donne are works of art because they are works of artifice which also say something beautiful and true. Other forms are the same way in that meter, line length, or thematic restraints require the poet to choose each word and syllable with care. It’s easy to dismiss artifice as artificiality, but even doing something as simple as trying to hold a rhyme scheme, establish internal rhyme, or construct parallelism forces me to really think about what I am trying to say and how best to say it. Blank verse breaks some of those rules. Free verse, frankly, is scarcely worthy to be called poetry, unless there is some structure or artifice to it that doesn’t rely on rhyme and meter. Without that, it’s just prose with random line breaks. I’ve written a certain amount of it myself and can safely say it’s not my best work.
Even the Cal Arts weenies get it:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=upxBGNcryRs
Sorry. I didn’t mean to make that a reply.
There’s a reason that J.S. Bach will always be associated with beautiful, heavenly music and Arnold Schoenberg’s will be associated with being subversive. Because the former’s harmonious compositions spoke for themselves while the latter wanted to have his own personal stamp.
Christian vs. “””secular””” in a nutshell.
Which way, Western man?
Great example, Alex. Bach is always a plus. Never heard of Arnold Schoenberg. I listened to “Peripetie”, and a section of Verklärte Nacht, Op.4 – Boulez out of the almost 30 minutes of it. I had to turn it off. It was giving me a headache. I would rather listen to current pop radio than that noise. If you like jazz, take a listen at “Sketches of Spain” by Miles Davis, particularly “Solea”, if you like Bolero music. Me and the wife played chess the other night while listening to the Bill Evans and Chet Baker collab. Really nice night. If you’re into country, try Ryan Upchurch’s “Same Ol’ Same Ol'”, “Miss My Buddies”, “Real Country”, and “Simple Man” for some of that good ol’ homegrown ‘Merican.
You really see the distinction in art in pixel art.
Some pixel art is quite beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, making use of techniques specific to the medium like dithering, subpixel movement, outlining/inlining and being careful to preserve essential features when rescaling.
Other pixel art is obviously used to excuse a style that no one would find appealing.
The quality of the pixel art in a game is often a good means of sorting out the quality of gameplay, story, overall design etc. I don’t mean whether it is a masterpiece or not, just whether it has any care to work as pixel art or if it looks like random garbage. If they care enough to learn the techniques for pixel art, they’ll probably care enough to hone their craft on the rest of the game. The main exceptions of games with great pixel art but terrible everything else are the ones where the art was all contracted out and as such developed independently of the game.
This also works for skinsuits, too. A lot of what is wrong with modern art and entertainment is the laziness brought on by narcissism built into the younger generation of creators. This is why they think simply having someone else’s name grafted onto their product is enough to sell their terrible ideas.
As an example, here is the most recent example from the video game industry. Stolen valor being attempted due to a company name:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdRLNUGmFC8
This goes a long way to describing the current brand obsession gripping the art and entertainment world. Nobody wants to make art to entertain others; they want to profit off their narcissism. It’s about lifting themselves above others, not connecting with the masses.
Left 4 Dead is a game that you would love, JD. It’s simple but difficult to master, and the story is subtle and optional to your enjoyment.
I admit this is tangentially relevant at best, but this does also tie into the moderns’ insistence on seeing everything through the lens of their favourite issues – on a recent video explaining Dante’s Inferno, one commenter thought it “ironic” that Dante was “so homophobic” (meaning that he believed the Church’s teaching about sodomy) while idolising Ancient Greece, then asked “who’s going to tell him?”, with the sly, snide assumption that he knows more about Ancient Greece than Dante did, while also feeding into the modern myth that Ancient Greece was some kind of gay love paradise. I apologise if this is derailing, but good GRIEF does such immense historical ignorance grind my gears.
Cactus Troous
There’s a book from Loeb’s Classical Library titled Greek laws. It’s a compendium of Greek laws from many city states.
Every single law had an article explicitly prohibiting homosexuality/sodomy. And other articles commanding men to get married and raise families
xavier