What a bizarre distinction. I'm not even sure I understand the classification. Art can make the ordinary transcendent - it's the treatment not the subject matter.
It seems the author believes that American as an identity bares great significance that Americans were and should be destined to greatness, or at least in favor of such ambitious ideals.
But let's be honest. The idea of human has mission to achieve greatness by itself is, just a belief. Human life can be any form it needs to be, if the owner him/herself desires so. And the in the age of internet, it is easy to at least observe afar what your desired life would be like by watching others do it. I'd argue people are much aware and resourceful to decide what he/she wants to be, and being ordinary yet full-filling is perfectly fine goal to pursue, and it is arguably not easy still.
If you had read the book The Case Against Education by his George Mason University colleague, Bryan Caplan, then you might not be as surprised. That economics department seems to be a haven for libertarian thought, opera, classical music, and Renaissance paintings.
> But now let us follow the subsequent development of photography. What do we see? It has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or an electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, 'How beautiful.' The World is Beautiful - that is the title of the well-known picture book by Renger-Patzsch in which we see New Objectivity photography at its peak. It has succeeded in turning abject poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of enjoyment. For it is an economic function of photography to supply the masses, by modish processing, with matter which previously eluded mass consumption.
-- Walter Benjamin, lecture at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris, 27th April 1934
> The relatively new trouble with mass society is perhaps even more serious, but not because of the masses themselves, but because this society is essentially a consumers’ society where leisure time is used no longer for self-perfection or acquisition of more social status, but for more and more consumption and more and more entertainment… To believe that such a society will become more “cultured” as time goes on and education has done its work, is, I think, a fatal mistake. The point is that a consumers’ society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches.
The article made me think of the first one, then I thought of the second one and added it to explain what might be wrong with turning everything into an object of consumption. To be honest, I don't know a lot about the work of Walter Benjamin, maybe he also had more to say on this. But I do know that Hannah Arendt was on to a lot, and is as timely as ever. I love and recommend her more than I can say.
> When books or pictures in reproduction are thrown on the market cheaply and attain huge sales, this does not affect the nature of the objects in question. But their nature is affected when these objects themselves are changed rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies. This does not mean that culture spreads to the masses, but that culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.
> The result of this is not disintegration but decay, and those who actively promote it are not the Tin Pan Alley composers but a special kind of intellectuals, often well read and well informed, whose sole function is to organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects in order to persuade the masses that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and perhaps educational as well. There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
Culture evolves, and people increasingly question tradition for tradition's sake. Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world, the decision to have children or not has many contributing factors (economic, for one), and it's hard to be patriotic when every country has so many skeletons in the closet you'd think it's perpetually Halloween.
> Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world
I'd say both are orthogonal to each other. The religious view of the world explain the "why do we exist?" and the scientific view the "how do we exist?".
Religion lays claim to both the why and the how. The belief that "religion explains why and science explains how" is entirely modern. For most of human history (until secular science arose as a concept,) every aspect of the material world was seen as having been created and controlled by divine powers. Even when "natural laws" were discovered, those laws were divine in origin, and thus could conceivably be arbitrarily suspended or changed under divine will.
God created the heavens and the earth, created man from the dust of the earth, and woman from man's rib. There's no room in that for the big bang, modern cosmology or evolution - one cannot accept the latter while believing the former to be anything but prose, which would make it no longer religion. Thus religion can only coexist with science as long as religion isn't taken seriously.
Sure, if you define religion as literal interpretation of the Bible, stuck in the 9th century, while allowing science the full benefit of modern understanding.
> Even when "natural laws" were discovered, those laws were divine in origin, and thus could conceivably be arbitrarily suspended or changed under divine will.
We still don't know the origin of natural laws. It's very probable that such knowledge is unattainable.
> literal interpretation of the Bible, stuck in the 9th century
I have to speak up in defence of people who lived in the 9th century. In the Middle Ages, allegorical approaches to Bible interpretation were popular, and they weren't wedded to literal readings of it – e.g. Augustine of Hippo (4th/5th century) argued that the six days in Genesis 1 were not meant to be understood as six literal days – and Augustine's views on this were very influential in the centuries that followed. People sometimes seem to back-project 19th/20th/21st century American fundamentalism on to the Middle Ages, when that sort of wooden literalism was very alien to the mediaeval spirit.
An omniscient god can guide random processes as it wishes. Or it can create a system where the desired outcome will come to pass, without controlling every detail. Like how each molecule of water moves randomly and unpredictably, but the river flows downhill and to the ocean.
But then if Occam's razor tells you the random process[0] will manage just fine, you have to push God's guidance further away still. At some point you might ask yourself, if increasingly sophisticated phenomena keep turning out to be explainable without any reference to God, if anything science touches turns out to be devoid of God, then why should we expect to find Him?
--
[0] - an important realization is that evolution isn't a completely random process - it has state in form of environment and path dependence, both of which concentrate the probability mass.
And you overstate "explainable" - we are only able to explain things in terms of math and fundamental (well, the most fundamental found so far) physical laws. But we cannot explain the source of either of those - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics#Fou...
Anything “can” happen if you want to define that it can. The point is that the why in many religions can lead to people thinking humans have a special status, vs the how indicating there is no reason to assume that.
The problem comes when people make decisions based on god making the desired outcome to pass, such as “don’t worry about climate change, everything happens for the better and god will take care of us”. There are religions that believe their purpose is to breed and multiply, without regard to the parameters of the system, because god will take care of the problems.
Yes, religious belief can have adverse consequences - but that's a pragmatic argument on how to act, and has no bearing on the underlying truth of whether or not some god, however defined, exists. Or if there exists more than mechanistic, mathematical nature - after all, religion and belief in an omnipotent god are not synonymous.
