Grievance #11: Idle Thoughts and False Hopes (Tin Will, Pt. 2)
If there's anything that I've become particularly sensitized to, it's postmodernist bullshit, to the point where I conversationally refer to the shit as "po-mo" only if I intend on dragging most of the sounds out in a sneer that would make Billy Idol blush. I am, as I might explain in an entry apart from this one, very much against the suggestion that just anything could be art. Marcel Duchamp is a personal hero of mine, it's true, but there were artistic statements that he was making about both post-modernism and art criticism through presentations that were, themselves, fairly po-mo-seeming themselves. He was on the attack, and he didn't deny meaning per se, so much as he knew he had achieved a point where he could achieve pointed pranks upon the establishment without having to do much dirty work himself, so much as nudge the whole matter along.
However, I digress, because I'm about to make an attack on something that isn't predictable by this setup. Y'see, I also have quite a bit of a fire shooting out of my sides and eyeballs about the responsibility of art and the artist too, as a result. Yet again, I can hear the staccato clicks of mouse buttons "UnFollow"-ing me soon, but I'll press on anyway. It is the responsibility of an artist who utilizes English words in a visual presentation to take some personal role in appreciating the assertions and inferences suggested by a particular combination of words. Juxtaposition with a picture, no matter what the picture ends up being, thusly is supposed to charge the picture with the bludgeoning that is all of that hidden and surface content slamming into the viewer+reader.
However, we now exist in an era where software or even websites give the tools to make this combination (frequently easily without even having to create the picture, so that pictures can be hijacked for some sort of flat-out pointless remix) happen in minutes, if not seconds in plenty of hand pairs. Now, something that used to require a lot of time and effort (and thusly self-policed itself as an art form so that such idle combinations were less likely, due to the time spent) now can be done by any bored pre-teen that manages to not find anything to watch on the now hundreds of television channels that are available, let alone all the way through any frail elderly human being that finds that they somehow have no time for something as stimulating as chess (chess fucking rules). I have nothing against these human beings normally, but I do have something against the runaway effect of idle thoughts and false hopes. In fact, I basically have something against anything that can so blatantly sabotage a human psyche, but at least most other things actually take some fucking effort to make.
Oh, I suppose an example would be good...
A perfectly good image of a forest, complete with some artistic background blur, just got some fucking white bars pasted over it and some ambiguous-ass words thrown in. there's a small amount of arrangement/alignment, ¿but would this take more than 3 real minutes with most software programs that enable this kind of thing? I mean, for me it wouldn't, apart from having the picture, and I frankly suck at Photoshop. It's kind of embarrassing, actually, but true.
¿For what, though, do we get this? Oh, I'm sure it motivates someone who's down and out, but I'm asking some honest questions about the underlying situation: ¿What the fuck does it say about us as human beings, that so many people lap this shit up, and is inspiration going to remain this fucking cheap? My previous blog in the series had a lot to do with the attention span of willpower (as I've gone back to retitle it), and shit like this is not going to help the matter at all. What is necessary in this age is an attention span to read, to mull over thoughts. Novels, sentence fragments. Essays, not quotes out of context.
LET HER KNOW (!?)...
That is a fucking Hallmark commercial. There were more than 60 notes on a sappy, directionless Hallmark commercial without the fucking crown emblem in the picture that circulates through a blogging site, or the Internet, or as a goddamn Forward in your work E-mail box (because everyone knows some fucking guy/gal who insists on forwarding you random crap to your work E-mail box that makes you reading a blog seem productive by comparison). I'm only remarking on the latest in a long string of versions o f this kind of garbage, and it's only just now started to even look that good, even though no one wants to explain why wasting this time on this actually helps them do whatever the hell it is that it relates to. Honestly, a lot of it downright looks like an idiotic way to reaffirm stupid ideas, and passing it around just gives a pathetic sense of validation that you're okay, because a bunch of other people want to believe they're okay for thinking the same total rubbish as you.
¿Example? I thought you'd never ask! (I know... you didn't ask.)
Not now that I see that you think this needed a perfectly nice picture of a landscape fucked up by some shitty Photoshopped cliche, actually. I actually just got convinced that we're different, because I'd rather go outside and play in a fucking field, while being paranoid and looking for text to come in and ruin the whole scene. I picked a kind of positive one, as a scary note. Just imagine if I were to bring up one about being lovesick, or what a perfect guy is (in which every single item was bollocks), or any number of other things that I could list which would be reacted to as if the short statements were preaching some great truth. Now imagine these things being passed around by kids who are spending an equal time at computers for less productive means than I was (who, mind you, guaranteed can't type as accurately or quickly as I can, judging by what I end up reading...), all of them approving these sweeping emotional statements, and...
...I'm going to cover this crap later, but a quick aside:
You're not that old, kids. You haven't lived a full life yet, so maybe you don't have to worry about being alone your whole life. You're still developing, actually: That's kind of exciting, because even if you ARE screwed up, you can actually fix it... and be infinitely more well-adjusted by my age than I turned out to be. Get off the Internet, and learn about what those sentences you're looking at in pictures actually MEAN.
Man...
...I am a jerk. ¿See? I can say something in a short point.
This isn't even a challenge: The year didn't harm you, as tough as it is to accept. I had a rough year, but I made mistakes that resulted in that. I also made fewer of the old mistakes. The next year will be better, because I have learned and will apply those things. Overall, things get better, because I take charge of my circumstances. ¿Does that make for great word art (with or without the picture)? Apparently not, but it also doesn't reinforce a lot of stupid reactionary thoughts that I might have, so my hopes will actually get somewhere.
The fact of the matter is, it's entirely baffling (pleasantly) that the response has been so favorable to these "Grievances" entries. Frankly, they're long; They have complex sentence structures (with varying levels of proficiency), they have correctly spelled words (like "proficiency"), last longer than 10 words on average, don't have some picture of mountains to ruin by writing over them, and generally don't offer you false hopes, so much as giving cold hard ideas about why something might not be such a good idea upon a real second look. I mean, apparently you're all understanding that it's because I actually respect you, and am not talking down to you, so much as saying things that I know won't be favorable on a reactionary level, but should be said to put the brakes on runaway behaviors. Yes, I am disappointed in those of you buying into this pap or anything resembling it, because we're frankly doing a lot of this shit in person too, let alone in text messages, instant messages, and the like. Oh, it's easy to get a fixation on the matter, especially when some sites outright skirt the line, albeit ultimately artfully, but I'm certain that some real scrutiny can show the difference (without even the close [¡but not quite!] example that I linked to).
This line of thinking is going to trouble some people, because it means that I'm not particularly in favor of most quick-fix short-snippet solution sayings, and it's honestly what guides my system of beliefs (and yes, I have one, although one too complex to put on a piece of postcard artwork). I don't give myself short statements to sit and waste a shitload of time interpreting, unless I have some cheat-sheet information on advice to give if my own mulling over isn't working. You'd be surprised at what I could believe while having such a spare set of guiding notions, but it does inform my preference for real advice, rather than trying to always guess what the other person wants from me. There is a way for allowing for creativity, but so far, this Internet manifestation of an old problem doesn't do much to solve it. I guess that I apologize for being zealous about wanting a world in which you're not easily swayed by some jerks with spare time on their hands and some photo editing software, let alone an ability to quote something out-of-context or say something they heard before. I'm not intending on offending you outright, unless it gets you thinking about the collective impact of all of these market-sized "ideas." I wrote about it for this long because frankly... I actually give a shit about this.