Why aren't people interested in the arts and culture anymore?

That /pol/ poster last night has made me rethink the validity of some opinions here

Which one? Thread?

>Have you even been to a large cities' downtown dude there are literally too many artists right now.

Thats the exact problem we're talking about though, there's plenty of artists exactly BECAUSE there is no audiences for art. When it doesn't matter if no one actually engages with your work to legitimize your title then it becomes simple for any loser to claim to be an artist.

Thank you, captain reddit

Decadence.
Culture and art had died in Rome by the 3rd century.
Wherever highly demanding art is present; prosperity is present. Whenever art has been simplistic and lousy; societal collapse occurs.

>Dude go back to talking about Star Wars and Drumpf trying to understand things is not cool

i was doing shit all late night, what was the thread?

So let's ignore the really good television being produced right now. (If you don't think SOME tv is art i can't help you)

Oh, and there've been plenty of art-house movies recently with America's literally booming indie film indutsry. - Baumbacher, Girwig etc.

OK and let's forget poets and performance artists like Tan Lin (personal favorite, you could try google to find your own) who make a fine living right now and draw huge crowds.

You literally just haven't looked hard enough if you think good art isn't being produced right now, and that it isn't being supported.

What you're all really complaining about is your inability to do art probably because you're internally conflicted about your relationships to women.

I'd imagine crap like SMBC has something to with it.

>So let's ignore the really good television being produced right now.

Like what? Last properly great series was Mad Men and that ended like four years ago.
HBO was the great experiment but its over, a formula is down and its all Netflix pulp from here

>Some television is art
a busted one

t. /pol/ poster

Nathan for You is basically funny performance art.

Transparent was great despite what /pol/ and the /pol/ influenced decided before watching.

Bojack Horseman is great.

The list could be huge this is just what I like offhand.

I liked Transparent (now cancelled by the way) but come on none of that shit approaches art in the way we're talking about it

>has went
fucking americans

>really good television
hahahahahahahahahahhahahahaha

kill yourself

Well now you're just going to hit me with your narrow ass definition of art.

But okay so we're talking about Fine-art? Go back to poets like Christian Bok, Claudia Rankine,Tan Lin, critics like Marjorie Perloff. Fiction writers like Fleur Jaeggy, Teju Cole.

Literally just start looking and not being dismissive just because some new art is not "mah classics."

im gonna go vomit and then eat my breakfast, you sud smash your fingers in a steel door for the next hour

You're missing the point, I'm obviously talking quality not category you fucking brainlet. Every figure you mentioned there is pure garbage

>Go back to poets like Christian Bok, Claudia Rankine,Tan Lin, critics like Marjorie Perloff. Fiction writers like Fleur Jaeggy, Teju Cole.

Holyfuck are these real names? Literature has become such a joke

nah

DUDE
NAMES

Nominative determanism is a real thing. No one called fucking Fleur Jaeggy or Marjorie Perloff are going to have thoughts worth knowing.
Then there's the obvious non-whites which is a whole other story

>nominative determinism is a real thing
A real stupid thing and you are a faggot

>I AM VERY SILLY

Do the math, if a writer sells books under the name 'Fleur Jaeggy' its because every single person that bought the book came across her name on the cover and thought "This is a book for me!"
I'm sure as fuck not reading whatever is recommended by those pseud piss-streaks

what the fuck means that picture???

unwise evaluation, the poster you’re replying to is correct in every sense

warosu.org/lit/thread/S10402371
kek it was a Peterson thread to

nice 'math', I am ever so trolled

Not an argument

not an argument

Oh jeez I just realized it's you guys who aren't interested in culture.

Dismissing writers because they have names you haven't seen before is what a 3rd grader does. Fleur Jaeggy is fucking swiss she has an swiss name jesus christ.

t. sam

I guarantee even in Switzerland its a dumbass name. I wouldn't be dismissing these goobers so superficially if it wasn't superficial standards that led to them being popular to begin with

t. Russel Jimmy

I also get the STRANGE sense ya'll don't read women because they're women, a nigerian like Teju Cole because he's black.

I guess you've been brainwashed enough to think that holding the ideology of a dumbass 18th century peasant is enlightened.

Your brain is clogged with contradictions you can't even fully explain. sad

Look up statistical outliers and long tails. White men are several degrees of power more likely to be capable writers than women or niggers. Its rough but a fact of life.
I'm simply being efficient with my time

>Your brain is clogged with contradictions

Name one in clear predicate logic, put your money where your mouth is nigger

It's not a fact dude you're literally just being controlled into discounting your fellow humans. White men are more likely to be represented in classics because they were the only ones who received educations, weren't pillaged into desolation or worked into submission. This is so obvious to anyone who views history without an ideological lens.

What's worse is that now those factors are somewhat lifted and even as women and black people are proving themselves through plent of great culture you ignore it to preserve your own faulted sense of self.

Sad that Veeky Forums even tolerates /pol/ level nonsense.

Exactly this.

Read Veblen Veeky Forums.