If that's the case, then does it matter at all if a god exists? It becomes a purely self perpetuating, entirely abstract question like "does the future exist?"
Also, culturally, in the majority of the "Western" nations, religion and belief in an omnipotent god are synonymous. There are outliers and exceptions, but they have little to no sway on the zeitgeist.
What, in this instance, defines "Catholic" and "science"? Science relies more on disbelief than belief. Faith is anathema to the scientific method. You can disagree, but you should be able to make a cogent argument as to why what I just typed is incorrect.
I don't like the term belied when applied to science, but I still used since it was the term the parent comment used. In that context, it's faith in the scientific method, not blind faith in anything that science has to say
Yes, but faith in scientific method can be re-written as "I've seen the scientific method demonstrated in the past, and I will continue to see it demonstrated in the future, because it strictly follows rules that define it". It's a "faith" that things will continue to be tested to be false, and, if not found to be false, slightly more founded in the the way we understand and correlate the observable universe.
Those who define science as truth are being lazy with the definition. Science is a series of experiments to determine what doesn't seem to be true, so we can narrow down what might be true.
I'm not meaning to be oblique or argumentative, and I actually respect the right of anyone to believe anything they find to be personally gratifying to believe (otherwise science wouldn't progress). I just tend to get entrenched in these discussions because I find religion (and faith) so fascinating. I see "faith" as the birth of a hypothesis, but without experimentation, it's only a hypothesis.
You can be both Christian and do science without the science having to be "Christian science". They are different concerns dealing with different things. They don't have to conflict at all unless you try to make them conflict.
You can also, as a scientist, use both general relativity and quantum mechanics. They are also different concerns dealing with different things. They still conflict. At least one of them is, and possibly both are, wrong.
There is crossover in the Venn diagrams of religion and science. History has shown that as scientific knowledge increases, the area that religion has previously laid claim to decreases.
They definitely, and historically, conflict until you're left with religion laying claim to the area that is un-provable, and therefore, un-falsifiable. This is the root of the "god-of-the-gaps" fallacy, and seems to be usually only met with the "fine-tuned-universe" theory, which is, if you think about it, a circular argument at best, and self defeating at worst.
Because you it's really hard to believe in the miracles Jesus performed while also believing that physics is a worthwhile endeavor. Either the universe follows laws that we can discover, or you can turn water into wine. I realize that the catholic church does the necessary mental contortions to believe both, but to me miracles and science are contradictory.
Most religions purport to explain both, and science has little interest in the former, as it has traditionally been impossible to come up with falsifiable experiments as to "why do we exist".
This is, like your comment, taking strict definitions for both "why" and "how".
"why" we exist can have answers ranging from "we're the current latest bunch of mutants resulting from this whole evolution thing" all the way to "as self-realized, intelligent beings, we inevitably ask this question, and asking this question is the only predictable outcome of being intelligent and self-realized."
"how" we exist can be answered anywhere from "with a whole lot of luck" to "badly".
You need to specify what you mean by "why" and "how" for your distinction to have any debatable qualities.
> "why" we exist can have answers ranging from "we're the current latest bunch of mutants resulting from this whole evolution thing" all the way to "as self-realized, intelligent beings, we inevitably ask this question, and asking this question is the only predictable outcome of being intelligent and self-realized."
To this range of answers, I'd add "because God created us (because of reasons outside the scope of this answer)"
"how we exist" is how does the universe works, which is explored and explained by the various scientific fields
> To this range of answers, I'd add "because God created us (because of reasons outside the scope of this answer)"
Yes, but which god, and why does this explanation get any greater credence than Douglas Adams' writing "the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of The Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel."
The religions of the world disagree with each other on the "why", and none of them seem to be interested in demonstrating the veracity of their theory. This is why science generally ignores the "why". No-one has come up with a reasonable way to show, one way or another, which theory may be truer (or more aptly, falser) than any other, and therefore the question currently has no meaningful answer. If this changes, it will show that all, some, one, or none of the current religions are correct, but thousands of years of discussion haven't produced anything close to solving this problem, and this discussion has been going on since before Akhenaten.
So true. So many people I know and myself included are tired of the "rat race".
We don't want to keep working for nothing, we don't want to keep hoping for that next raise, we don't want to pretend to be smarter or cooler or better than we are. What a horrible way to live in the age of plenty. Maybe, we like cold pizza.
Bougey is a dirty word. We want to chill. We want fairness. Simplicity is where Happiness lies. There's nothing bad about that.
What is "grand" anyway? Those 500 people currently living that the rest 7+ billion should aspire to be? Nah. I'd rather be like my grandfather. Smiling even when I'm old.
It's hearkening back to a simpler time, and this gives me hope that more people might be "getting it"
Yes, I think it's actually out of vogue now, but a few years ago it was trendy to describe things as bougey:
bougey
(pronounced: boo-G) a condensed version of the word bourgeoise, used to refer to capitalists, the upper class, gaudiness, and profit-oriented viewpoints
Unfortunately the slang tends to refer to acts or items that are expensive, rather than, y'know, class relations or members of the French Third Estate.
Do you know Epicureanism?[1] Basically what you're describing.
> Epicurus believed that what he called "pleasure" (ἡδονή) was the greatest good, but that the way to attain such pleasure was to live modestly, to gain knowledge of the workings of the world, and to limit one's desires. This would lead one to attain a state of tranquility (ataraxia) and freedom from fear as well as an absence of bodily pain (aponia).
How are you defining simplicity? Are differentiating from easiness or convenience? I get the impression you are using the word simplicity differently than I would.
Not sure how the author decides what is ordinary and what is transcendent. According to him, there is nothing special about folks creating podcasts, but there is something special about a singer-songwriter. He does not say why.
