It’s relevant information imo. The whole “separate the artist from the art” is such nonsense. The only people who want to separate the work from the people who create it want to get rich from somebody else’s work. There is a dearth of surrealist art that is largely antifascist, but the only surrealist artist that most people are aware of is by a fascist who was rejected by the rest of the movement in his own time.
Art isn’t just a picture or aesthetic experience, it is a relationship between the world and the people in it. You can look at art throughout history to understand culture, and culture is where people derive their sense of morals and truth. Fascism, by its nature, works to dissolve truth and culture into relations of naked exploitation. Dali was a good painter, but there’s no shortage of principled criticisms about whether he was a great artist. So he doesn’t objectively have amazing art. On the contrary, objectively, he was quite shallow and self-obsessed, and if art imitates life, what it is his art imitating – the world around him, or the shallow and self obsessed artist himself? Perhaps that is the root of his fame, its incredible lack of substance promoted by a class that does not value substance, since substance is not a consideration in profit.
I get your point.
But we have gotten way too picky and sensitive over time.
“We live in a society” as a wise clown once said, and there are all different kinds of people around us.
While we have to call out to villains, we can’t be too picky and expect everybody to be what is our opinion on what’s good.
You need tolerance in actual communities. Your uncle might be a MAGA idiot but you don’t need to hate him or be enemies with him. You can acknowledge that “hey, I really don’t agree with this view of yours” and have an awesome pick nick or have fun with eachother. I’ve been there.
Social media and internet have made us comfortable with living in our own bubbles.
We go to the social media that we like, follow the certain channels,people,communities that we like, block anything that we don’t like and thus just create ecochambers for ourselves. But that’s not a healthy society. We need to learn tolerance.
We can find the top 20% of actual bad guys and fully go to war with them, but no need to agree in everything with eachother all the time.
Def appreciate the thoughtful response. I agree in principle but disagree in premise. Like, I agree that there is a social problem where people are too dismissive of other peoples viewpoints, often going to the extremes of trying to categorize other people’s arguments as fascist, when the person stating them probably isn’t a fascist, they’re just confused.
I think in general, society encourages people to be too abstract in our treatment of other people. We are so quick to shunt somebody in a category, and of course we can cite all these rationalizations and evidence, and the effect is just continued division within the people who pay the price for bad or draconian policies. Everything comes down to personal responsibility, whether you’re for or against a certain view. And thats just not entirely true. There are myriad social causes for individual behavior: poverty, privilege, racism, sexism all have deep institutional causes and effects. In my own experience, I was raised in the country and had many “right wing” views. But my friends, who were more progressive and educated, accepted me, and over time, changed my mind, which opened the door for me to try and learn more and change myself.
So its really important to me when broaching a political subject to be tuned into the people I’m talking to, to take into consideration where they’re coming from, to listen and be flexible.
Fascists (and billionaires) are intentionally pushing a message of “empathy is weakness.” I find the claim that “people are too sensitive” to be the younger sibling of the more explicit claim. To me, empathy is a way of sensing truth in the world. Fascists want us to be less sensitive, so we aren’t sensing what other people are experiencing, because most people if we knew, would feel empathy and want to change things. Ive seen the argument that it is merely arguing against “selective empathy,” which I dont condone in principle, but in practice it usually means having empathy for the stockholders, rather than the people being harmed by political and economic policy that serves the stockholders interests.
I know what you mean, ive found people to take things very personally when I try to address certain issues with them. But returning to Dali, why is he so celebrated? Its fine that people like it, the philosopher Heidegger is still taught in universities and he was a straight up card-carrying Nazi. But Dali was, other than being kind of a slut for attention and self aggrandizement, not considered one of the surrealists in his own time. Yet now he is synonymous with surrealism? His own prestige replaced the entire movement, who included many socialists and antifascists. He was a vocal supporter of the Franco dictatorship, and of Adolph Hitler. Why does his art keep getting promoted as a leader in the surrealist movement? Is it talent, or is it hegemony?
Culture matters, because it affects people on a level that politics and academics can never. The Italian intellectual, Antonio Gramsci, theorized that culture was where most people got their morality. Unfortunately, the people with the power to promote culture, promote the culture that they want.
Given how closely those people cleave to fascism in recent years (if not always) and how monopolized the culture industry has become in the last 30 years, I think it is definitely concerning to see which artists are promoted and which ones are relegated to obscurity. So the question is: is Salvador Dali’s work actually so important on a cultural level, that his personal views, which were rejected in his own time, aught to be acceptable in our own? Without being “too sensitive” I think that culture matters, and who is behind the dissemination of popular culture, and the currents which resist hegemonic culture and what it represents, are all extremely important considerations.
