October incoming!
Hello!
See, I told you I wouldn't send these more than once a week! I've been doing Stuff, and Things, including getting the latest Covid booster and this year's flu shot. If you can get those shots, by all means do. I know not everyone can--some of us are immune-compromised, among other things--but those of us who are able to can help them out tremendously by getting immunized.
No picture of Fitness Coach Vanburen this time, he is recovering from surgery. Hopefully once the stitches come out and he's healed up there will be more pics.
So, I wanted to let you all know about the Wayward Wormhole--or more specifically, the Wayward Wormhole Light. Basically, Cat Rambo is running a month-long workshop in a castle in Spain, and I'm teaching for one week of it. Obviously not everyone who wants to be in on the classes can make it to Spain--and those places are all filled anyway--so there is a way to join online. You can do just one instructor's week at a time, or the whole four weeks. Besides me, there's Cat Rambo, Sarah Pinsker, and Tobias Buckell. Really a fabulous lineup.
I know I'm getting this news out kind of late, and I can't promise places aren't already filled, but here you go.
So I want to say some things about "good art" and "bad art." About a month ago there was a chart going around that claimed to show the one hundred percent absolutely objective differences between good art and bad art. It was laughable on its face, and in addition it was pretty much composed of undiluted fascist propaganda, so I'm not going to reproduce it here or link to it, I'm just going to muse about one of its claims.
That claim is that good art is "instinctively recognized as art" and bad art is "instinctively recognized as a scam." Notice, though, there's no subject attached to these verbs--who is doing this instinctive recognizing? The vagueness about that, plus the use of "instinct," which is supposed to be biologically programmed and, one would assume, universal to all humans, suggests that of course anyone who isn't somehow warped or ill is naturally going to be doing this recognition.
Which immediately makes any art you don't like (or any art the Nazis don't like) not just "bad art" but sick, degenerate art, the product of corruption and wrongness. Morally dangerous. A scam at best. Because surely the artist has to know it's not really art, right? It's instinct.
But art doesn't come from nowhere, it comes from a context. The same with our immediate, gut reactions--those are a product of our culture, our individual experiences, our particular tastes. If you aren't already swimming in a particular context, the art that comes from it will seem shallow at best.
And the insistence that all art can be judged by some particular "instinctive" standard is, at base, an insistence that everyone must use the context of the person or faction doing the insisting, and the denial not only of the legitimacy but even the existence of any other context.
Now, I'm not saying you can't have opinions--even strong ones!--about what good or bad art is. I'm just saying, maybe ask yourself where those opinions come from. Especially the next time you're at a museum and see, I don't know, a banana taped to the wall, or a big canvas painted all blue, or, you know, anything that immediately prompts you to say "is that even art?" Ask yourself, what context was the artist working in? What context is the museum's curator part of, what is the history behind that kind of art? "Wow I don't understand this at all" is a perfectly fine reaction to art. So is "OK I get this but I still don't like it." Any reaction that isn't "my gut reaction to this piece, plus whatever education I already have, is the final word on whether this is good art or not" is perfectly fine.
I could go on about how "good art is instinctively recognized" serves the purposes of not just Nazis but any authority who wants to maintain their power, and how important it is to learn to question that sort of assertion for this reason alone, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Take care, all! I hope you have a safe and happy October! See you soon.