Take https://www.patreon.com/sonicether who earns $50k a month creating shaders for Minecraft. That sounds mundane until you realise that he's probably enabling tens of thousands of people to create transcendent art from the comfort of their homes.
He doesn't think much of the artists creating comics either. Maybe he thinks only artists that display their work in galleries are "real" artists. Personally I think artists like Bill Watterson and Randall Munroe have done more to push the cultural zeitgeist than any artist in the last 30 years.
If you want to appreciate your fine classical works in a museum while listening to an orchestra and sipping your Pinot Noir, that's fine. But I think it's incorrect to presume to know what "real" culture is and labeling everything else "ordinary".
> Not sure how the author decides what is ordinary and what is transcendent.
This. Why should I allow anyone to define what kinds of art should I find transcendent and, worse, which kinds of art are non-transcendent?
This article is weird and full of stereotypes; it's written from the point as if art was easily and objectively classifiable. No, art is not classifiable like that, and something that one man calls everyday trash can be eye-opening and mind-blowing to another. This fact alone disproves the main assumption that this article is based on, and breaks the point of the whole article for me.
Art’s subjectivity has been debated since forever. It’s not a fact. That being said, I also didn’t enjoy the point of view in the article very much and I mostly agree with your sentiment.
>This. Why should I allow anyone to define what kinds of art should I find transcendent and, worse, which kinds of art are non-transcendent?
Because else you're in an endless loop, where you define what you like by what you like.
It is (or, perhaps, it has been) generally understood, that being schooled into things, learning about them, their history, aesthetic rivalries and ideas abotu them, and appreciating the cultured opinions of people who have studied them more, helps one appreciate finer things and cultivate their preferences.
The alternative, "because I like it", sounds like a regression to childhood.
You misunderstood my question. I asked, "Why should I allow anyone to define what kinds of art should I find transcendent and, worse, which kinds of art are non-transcendent?", with a stress on the "I".
I find it worthwhile to listen to people who describe what touches them and what they are indifferent to. However, the tone of the article describes the "mundane" and the "extraordinary" from an objectivesque point of view, which I personally find silly due to the fact that art is an inherently subjective experience.
>However, the tone of the article describes the "mundane" and the "extraordinary" from an objectivesque point of view, which I personally find silly due to the fact that art is an inherently subjective experience.
I don't think that's settled. For that matter, I don't think that's true.
Those who are aspirational in their appreciation of art do tend to gravitate towards the same shit. The first time you're exposed to a cliche it could very well be mind blowing, but after getting through a wide enough body of work you start recognize the common patterns and eventually get sick of the cliches and you appreciate the stuff out there that actually broke ground, and moved the needle a bit.
I've only heard the 'art is subjective' defense from people with uncultivated tastes. Myself, I don't know much about chemistry, and something I don't do is wander into conversations with chemists and expect my unfounded opinion to be anything other than a nuisance to them. When it comes to art, for some reason, people who haven't done their homework nonetheless expect their opinion to matter.
It is my honest, non-facetious opinion that Randall Munroe ought to be in the very serious running for the Nobel Literature Prize. His oeuvre is wide-ranching, deep, consistent, informative, relevant, thought-provoking, stylistically groundbreaking, and extensively quoted by all sorts of highly influential people the world over.
That looks like overly simplistic explanation. Literature Nobel Prize are usually given when someone's body of work stands the test of time although Lit. Nobel Prize has more than it's share of controversies.
>This article is textbook bourgeois virtue signalling - also known as "snobbery."
Or what once was known as "refinement". It's not like high/low culture is some kind of settled issue, and everybody agrees that it's "all the same"...
>The kind of art he supports already gets plenty of funding. No one seriously expects MOMA or the Met Opera to go bust any time soon.
Isn't that part of the author's point? In that the MOMA or Met Opera's funding are quite distinct from what the masses fund (and from what the masses consume). Not to mention that museums shouldn't be where the culture is consumed, that's where already established culture goes to die.
It’s good to keep in mind that the same classes of people who praise “transcendent art” today and criticize “ordinary art” would have done the exact same thing if they had been contemporaries of the transcendent artists they now adulate so much. Very few people found any interest in the works of Van Gogh or Monet while they were making them.
100 years from now, this guy’s socio-economical equivalents will criticize whatever is popular then while revering the lost transcendent beauty of Minecraft shaders ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Just let people enjoy things. I’ve also found that making things yourself is much more rewarding than telling people that they shouldn’t enjoy what they enjoy.
> It is between those who believe in aspiring to something greater and those who do not. (...) something greater and grander than everyday life.
So "transcendent" would mean "concerning things that are not common encounters in daily life".
What they do not properly motivate, in my opinion, is why that would be better ("high") than focusing on ordinary life. I wonder if they're also turned off by Impressionism?
> Not sure how the author decides what is ordinary and what is transcendent
I didn’t find the author criticism the artists as much as their subject matter. Talking about Elon Musk or nuclear technology or philosophy is transcendent. Talking about the everyday life of a Charleston crab fisher is ordinary.
I like both! But I agree that pop culture fetishises the latter while looking down on the former. (It reminds of of revolutionary France, dialled down orders of magnitude.) I also agree that a healthy culture embraces both.
Virtue signalling in popular culture increasingly looks down on transcendent subjects as out of touch. It’s an interesting recapitulation of classical virtue signalling, e.g. eschewing rock for the opera.
Rather than rock or opera, give me a rock opera. The most interesting art comes from mixing things up. In that sense, Youtube is a massive driver of art today, with its many mash-ups and other crazy ideas that would never have been allowed by more traditional art gatekeepers. Of course it's mixed in with lots of pulp, but there's plenty of art on Youtube that's far more transcendental than yet another ballet.