It’s relevant information imo. The whole “separate the artist from the art” is such nonsense. The only people who want to separate the work from the people who create it want to get rich from somebody else’s work. There is a dearth of surrealist art that is largely antifascist, but the only surrealist artist that most people are aware of is by a fascist who was rejected by the rest of the movement in his own time.
Art isn’t just a picture or aesthetic experience, it is a relationship between the world and the people in it. You can look at art throughout history to understand culture, and culture is where people derive their sense of morals and truth. Fascism, by its nature, works to dissolve truth and culture into relations of naked exploitation. Dali was a good painter, but there’s no shortage of principled criticisms about whether he was a great artist. So he doesn’t objectively have amazing art. On the contrary, objectively, he was quite shallow and self-obsessed, and if art imitates life, what it is his art imitating – the world around him, or the shallow and self obsessed artist himself? Perhaps that is the root of his fame, its incredible lack of substance promoted by a class that does not value substance, since substance is not a consideration in profit.
I get your point. But we have gotten way too picky and sensitive over time. “We live in a society” as a wise clown once said, and there are all different kinds of people around us. While we have to call out to villains, we can’t be too picky and expect everybody to be what is our opinion on what’s good. You need tolerance in actual communities. Your uncle might be a MAGA idiot but you don’t need to hate him or be enemies with him. You can acknowledge that “hey, I really don’t agree with this view of yours” and have an awesome pick nick or have fun with eachother. I’ve been there.
Social media and internet have made us comfortable with living in our own bubbles. We go to the social media that we like, follow the certain channels,people,communities that we like, block anything that we don’t like and thus just create ecochambers for ourselves. But that’s not a healthy society. We need to learn tolerance.
We can find the top 20% of actual bad guys and fully go to war with them, but no need to agree in everything with eachother all the time.
Def appreciate the thoughtful response. I agree in principle but disagree in premise. Like, I agree that there is a social problem where people are too dismissive of other peoples viewpoints, often going to the extremes of trying to categorize other people’s arguments as fascist, when the person stating them probably isn’t a fascist, they’re just confused.
I think in general, society encourages people to be too abstract in our treatment of other people. We are so quick to shunt somebody in a category, and of course we can cite all these rationalizations and evidence, and the effect is just continued division within the people who pay the price for bad or draconian policies. Everything comes down to personal responsibility, whether you’re for or against a certain view. And thats just not entirely true. There are myriad social causes for individual behavior: poverty, privilege, racism, sexism all have deep institutional causes and effects. In my own experience, I was raised in the country and had many “right wing” views. But my friends, who were more progressive and educated, accepted me, and over time, changed my mind, which opened the door for me to try and learn more and change myself.
So its really important to me when broaching a political subject to be tuned into the people I’m talking to, to take into consideration where they’re coming from, to listen and be flexible.
Fascists (and billionaires) are intentionally pushing a message of “empathy is weakness.” I find the claim that “people are too sensitive” to be the younger sibling of the more explicit claim. To me, empathy is a way of sensing truth in the world. Fascists want us to be less sensitive, so we aren’t sensing what other people are experiencing, because most people if we knew, would feel empathy and want to change things. Ive seen the argument that it is merely arguing against “selective empathy,” which I dont condone in principle, but in practice it usually means having empathy for the stockholders, rather than the people being harmed by political and economic policy that serves the stockholders interests.
I know what you mean, ive found people to take things very personally when I try to address certain issues with them. But returning to Dali, why is he so celebrated? Its fine that people like it, the philosopher Heidegger is still taught in universities and he was a straight up card-carrying Nazi. But Dali was, other than being kind of a slut for attention and self aggrandizement, not considered one of the surrealists in his own time. Yet now he is synonymous with surrealism? His own prestige replaced the entire movement, who included many socialists and antifascists. He was a vocal supporter of the Franco dictatorship, and of Adolph Hitler. Why does his art keep getting promoted as a leader in the surrealist movement? Is it talent, or is it hegemony?
Culture matters, because it affects people on a level that politics and academics can never. The Italian intellectual, Antonio Gramsci, theorized that culture was where most people got their morality. Unfortunately, the people with the power to promote culture, promote the culture that they want.
Given how closely those people cleave to fascism in recent years (if not always) and how monopolized the culture industry has become in the last 30 years, I think it is definitely concerning to see which artists are promoted and which ones are relegated to obscurity. So the question is: is Salvador Dali’s work actually so important on a cultural level, that his personal views, which were rejected in his own time, aught to be acceptable in our own? Without being “too sensitive” I think that culture matters, and who is behind the dissemination of popular culture, and the currents which resist hegemonic culture and what it represents, are all extremely important considerations.
aw someone yucked your yum with factual history.
boo fuckin hoo.
you stanning for JK too?