Is an optimistic post-postmodernism possible?

Isn't every successful artistic endeavor by definition an exploitation of ideals for social/economic currency? SJW writers and artists, idealogues with a book, even mock-poor like rap or zef culture. All victims of capitalism, even when they succeed. Is no one capable of living in the balance between irony and sincerity, or cynicism and hope? Is art possible anymore?

Recommend me some writers who grapple with this, Veeky Forums. I'm looking for a way forward before the nanites gobbles us all up.

>inb4 Shia LeBeouf

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ROBERT ANTON WILSON

It's the question whether you want to masturbate over your ideas alone or share them. How did exploitation even come into this?

The optimism will come when you change to fit the new era.

Information wants to be free user. Ideas are meant to be shared, witness our inherent mimeticism. It is how people learn. My question is how is genuine art supposed to be successful in a 2017 capitalist system when the act of viewing art destroys its capacity to criticize the system it is trapped in. I watched a man blow his brains out once in a political protest. It was the only genuine performance art I've ever seen.

Postmodernism has already given way to neo-sincerity.

That is to say, the art viewer's eyeballs have been commodified. More than before.

E.g. YouTube isn't a place for artistic expression, it is a market wherein the artist sells a very specific crafted image of himself and his art. There is so much "creativity" out there vying for viewership (because capitalism), that the true expression is unwanted or outright prohibited by the marketplace. The same analogy applies to other forms of mass media.

I'm done Veeky Forums, I'm leaving.

Look at OP's post: 2 paragraphs of words which are not related in any way to actual knowledge. He does not know the first thing about what he is talking about, yet people will answer seriously, and some of them will even agree with this complete lack of knowledge.

Only now it clicked on me: the whole board is like this.
So there it is, sorry for the blog. I'm leaving, and I'll read books instead.
Fuck off, plebs.

New Sincerity is itself an ironic joke. It will forever be self-conscious of taking itself "too seriously." It's meaningless.

>[...]a new literary movement which would espouse something like the New Sincerity ethos:[1]"The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal”. To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows[...]

The same analogy applies to that psycho who blew his brains out. We're all vying for attention. That doesn't nullify authenticity or creativity in every case. In fact, probably the most authentic art would acknowledge the many different motivating forces behind its creation, but then, who are we to say art needs to justify its existence to anyone.

But yes, you're not astute for recognising that most mass and social media is shallow and pointless. We all know that

Fuck off pseud. I'm thinking every object of art must contain its antithesis. A self-effacing inside joke, an antidote to excessive praise.

I'm glad you're going to read more user. Come back again.

Valid.

Fortunately for you I'm not trying to be astute. I'm trying to get answers.

And the guy who blew his brains out was 17. He was paid $0 for his act, and it was barely a blip in its 12hr news cycle. He has no need or desire for credentials anymore. Living artists cannot say the same.

So why not distribute your art for free? You expect nothing out of it except a genuine longing to share with others

Like who? NS poets tend to be the opposite of what you're describing.

That's neo-sincerity at its worst. At it's best, neo-sincerity is not simply a reaction against the play of postmodernism, but acknowledges the fragmentation, sterility, lack of common ground, etc. of postmodernism, yet in the final tally declares in favor of the warmth, community and friendship that postmodernism dismisses.

Terribilità will make a comeback in the near future, mark my words.

The cure for pessimism is real suffering.

> it is a market wherein the artist sells a very specific crafted image of himself and his art
Sorry to be that guy but that was always the case with any popular art (aka. most of what we know). The only different from the past is that we better know how to do it.

He was a basket case who needed help, you edgelord. Don't overdose on memes, kid. And if you want answers, on the Veeky Forums board maybe respond to the ONLY book recommendations in the thread. Either that, or seriously, LITERALLY go back.

Are NS poets and musicians successful? And is that success derived from their art or the image they have crafted to sell their art? It's vapid hipster shit.

Sorry, I mean it's not for me.

Funny enough it seems the case. People from fucked up countries like Nigeria are a lot more happy than Amerifats who are spoiled since they are born.

Bugs... easy on the pseud stuff

it goes back to our calvinist roots, if you aren't successful then you must have a moral failure that displeased the lord, of course now america has been flooded with catholics who thinks it's cool and noble to be poor and are basically just magical marxists

Just compare native Africans living in abject poverty to the uppity nigs in America living in the lap of luxury and decadence.

You're not here for answers. You're here to boost your ego by playing "yes, but" worth cherrypicked posts that you have an instant quip response for. That's teenage identity formation, not discussion.

Why bringing the niggerness into it? Pretty much everyone in America is living in the lap of luxury compared to majority of the world.

The cure for this is Jesus. Not even memeing. When you're sincere about the divine sincerity about everything else follows as a matter of course.

because genetically they're very similar, which rules out biological explanations

Not the same user, but I think that Serial Experiments Lain provides a good bridge between postmodernism and neo-sincerity. Formally, the mini-series has all the hallmarks of postmodernism, and given this was an early (and prophetic ) commentary of what the Internet would do to our lives, identities and culture, one would expect every conceivable postmodern trope to appear: fragmented identities, a lack of groundedness, endlessly multiplying and empty signifiers that only refer to each other, but in the final account, Lain is a very traditional search for the truth of one's identity, more Oedipus Rex than Gravity's Rainbow. Postmodernism said that such a search could no longer be done, yet there it is.

bugs.. easy on the projection

Projecting projection, user. Checkmate.