> Not sure how the author decides what is ordinary and what is transcendent
I think the author gives us a hint about what is ordinary:
"They tend not to be representations of noble ambition, or of a classical or romantic vision of how human beings might achieve greatness."
As an aside and don't take this personally - perhaps your question was actually "I am sure what they mean but I'm trying to disagree" ? Or perhaps it's "I wouldn't be able to make the decision if I had to do it"? I never know about this use of language. It's like asking "I don't understand why someone would vote for X" when the question is really about them actually understanding and wanting to state ones opposition to it? That type of question is not asking the reader "help me understand", right? It's confusing to me.
I don't think there is a very serious theory behind this text, it feels more like someone complaining that what they find on patreon wouldn't belong in their museum of art.
Perhaps because minecraft shaders belong more in the realm of some guy making stools and chairs at his garden shed, and not in the realm of deep aspirational art?
This kind of confusion is constantly created when the underlying unstated assumption is we all share the same needs.
We don't.
We spend huge amounts of energy and time trying to convince each other that our needs are whats best for everyone else.
In reality, people and their needs are on as wide a spectrum, as the needs of a cactus and a banyan tree. And it doesn't end there, those needs change with time and context.
I think you have this the wrong way around. The article is undoubtedly correct to my mind. The most popular content creators are basically doing nothing. Looking at the truly huge Youtubers, people on Patreon, Instagrammers, streamers etc it is clear that mundanity with high production values is what people want. This is non-art served up with the orchestra and vino that you are criticising as bourgeois. Reality TV gets it wrong with exotic locales, tattooed narcissists and manufactured drama, that's too much actually. People seemingly just want a nicer, sanitised version of their own lives served up to them. They will swallow this all day every day.
The saving grace I think are podcasts. There is some authentic intellectual stuff going on there, it's a renaissance medium that humanises debate and invites nuance and complexity.
I agree with some of your points. Podcasts have come a long way and if one takes a bit of time and is open to dialling down the filters there is lot of interesting conversations happening.
> "Looking at the truly huge Youtubers, people on Patreon, Instagrammers, streamers etc it is clear that mundanity with high production values is what people want."
How about just looking at Hollywood box office numbers? A Michael Bay explosion spectacle makes way more money than some insightful art house movie dealing with complex issues.
>He doesn't think much of the artists creating comics either. Maybe he thinks only artists that display their work in galleries are "real" artists. Personally I think artists like Bill Watterson and Randall Munroe have done more to push the cultural zeitgeist than any artist in the last 30 years.
This information could also help make the author's point -- depending on the quality of said "cultural zeitgeist".
It is rather convenient the author defines "mundane" as things he doesn't like and "grand" as things he does like. It sounds like he's merely upset that a majority of patrons on patreon don't share his tastes.
This, so much. I for one find the vast majority of so-called "high art" and "high culture" to be frankly depressing and off-putting, rather than "grand" or "transcendent" in any way. In the best of cases this is somewhat offset by the HNish intellectual interest and curiosity one can take in the stuff (and some variant of this is an often-cited point that's supposed to demonstrate the superiority of "high" culture) but all things considered, I'd rather explore the hidden intellectual interest of things that are usually dismissed as mundane, "middlebrow" or even "lowbrow".
I wouldn't interpret comparing one generation to a previous generation but against itself as it grows older. (as in, most people earn more money and become more able to donate money as they get older)
Those are some pretty -- to use the author's word -- transcendent conclusions to draw from a top 50 Patreon list.
Even if you were assuming the patrons were all American (obviously false) the most popular creator would have fewer than 1 in 10,000 people subscribing.
Patreon is an obscure way to fund yourself that a very small number of people make their living from, it's not a bellwether for the American heart.
I don't know what high brow things the author finds missing from the list that would change his conclusion, but this seems very much like a conclusion looking for scant evidence for to justify something to write. That page would have been better left blank.
A recent survey of American values indicates that patriotism, belief in God and having children all rate much lower than they did 20 years ago.
Gosh, one wonders what could have happened? Maybe two decades of pointless soul-rotting stupid wars, all supported by the most patriotic and pious among us? That has certainly sapped this correspondent's patriotism. (His piety, though, something else sapped that...) Next you'll be telling us that trigger-happy crowd-murders are more common, and we'll think of all the wedding parties, funerals, open markets, etc. we've incinerated in the Middle East. It's as if chickens... come home to roost!
TFA is definitely the most pedestrian, limp, effort-free deposit one has ever read from Cowen.
> Maybe twenty years of pointless soul-rotting stupid wars
> Next you'll be telling us that trigger-happy crowd-murders are more common
> It's as if chickens... come home to roost!
I'm a bit confused, are you of the mind that there is some relation between mass-shooters and the wars in the Middle East? Or just those wars are why people feel less positive about patriotism?
I've been around long enough to have seen karma in action. If I pay enough attention, I often find that "karma" is another name for "obvious consequences".
The things that we're encouraged to blame for these mass murders: guns, crazy people, Republicans, white supremacists, etc. we've always had in USA. What has changed? I submit that over time we've been subjected to ever-increasing levels of war-media conditioning. We're constantly encouraged to fear, to hate, to destroy. Right now we're hating on Iranians and Venezuelans, with plenty of leftover hatred for Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Russians, Chinese, etc. The idea is that we'll funnel that insanity into voting for, or at least tolerating, increased payments to armaments manufacturers, and the contrived wars necessary to "justify" same. Some people just aren't mentally pliable enough to focus on the desired end goal. If you tell them often enough to fear and kill, eventually that's what they'll do. Maybe they'll try to kill mostly "others" on their killing sprees, but maybe they're such loners that anyone human parses as "other" to them.