>non aristotelean logic
burn in hell heathen

>I wouldn't be dismissing these goobers so superficially if it wasn't superficial standards that led to them being popular to begin with

>>denouncing superficiality when you wouldn't even take the time to read Jaeggy to prove it is superficial.
>>Admits to being superficial too
>>What's the problem with superficiality anyway then

>White men are more likely to be represented in classics because they were the only ones who receive

BECUASE They're who formed Western Civlization. You talk like God just handed Greek thought to Europe one day. There was no classical education before white men created it all out of fucking thin air.

Regardless do the math if a tiny percentage of people in general are talented enough to become great writers and a certain demographic (white men) is a tiny bit more predisposed on average to reach that limit then even if white men are only marginally smarter on average than other races it still results in there being tremendously more gifted writers in that group.

>Bok
meme poet, the equivalent of the guy who wrote Gadsby. The focus is never on his poems/their content--rather, it's on the kooky way in which the poems are distorted/delivered. Fitting for such a frivolous country as Canada.

>Rankine
>"...The first chapter details microagressions that have occurred to Rankine and her friends. The second chapter discusses the YouTube character Hennessy Youngman created by Jayson Musson, and discusses racial incidents in the life of Serena Williams and her public image. The third chapter features more microagressions and the nature of racist language."

>Lin
too much xanax

>Jaeggy
Chronic maudlinism + utter contempt for life. The only reason people like this stuff is because they've been conditioned to think that the essence of literature is black bile and sneering frenchness.

>Cole
man I have seen so much of this shit. tedious middlebrow social realism roman a clef about how IMMIGRANT of NATIONALITY struggles to FIT IN in AMERICA!?
It's never good, it's never interesting, it's always boring and it's ALWAYS EXACTLY THE SAME! FUCK!

***

I did set out on this list with an obvious bias, and I admit that. If you post me some cool passages I will read more, but right now... I have a painfully high certainty that all this shit would be a waste of my time to slog through. Like I have tasted the first spoonful of this soup and it's flavorless and bland. Capiche?

Lol the arabs gave greek thought to europe after the dark ages, but you probably choose to not believe that.

White Men only took over Western Civilization by being brutes, forcing women into submission and other civilizations too when they finally came out of the dark ages with a few weapons others didn't have. Better weapons =/= better culture.

>understanding where the products of a selection system came from is engaging in the same selection system

Here's the big piece of the picture you're missing if they were any good I would be happy to read them, but the problem is I literally how reason to believe that to be the case infact I have what I take as ample reason to suggest otherwise.

user... easy on the John Green videos.

>Greeks
>White
WE

Not even him, but holy shit, I thought these were memes /pol/sters engaged in to strawman any disagreement, but I've lived to see 'we wuz kangz' and 'the golden age of Islam' on Veeky Forums.

I guess this is my cue.

>Lol the arabs gave greek thought to europe after the dark ages

They didn't give shit, the Southern Meditteranean remnants of the Roman Empire held onto it before the Arabs fucked it up.
Europeans actually had zero military advantage over the rest of the world until the industrial age. What set Europeans apart was having a belief in independent thought and achievement (thanks to Christianity) that enabled the daring and fortitude required to start the Age of Exploration, and the discovery of America which was the engine for the enlightment.

I was with you until this stupid fucking post, seeing European history just as a series of conquests is even stupider than not acknowledging them

why do people still do the "trolling n00bs" thing, it's like shooting fish after they've been cooked and placed before you in a silver dish

>calls out anonymous poster for bad grammar
>while not using capitalization or punctuation
>muh burgers
What did he mean by this?

pic related, lel

YA sells like hotcakes. Half the world is watching the latest superhero movies and Game of Thrones episodes. Only turbo autists don't listen to music. Arts and culture, no matter how shitty we here think they are, are still essential to humans.

Bok is working on inserting a set of sonnets about Orpheus into a heat-resistant cell that will outlive the sun exploding. He works without poetry outside the bounds of romanticism that you seem to want him to stay in (i.e. the focus on the poem and content)

Your dismissal of Rankine is off hand and biased. Try not to be triggered by the word microaggression and try again.

Jaeggy - fair, but I think she writes beautiful sentences

Cole: Most of Open City takes place in his head, isn't a standard immigrant narrative. He actually inverts it as the main-character is successful and travels the world, thinking about history and philosophy and talking to a bunch of different kinds of people. The immigrant narrative though, shouldn't be discounted immediately just because you don't relate to it.

but you decided that they were good or bad before engaging, and anyway your ability to shed an imposed ideological worldview is second grade level.

>your ability to shed an imposed ideological worldview

The irony is palpable

"Ionia is an ancient region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey"

>but you decided that they were good or bad before engaging

As is my wont, I little time to entertain mediocrity

Your point being? Other than the most European region of the Islamic world dominating their entire civilization for millenia

>>He says on Veeky Forums

Anyway, while the /pol/ people debate if people who aren't white men are culturally valuable...

people are interested in culture right now even if you guys don't have the time to go find out what's good. I hate Rupi Kaur too, but there's tons of poets who do identity focused work who don't suck. And the experimental work going on right now is at least interesting. The argument that "culture sucks right now" is so reductionist and only indicative of someone who likes to stop themselves from thinking too much. There's literally so much culture right now all you have to do is be your own curator.