Yeah, the underground church is thriving in Communist China. In the West, whether liberation theology can rise from the dead after being crucified by the CIA remains to be seen. Incidentally, Zizek has a few words about liberation theology. Watch the tail end of his lecture, at the one hour nineteenth minute mark. m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv5Y9nQjz90

What does successful mean to you? I would argue that nobody in poetry is traditionally successful. I mean, Rita Dove is the biggest name rn and I'd be shocked if anyone knew her name let alone her poems. As for music, Matt Farley is pretty NS and again I'd be surprised if most people know the name let alone the songs. But people have other measurements for success. David Mcgimpsey just finished a three book exploration of the sonnet and seems to regard it as a great success but I doubt people even know the name etc

>What does successful mean to you?
The mimetic ability of an idea and its utility to the species, regardless of its ability to generate capital. This high bar is why the most successful art is currently made for the lowest common denominator.

Your examples illustrate my point exactly. Lack of circulation is proof of failure. Songs that failed to germinate into new genres. Novelties.

That's not something you can account for during the artist's lifetime. With your logic we would have to dismiss 80% of the great Western composers and 95% of the authors and philosophers in the canon.

>80% of the great Western composers
Seems a bit much. Most of them were very popular in their time.

Lack of circulation equals failure? Well I guess art isn't for you. Almost by definition art has small circulation.

OP, I posted the first post and it IS the best post. You need to check it out with an open mind.

This is less true than you might think, especially for classical German and French composers. It's 100% true when it comes to opera, though.

The fact that you heard of any of them is because they work survived for centuries, which is pretty tricky if it was obscure shit. Besides, composing music needs quite a bit time and money, and not too many had the luxury to born into NEETdom which allowed them to spend their time into art, so their art couldn't be too shit for the general public.

Obviously many composers died poor but that's a bigger indicator for their shit skill with money and not how popular they were. Do you have any specific examples in mind?

>Do you have any specific examples in mind?
What about the big ones?
Bach's legacy was understood 100 years after his death (in his lifetime he was only famous as a pedagogue and keybordist), Beethoven was only imitated in his more superficial quirks (the usage of orchestration, certain musical figures and so on), but the legacy of his late works was fully accepted 40 years after his death (in his lifetime, for example, people would consider his last 6 sonatas as the work of a dead madman), Schubert died anonymous and penniless, Mahler was seen as a charlatan by the public and critics until his very last symphony, and only an handful of music students in Vienna were studying his music in those years.

>Bach
Was a big deal in Weimar before he pissed off someone of.
>Beethoven
Thousands came to his funeral.
>Schubert
Was your average rockstar who makes it big and then spends all the money on coke and hookers. Erlkönig was stupidly popular during his lifetime.
>Mahler
Didn't do too bad after he jumped on Webers dick.

All of them were AT LEAST reasonably popular just not as big as they are now. Their greatness and contributions to art took longer to be understood but it's often the case even today. 2Pac, Big L or J Dilla are probably the most popular examples.

>Was a big deal in Weimar before he pissed off someone of.
As a keyboardist. Until the Romantic period he was known only for his WTC, GV and AoF, which were treated as didactical works for keyboardists. Apart from this, he was virtually unkown as a composer until Mendellsohn started proselitizing his music to his extremely large audience.

>Thousands came to his funeral.
Your point was
>The mimetic ability of an idea and its utility to the species
Popularity is meaningless in this context. Beethoven was famous for his early and middle works, but we know remember him mostly for his late compositions, which were shunned for the most part by public and critic (it should be noted that just 20 years before his death most music was still composed on Haydn's model, and that Mozart died only 30 years earlier: the aesthetics shift was immense). The 9th symphony and the Missa Solemnis are exceptions, but it should be noted that Beethoven wrote all of his major orchestral works specifically for the public (it was his idea of democracy in the arts), but even the 9th had little influence over his contemporaries, during Beethoven's last time (in which he was able to organize only a handful of performances).

>Was your average rockstar who makes it big and then spends all the money on coke and hookers. Erlkönig was stupidly popular during his lifetime.
Schubert had a couple of lucky hits our of a repertoire of 1000 pieces. Also the lieders are only one of the reasons for which we remember him: what about his chamber music? His late piano sonatas? His symphonies?
All of this music was popularized by Romantic composers in the '40s. For example Schumann is the one who discovered his Symphonies.

>Didn't do too bad after he jumped on Webers dick.
He was famous as a director, his music instead was highly controversial, and had very few imitators in his lifetime. Mahler as a composer obtained mainstream status in the '60s, before that he was a fairly niche composer.

>The mimetic ability of an idea and its utility to the species
Which needs popularity to even make it possible. It doesn't mean it'll happen instantly.

If they didn't get any popularity during their lifetime, they wouldn't have ANY influence after their deaths.

So judging poets in their 20s-30s even by this criteria is misguided.

Not really. What is needed is popularity amongst artists, which most of the time does not represent the popularity with the general population.

>If they didn't get any popularity during their lifetime, they wouldn't have ANY influence after their deaths.
You don't even know how wrong you are.

>If they didn't get any popularity during their lifetime, they wouldn't have ANY influence after their deaths.

No.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Traherne