It's not a coincidence that the "first" one of these things took place in 1966. The military-media-industrial complex was pulling out all the stops on their first big project since Korea.
Yes, also, obviously, the wars have killed patriotism among thinking people. Again, though, it hasn't just been the wars, but also the industrial-strength war-media war conditioning that was necessary to bring them about.
There is a relationship: they're both either directly caused by or indirectly fomented by the same group of people ("patriotic, pious", and often racist right-wingers).
He mentions Kurzgesagt as a positive example - but ignores other educational channels like CGP Grey, CrashCourse and ContraPoints. - There's also many more highly educational podcasts and youtube channels that are very popular.
Entertainment has shifted from TV to the internet in recent years, and as it grew more popular it also grew more mundane. - But looking at TV entertainment of previous decades, I think it is hard to claim there has been a reduction in quality.
Political education is education even if it's also propaganda (in the sense of information designed to persuade). A large number of political YouTube channels across the political spectrum could be called educational.
No, it's something like political satire or political entertainment. If the category education should mean anything then it certainly does not include a man pretending to be a woman pushing political agendas in some completely overblown and sexualized manner. This is ridiculous.
I don't think that examining the breakdown of one funding source is indicative of a shift in culture. Especially not a funding source like Patreon. Patreon is especially suited for funding ongoing efforts or something that has a recurring payoff (weekly podcasts, YouTube videos, or regular releases of comics). That lends itself to "mundane" things as the author puts it. If you want to create a magnum opus you need to raise funds for a single big effort, so something like Kickstarter is a lot more appropriate. I'm sure if the author perused Kickstarter they would find many "grand" ideas. There is also traditional funding for established creators looking to do something grand. If you are a director looking to create the masterpiece to cap your career, chances are that you're getting a movie studio to pay for it based on your previous successes. The same goes for successful artists in most fields that can use their reputation to fund something grand. Looking at Patreon only gives you a single piece of the puzzle.
It's amusing that the only sign of a "culture war" here is the author's tendentious carping about, of all things, the Patreon Top 50 list. Why?
Very possibly, if you are doing things that random economics professors consider "transcendent", you are probably extremely well served by the far more lucrative network of grants and funding that exists outside Patreon. He nods briefly to this idea before rejecting it and just plain making some shit up:
"Maybe, but there is another possibility: that Patreon is the tip of an ever-growing iceberg."
The article identifies a culture war between the ordinary and the transcendent, and sees in the Patreon top 50 that the ordinary has won, but it doesn't do a great job of how it determines how it classifies the entries.
Apparently a political podcast is ordinary, things that are NSFW or dealing with history are ordinary, and photos of New Yorkers are ordinary. The only things it considers transcendent are educational videos and Amanda Palmer.
As examples of what he means by transcendent, he mentions ancient Greeks, Christianity, Enlightenment, classical music, the US Constitution and scientific revolutions.
But honestly, hasn't the ordinary always outnumbered the transcendent? There first needs to be an 'ordinary' to transcend. Even during the height of enlightenment, the world was filled with the ordinary. We remember the transcendent because it is what changes things.
Especially as there are creators like 3blue1brown on that list. The videos 3blue1brown does should certainly be considered transcendent in the classical sense, those are easily the highest quality math education videos I've ever seen. The linear algebra series definitely expanded my appreciation for the subject in a way no textbook has ever done.
Sure, there is crap like MxR Mods on the list, but there is also stuff like crash course & clickspring. I don't know if I'd call clickspring's videos themselves art, but what he is producing in his shop is certainly art and the opportunity to view the process is just magnificent; this is certainly a channel that shows how great online video can be.
And Contrapoints; while very much political, does an excellent job of engaging with topics much more deeply than what one normally reads in publications like Bloomberg. I honestly found reading this list encouraging; most of the top 50 creators definitely deserve that place and I'm glad that the people benefiting most from Patreon deserve it. Aside from MxR, he's a cancer on the Bethesda modding scene.
For those who work there - I am curious, I occasionally come across complaints online that much of Silicon Valley and tech companies have a large "dirtbag left" (not my term, I am referencing what is written in the article) contingent of employees, who actively "cleanse" their ranks of all right-leaning employees.
I am inclined to believe this because of past stories involving the Mozilla CEO and the Occulus CEO and James Damore all being fired for basically not having heterodox views.
From the comments that I read across various forum websites whenever this topic comes up, the takeaway seems to be a chilling effect POV of "if you're right-leaning, make sure nobody finds out, and just do your job".
Of course it's very difficult to form an opinion sitting in another country based on what you read on the internet, so I was curious to know how true it is.
America is so far right of center, many of the so called dirt bag left are actually center right.
However, in my experience extreme right wing social conservatives can be pretty good at self-cleansing by constantly sharing their amazing opinions on superior races, the problem with 'those people' and my favorite, informing people that they are living in sin.
In the present tense the problem of bigotry seems universal regardless of political affiliation. It is just the category of people who are discriminated against, that changes, depending on the offending party's preferences
"Alas [...] Eight of the top 50 are marked “NSFW” (not safe for work)." This is straight 19th century stuff. I think it's safe to say that western art lost its "safe for work" status like 200 years ago. I suggest the author should grow up and get an education..
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[ 158 ms ] story [ 2711 ms ] threadBut let's be honest. The idea of human has mission to achieve greatness by itself is, just a belief. Human life can be any form it needs to be, if the owner him/herself desires so. And the in the age of internet, it is easy to at least observe afar what your desired life would be like by watching others do it. I'd argue people are much aware and resourceful to decide what he/she wants to be, and being ordinary yet full-filling is perfectly fine goal to pursue, and it is arguably not easy still.
