mintcar

Some questions for the seventh week of the semester:

-What is the role of an aesthete in a world like this?

-I see the invention of the atom bomb and Jackson Pollock's death as a moment that our culture became too aware. Pollock, you might say, died because he... self-destructed--he couldn't live on with the thought that he was a sellout. Before, it was an issue. Authenticity mattered in art. Pandering was shameful, because you looked inside yourself for answers, not from an exhibition. And now? The creme de la creme of the mass media (and masses are not people, are they?) involve the active pronounciation of performance--we relish the self-declared personas, and media icons are bred to relish their own versions of inauthenticity, and their self-glorified display. Commercialized authenticity. Because, after all, there's no such thing as authenticity when everything's relative. And you need to make money. So you might as well be as sexy as you can, and be everyone's darling. Or at least, everyone's hero.

So where's the substance? When everything moved from 3d to 2d, and inauthenticity is valued as much as authenticity, and sometimes even more so... I was wondering what it does to our psyches. Is it harder to know purity? And harder to trust? Is it harder to be serious about things that must be thought out? And are we depending on our media sources (that heard from someone else who read something else based on some other feed) to give us ... pure distraction ... from an ugly world that is filled with sickening inauthenticity, filled with conflicts you don't want to deeply think about anymore, because it should all be blown up anyway, or you're lazy, and you want to stop thinking about the violence you would do, if you had any power, to all those glorified icons who are saving the nation.

I don't want to believe that things were like this for all of history, and that the cycle continues. I want to know there's a way to escape it. It's just too easy to forget.

-So when I play the Sigur Ros cd, ( ), while I'm driving, I really feel like I'm in a bubble, a capsule floating down the street, and within it, I'm watching some majestic movie unfolding within the frame of my windshield. Then I drive exactly at the speed limit, and nothing is real. Birds thrust their wings across a blue canvas. (Do you know how funny it is when you talk about something that's totally not serious in a serious way? But, what if it is serious, and you don't know it anymore, because you've been too busy laughing at it?)

-What's the role of an aesthete in a world like this?