>>Or the most Islamic part of Europe dominating European thought??

>>Jeez i guess we can't make sweeping claims about one culture being better than another.

>there's tons of poets who do identity focused work who don't suck.

>he says this while posting on Veeky Forums
lmfao

>Or the most Islamic part of Europe dominating European thought??

Oh shit, the Ancient Greeks were Muslims?

checkmate

Don't make fun of my website

They weren't pale Christians either

>most Islamic part of Europe dominating European thought??
Not him but would what that be? Islamic theologians took most of their basis from Aristotle

> the arabs gave greek thought to europe
Besides your marginalization of the entire Byzantine Empire, the Latin Church was structurally and intellectually rooted in the Greco-Roman tradition. Arabs did not benevolently culturally enrich Europe. Crusader forces picked up some Islamic culture but it was by no means some kind of evolutionary transformation. Averroes' translations of Aristotle were later banned by Islamic authorities. Your narrative also excludes the Greek thinkers and tradesmen that fled West after 1453.
>White Men only took over Western Civilization by being brutes
Letting normies read was a mistake.
>forcing women into submission
Patriarchal, male dominated societies were the norm everywhere.
>other civilizations too
Conquest and pillage were and are not even remotely exclusive to European societies. Colonialism took it to another level scale-wise, but don't act like the world was full of passive victims.

I'll accept what you're saying is true. Where do I start looking?

No but I didn't claim that. Western Civlization began at the synthesis of the Roman Citizen with the Child of Israel.

You have a misunderstanding about what Western means, study history and you can trace a geneology from Greco-Roman thought and tradition through Christianity up to Enlightment and modernism, all as responses to eachother, all fundamentally European

Underfunding and continual slashing of arts and humanities programs in highschools, over-focus on STEM within society, business, and universities as a whole. The emergence of the Hollywood blockbuster. The internet accelerating mass media to hyperspeed, dissuading any actual focus or viewer participation/concentration. SJW reactionary identity politics that, instead of making people more aware and interested in black, asian, and latin culture, instead has just boiled down into anti-western; + /pol/'s own anti-idpol idpol, which basically consists of whatever popular alt-right youtuber at the moment tells them was good about life 100 years ago.

Read up on Mark Fisher, too, if you're interested in why culture hasn't seemed to evolved in any significant or revolutionary way over the past two decades.

Put your eggs in as many baskets as you can for a while until you figure it out. Veeky Forums is just one of those baskets for me. Talk to people at bookstores, librarians, try appreciating things you once dismissed offhand (like rap i'd guess for most people on Veeky Forums) and seeing where it connects to what you already like.

Read things like lithub, poetry.com, Paris review, and understand that they have ideologies, but take what they give you that's good, even if you think a lot of it sucks, that's just how it is, but you can find good stuff on these sites if you try. Go to local art shows (again, lots of crap, but that's always how its been and you find gems this way) and talk to the artists there. Not going to argue those places aren't full of crap too, but they're not worthless. One artist/writer will connect you to another.

Just never let your mind close, or hold to sweeping ideas like that white men are just better because that creates cultural stasis as evidenced above. (and is literally just stupid.) Culture has always been hard to find. You just have to fucking work to find it.

thanks George

NIgga, no one dismisses black authors just because they're black (apart from some /pol/ crossposters) and I'm open to reading/listening/paying attention to any author regardless of racial identity, but holy shit NIGGA, rap is fucking retarded nigga, stop it with this fucking rap is high art poetry meme nigga.

>like rap i'd guess for most people on Veeky Forums

After two decades of never being a fan I suddenly got into the genre through a friend then became severely bored of it after a few months. Overrated and seriously limited, glad I never wasted much time with it

I don't think that "white" men are inherently better (I'm not that retard pol-poster). Impossible as this may be to believe, my objection is honestly a purely aesthetic one... so many white men, so many people of all races and SEEEXES!! write these boring roman a clefs too. It's like a New York thing more than a race thing. I fucking hate this little cat steps school of literature which identifies literature with futility and milquetoast pointlessness... hard for me to express it. But New York should be paved over ASAP. Prompt(o).

I downloaded the open city and I'll look into it. Thanks for all your excellent suggestions, I'll keep slamming through the journals I know I hate. I have found some good shit in them before. I'll also check out lithub and stuff. I guess the few gems you find through doing that are so good that they sweep over and overpower an ocean of bullshit.

Thanks again for your patience.

>never let your mind close
>BUT SERIOUSLY DONT THINK IN THIS WAY ITS WRONG THINK!

Who did you listen to?

there are more people doing anything than ever before (except buying books lmao)

In some cases I would disagree that rap isn't just poetry. I recommend mf doom.

Lately, post-rock and edgy low-fi pop

>like rap i'd guess for most people on /lit
I grew up listening to rap, then grew out of it because it's awful. I have better taste than both of you, who are literal plebs consuming the lowest form of music

That's cool, but I was wondering about rap artists.

Oh right, Kendrick, Talib Kweli, Madlib, Wutang Clan. Couldn't get into MF Doom