When looked to see the name of the author, I was very surprised to see economist Tyler Cowen
Still I don't see what beef a libertarian economist should have with voluntary donations to "ordinary" causes.
-- Walter Benjamin, lecture at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris, 27th April 1934
> The relatively new trouble with mass society is perhaps even more serious, but not because of the masses themselves, but because this society is essentially a consumers’ society where leisure time is used no longer for self-perfection or acquisition of more social status, but for more and more consumption and more and more entertainment… To believe that such a society will become more “cultured” as time goes on and education has done its work, is, I think, a fatal mistake. The point is that a consumers’ society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Between Past and Future"
> When books or pictures in reproduction are thrown on the market cheaply and attain huge sales, this does not affect the nature of the objects in question. But their nature is affected when these objects themselves are changed rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies. This does not mean that culture spreads to the masses, but that culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.
> The result of this is not disintegration but decay, and those who actively promote it are not the Tin Pan Alley composers but a special kind of intellectuals, often well read and well informed, whose sole function is to organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects in order to persuade the masses that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and perhaps educational as well. There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture - Its Social and Its Political Significance", http://www.celinecondorelli.eu/files/arendtcrisisinculture_v...
No, it's not.
> it's hard to be patriotic when every country has so many skeletons in the closet you'd think it's perpetually Halloween
When did nations not have skeletons in their closets?
I'd say both are orthogonal to each other. The religious view of the world explain the "why do we exist?" and the scientific view the "how do we exist?".
God created the heavens and the earth, created man from the dust of the earth, and woman from man's rib. There's no room in that for the big bang, modern cosmology or evolution - one cannot accept the latter while believing the former to be anything but prose, which would make it no longer religion. Thus religion can only coexist with science as long as religion isn't taken seriously.
For example, you probably didn't have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinozism in mind when you said religion.
> Even when "natural laws" were discovered, those laws were divine in origin, and thus could conceivably be arbitrarily suspended or changed under divine will.
We still don't know the origin of natural laws. It's very probable that such knowledge is unattainable.
I have to speak up in defence of people who lived in the 9th century. In the Middle Ages, allegorical approaches to Bible interpretation were popular, and they weren't wedded to literal readings of it – e.g. Augustine of Hippo (4th/5th century) argued that the six days in Genesis 1 were not meant to be understood as six literal days – and Augustine's views on this were very influential in the centuries that followed. People sometimes seem to back-project 19th/20th/21st century American fundamentalism on to the Middle Ages, when that sort of wooden literalism was very alien to the mediaeval spirit.
Easiest example is “god made people this way” vs “people are the result of random processes that came about due to happenstance”.
--
[0] - an important realization is that evolution isn't a completely random process - it has state in form of environment and path dependence, both of which concentrate the probability mass.
I don't think science can be used to find any proof of the existence of God
Can anything be used to provide any proof of the existence of God? If not, why continue to argue for the existence of God?
And you overstate "explainable" - we are only able to explain things in terms of math and fundamental (well, the most fundamental found so far) physical laws. But we cannot explain the source of either of those - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics#Fou...
The problem comes when people make decisions based on god making the desired outcome to pass, such as “don’t worry about climate change, everything happens for the better and god will take care of us”. There are religions that believe their purpose is to breed and multiply, without regard to the parameters of the system, because god will take care of the problems.
Also, culturally, in the majority of the "Western" nations, religion and belief in an omnipotent god are synonymous. There are outliers and exceptions, but they have little to no sway on the zeitgeist.
Those who define science as truth are being lazy with the definition. Science is a series of experiments to determine what doesn't seem to be true, so we can narrow down what might be true.
I'm not meaning to be oblique or argumentative, and I actually respect the right of anyone to believe anything they find to be personally gratifying to believe (otherwise science wouldn't progress). I just tend to get entrenched in these discussions because I find religion (and faith) so fascinating. I see "faith" as the birth of a hypothesis, but without experimentation, it's only a hypothesis.
There is crossover in the Venn diagrams of religion and science. History has shown that as scientific knowledge increases, the area that religion has previously laid claim to decreases.
They definitely, and historically, conflict until you're left with religion laying claim to the area that is un-provable, and therefore, un-falsifiable. This is the root of the "god-of-the-gaps" fallacy, and seems to be usually only met with the "fine-tuned-universe" theory, which is, if you think about it, a circular argument at best, and self defeating at worst.
This is, like your comment, taking strict definitions for both "why" and "how".
"why" we exist can have answers ranging from "we're the current latest bunch of mutants resulting from this whole evolution thing" all the way to "as self-realized, intelligent beings, we inevitably ask this question, and asking this question is the only predictable outcome of being intelligent and self-realized."
"how" we exist can be answered anywhere from "with a whole lot of luck" to "badly".
You need to specify what you mean by "why" and "how" for your distinction to have any debatable qualities.
To this range of answers, I'd add "because God created us (because of reasons outside the scope of this answer)"
"how we exist" is how does the universe works, which is explored and explained by the various scientific fields
Yes, but which god, and why does this explanation get any greater credence than Douglas Adams' writing "the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of The Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel."
The religions of the world disagree with each other on the "why", and none of them seem to be interested in demonstrating the veracity of their theory. This is why science generally ignores the "why". No-one has come up with a reasonable way to show, one way or another, which theory may be truer (or more aptly, falser) than any other, and therefore the question currently has no meaningful answer. If this changes, it will show that all, some, one, or none of the current religions are correct, but thousands of years of discussion haven't produced anything close to solving this problem, and this discussion has been going on since before Akhenaten.
We don't want to keep working for nothing, we don't want to keep hoping for that next raise, we don't want to pretend to be smarter or cooler or better than we are. What a horrible way to live in the age of plenty. Maybe, we like cold pizza.
Bougey is a dirty word. We want to chill. We want fairness. Simplicity is where Happiness lies. There's nothing bad about that.
What is "grand" anyway? Those 500 people currently living that the rest 7+ billion should aspire to be? Nah. I'd rather be like my grandfather. Smiling even when I'm old.
It's hearkening back to a simpler time, and this gives me hope that more people might be "getting it"
edit: typos
Is this US slang?
bougey
(pronounced: boo-G) a condensed version of the word bourgeoise, used to refer to capitalists, the upper class, gaudiness, and profit-oriented viewpoints
http://bougey.urbanup.com/4157958
> Epicurus believed that what he called "pleasure" (ἡδονή) was the greatest good, but that the way to attain such pleasure was to live modestly, to gain knowledge of the workings of the world, and to limit one's desires. This would lead one to attain a state of tranquility (ataraxia) and freedom from fear as well as an absence of bodily pain (aponia).
It's a good way to live.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism
Take https://www.patreon.com/sonicether who earns $50k a month creating shaders for Minecraft. That sounds mundane until you realise that he's probably enabling tens of thousands of people to create transcendent art from the comfort of their homes.
He doesn't think much of the artists creating comics either. Maybe he thinks only artists that display their work in galleries are "real" artists. Personally I think artists like Bill Watterson and Randall Munroe have done more to push the cultural zeitgeist than any artist in the last 30 years.
If you want to appreciate your fine classical works in a museum while listening to an orchestra and sipping your Pinot Noir, that's fine. But I think it's incorrect to presume to know what "real" culture is and labeling everything else "ordinary".
This. Why should I allow anyone to define what kinds of art should I find transcendent and, worse, which kinds of art are non-transcendent?
This article is weird and full of stereotypes; it's written from the point as if art was easily and objectively classifiable. No, art is not classifiable like that, and something that one man calls everyday trash can be eye-opening and mind-blowing to another. This fact alone disproves the main assumption that this article is based on, and breaks the point of the whole article for me.
Because else you're in an endless loop, where you define what you like by what you like.
It is (or, perhaps, it has been) generally understood, that being schooled into things, learning about them, their history, aesthetic rivalries and ideas abotu them, and appreciating the cultured opinions of people who have studied them more, helps one appreciate finer things and cultivate their preferences.
The alternative, "because I like it", sounds like a regression to childhood.
I find it worthwhile to listen to people who describe what touches them and what they are indifferent to. However, the tone of the article describes the "mundane" and the "extraordinary" from an objectivesque point of view, which I personally find silly due to the fact that art is an inherently subjective experience.
I don't think that's settled. For that matter, I don't think that's true.
Like how there’s good code and shit code.
I've only heard the 'art is subjective' defense from people with uncultivated tastes. Myself, I don't know much about chemistry, and something I don't do is wander into conversations with chemists and expect my unfounded opinion to be anything other than a nuisance to them. When it comes to art, for some reason, people who haven't done their homework nonetheless expect their opinion to matter.
Because you need to wait for the generation who enjoyed his work during collage to be the political / social elite.
The kind of art he supports already gets plenty of funding. No one seriously expects MOMA or the Met Opera to go bust any time soon.
Patreon is a successful alternative for relatively small-scale public-supported art. Of course it reflects public tastes. That's what it's for.
Or what once was known as "refinement". It's not like high/low culture is some kind of settled issue, and everybody agrees that it's "all the same"...
>The kind of art he supports already gets plenty of funding. No one seriously expects MOMA or the Met Opera to go bust any time soon.
Isn't that part of the author's point? In that the MOMA or Met Opera's funding are quite distinct from what the masses fund (and from what the masses consume). Not to mention that museums shouldn't be where the culture is consumed, that's where already established culture goes to die.
100 years from now, this guy’s socio-economical equivalents will criticize whatever is popular then while revering the lost transcendent beauty of Minecraft shaders ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Just let people enjoy things. I’ve also found that making things yourself is much more rewarding than telling people that they shouldn’t enjoy what they enjoy.
> It is between those who believe in aspiring to something greater and those who do not. (...) something greater and grander than everyday life.
So "transcendent" would mean "concerning things that are not common encounters in daily life".
What they do not properly motivate, in my opinion, is why that would be better ("high") than focusing on ordinary life. I wonder if they're also turned off by Impressionism?
I didn’t find the author criticism the artists as much as their subject matter. Talking about Elon Musk or nuclear technology or philosophy is transcendent. Talking about the everyday life of a Charleston crab fisher is ordinary.
I like both! But I agree that pop culture fetishises the latter while looking down on the former. (It reminds of of revolutionary France, dialled down orders of magnitude.) I also agree that a healthy culture embraces both.
Virtue signalling in popular culture increasingly looks down on transcendent subjects as out of touch. It’s an interesting recapitulation of classical virtue signalling, e.g. eschewing rock for the opera.
I think the author gives us a hint about what is ordinary:
"They tend not to be representations of noble ambition, or of a classical or romantic vision of how human beings might achieve greatness."
As an aside and don't take this personally - perhaps your question was actually "I am sure what they mean but I'm trying to disagree" ? Or perhaps it's "I wouldn't be able to make the decision if I had to do it"? I never know about this use of language. It's like asking "I don't understand why someone would vote for X" when the question is really about them actually understanding and wanting to state ones opposition to it? That type of question is not asking the reader "help me understand", right? It's confusing to me.
> a classical or romantic vision of how human beings might achieve greatness
How does a singer-songwriter provide this but not the minecraft shader guy? Is there something I'm missing?
We don't.
We spend huge amounts of energy and time trying to convince each other that our needs are whats best for everyone else.
In reality, people and their needs are on as wide a spectrum, as the needs of a cactus and a banyan tree. And it doesn't end there, those needs change with time and context.
The saving grace I think are podcasts. There is some authentic intellectual stuff going on there, it's a renaissance medium that humanises debate and invites nuance and complexity.
How about just looking at Hollywood box office numbers? A Michael Bay explosion spectacle makes way more money than some insightful art house movie dealing with complex issues.
This information could also help make the author's point -- depending on the quality of said "cultural zeitgeist".
Is this correct? My understanding was today's youth in the U.S are taking on more debt than ever.
Perhaps these "ordinary ambitions" have become something unachievable by so many people, that it can highlight the relativity of the statement itself?
Starting "culture wars" about mundane shit isn't my definition of extraordinary either. If so, Burger King vs. McDonalds could be a culture war.
But compare that content to former reality TV and I can only see improvement everywhere.
On the other hand, I don't mind the loss of splendor, pomp and royal weddings. I do like architecture and jazz though.
But yes, I would prefer to have an "ordinary" house first instead of some abstract effort to build the pyramids 2.0. Does the author work for a bank?
Even if you were assuming the patrons were all American (obviously false) the most popular creator would have fewer than 1 in 10,000 people subscribing.
Patreon is an obscure way to fund yourself that a very small number of people make their living from, it's not a bellwether for the American heart.
I don't know what high brow things the author finds missing from the list that would change his conclusion, but this seems very much like a conclusion looking for scant evidence for to justify something to write. That page would have been better left blank.
Gosh, one wonders what could have happened? Maybe two decades of pointless soul-rotting stupid wars, all supported by the most patriotic and pious among us? That has certainly sapped this correspondent's patriotism. (His piety, though, something else sapped that...) Next you'll be telling us that trigger-happy crowd-murders are more common, and we'll think of all the wedding parties, funerals, open markets, etc. we've incinerated in the Middle East. It's as if chickens... come home to roost!
TFA is definitely the most pedestrian, limp, effort-free deposit one has ever read from Cowen.
> Next you'll be telling us that trigger-happy crowd-murders are more common
> It's as if chickens... come home to roost!
I'm a bit confused, are you of the mind that there is some relation between mass-shooters and the wars in the Middle East? Or just those wars are why people feel less positive about patriotism?
The things that we're encouraged to blame for these mass murders: guns, crazy people, Republicans, white supremacists, etc. we've always had in USA. What has changed? I submit that over time we've been subjected to ever-increasing levels of war-media conditioning. We're constantly encouraged to fear, to hate, to destroy. Right now we're hating on Iranians and Venezuelans, with plenty of leftover hatred for Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Russians, Chinese, etc. The idea is that we'll funnel that insanity into voting for, or at least tolerating, increased payments to armaments manufacturers, and the contrived wars necessary to "justify" same. Some people just aren't mentally pliable enough to focus on the desired end goal. If you tell them often enough to fear and kill, eventually that's what they'll do. Maybe they'll try to kill mostly "others" on their killing sprees, but maybe they're such loners that anyone human parses as "other" to them.
It's not a coincidence that the "first" one of these things took place in 1966. The military-media-industrial complex was pulling out all the stops on their first big project since Korea.
Yes, also, obviously, the wars have killed patriotism among thinking people. Again, though, it hasn't just been the wars, but also the industrial-strength war-media war conditioning that was necessary to bring them about.
Two? It's hardly a new development. Vietnam was just as pointless and soul-rotting.
Entertainment has shifted from TV to the internet in recent years, and as it grew more popular it also grew more mundane. - But looking at TV entertainment of previous decades, I think it is hard to claim there has been a reduction in quality.
Very possibly, if you are doing things that random economics professors consider "transcendent", you are probably extremely well served by the far more lucrative network of grants and funding that exists outside Patreon. He nods briefly to this idea before rejecting it and just plain making some shit up:
"Maybe, but there is another possibility: that Patreon is the tip of an ever-growing iceberg."
Awful.
Apparently a political podcast is ordinary, things that are NSFW or dealing with history are ordinary, and photos of New Yorkers are ordinary. The only things it considers transcendent are educational videos and Amanda Palmer.
As examples of what he means by transcendent, he mentions ancient Greeks, Christianity, Enlightenment, classical music, the US Constitution and scientific revolutions.
But honestly, hasn't the ordinary always outnumbered the transcendent? There first needs to be an 'ordinary' to transcend. Even during the height of enlightenment, the world was filled with the ordinary. We remember the transcendent because it is what changes things.
Sure, there is crap like MxR Mods on the list, but there is also stuff like crash course & clickspring. I don't know if I'd call clickspring's videos themselves art, but what he is producing in his shop is certainly art and the opportunity to view the process is just magnificent; this is certainly a channel that shows how great online video can be.
And Contrapoints; while very much political, does an excellent job of engaging with topics much more deeply than what one normally reads in publications like Bloomberg. I honestly found reading this list encouraging; most of the top 50 creators definitely deserve that place and I'm glad that the people benefiting most from Patreon deserve it. Aside from MxR, he's a cancer on the Bethesda modding scene.
I am inclined to believe this because of past stories involving the Mozilla CEO and the Occulus CEO and James Damore all being fired for basically not having heterodox views.
From the comments that I read across various forum websites whenever this topic comes up, the takeaway seems to be a chilling effect POV of "if you're right-leaning, make sure nobody finds out, and just do your job".
Of course it's very difficult to form an opinion sitting in another country based on what you read on the internet, so I was curious to know how true it is.
However, in my experience extreme right wing social conservatives can be pretty good at self-cleansing by constantly sharing their amazing opinions on superior races, the problem with 'those people' and my favorite, informing people that they are living in sin.
Also this: "As today’s young become wealthier [...]" . Where's the evidence fit this assertion?