transcript
“Pretty shitty how baseline human activities like singing, dancing, and making art got turned into skills instead of being seen as behaviors, so now it’s like ‘the point of doing them is to get good at them’ and not ‘this is a thing humans do, the way birds sing and bees make hives.’”
It’s even worse when the point isn’t even to get good at them, but rather to make money off of them.
…if you want to just make art or sing, no one is stopping you. You don’t need to treat it like a mountain you’re required to summit. You know what? This post is pretty shitty, too.
As someone who loves to sing and make music, as someone who loves to dance and to be crafty, and as someone who inherently sucks at it - especially the music part, I can’t tell or hold a rhythm, let alone a note - this post really got me. I often feel like I am not allowed to sing or join or like I have to hide that I used to play guitar and write songs for hours when I was a teen and young adult. Because I was never good at it. Because the chords were just strummed. The chords didn’t fit the melody in my head and I could not sing the melody as it was in my head. And I just suck at it. And still, it brought me so much joy. It was such a big part of my life. I loved it.
I now sing songs to my daughter when we are in public. I pretend it is because she wants to hear them. It’s a great alibi. (She often doesn’t like my singing.) Sometimes she joins in. This is the best. There is no better sound in the world.
I’m ok at writing. But even this - I am a biomedic, not a writer. I didn’t study linguistics or literature or politics or journalism, I am absolutely not in the writing world. I can’t write professionally, so why should I even write. There are tons of more talented people who actually learned how to write out there. I leaned out of the window and got a side gig while I was on mat leave and wrote for a blog 2-4 times a month for a year. It was the best. I was paid peanuts but these were the tastiest lil’ peanuts I’ve ever devoured.
Counterpoint, modern art has desperately tried to move into the territory of “things people just do” and its terrible.
Fine arts and the old arts are pretty goddamn spectacular in comparison.
Skill and effort should be celebrated, and people should also be able to just do.
Wait until smiling is commercialized! Then if you smile and you’re not a professional smiler you’ll be mocked (but with a straight face).
I think I get the point they’re making, but eeehhh? I don’t think “art is something inherently human” and “you can (and maybe even should!) be improving your abilities in art” are in conflict with each other. Humans have been able to make art for as long as we’ve been human, but we’ve also had an implicit understanding of seeing two pieces of art and picking which ones we preferred in the moment. Capitalism didn’t really change that, we’ve had masters and apprentices since antiquity.
Couldn’t we say that the desire to make better art and the anxiety that comes with examining your own progress just as easily be called a behaviour unique to humans?
Also just as an observation: monotony is boring and I think aversion to boredom is a big reason people seek different things (maybe even things that require more skill to perform). Who wants to dance the same dance their whole life?
I feel like people in the past were as susceptible to being bored that we are – maybe even more because there were a lot fewer things to actually do back then.
Birds sing and make hives literally with purpose, what a stupid example to use.
It’s commodification. These things have been turned into marketable commodities for sale.
A huge part of capitalism is commodifying core parts of the human experience.
I don’t think that’s right. What portion of these activities actually is for sale, though?
I sing songs with my kids, and maybe to pass the time alone in a car, but nobody would ever be able to pay me enough to want to do that in public. Nor should anyone want to pay to see my mediocrity on display.
I played different sports when I was younger, mostly playing in unorganized pickup games with no formal teams or uniforms or referees or schedules. I still run and bike, and I still lift weights, but have no desire to enter any formal competitions with any of those activities. But I still work on the skills and the progressions on those activities, and track my performance in my notes/logs.
None of this is commodified. It’s not for sale, and someone else’s experience doing these things can’t be traded for what I get out of doing them myself. Even if there are people who do all of these things professionally, full time, the “commoditized” product has basically nothing to do with what I’m doing. Nor does the fact that people do those things professionally somehow detract from the enjoyment I get out of doing those things myself.
One of the most fundamental human experiences, of cooking food for people to eat, is actually a full time job I’ve had in the past. But the fact that I have cooked many meals for strangers for money doesn’t actually detract from my ability to still cook meals at home for my family, or host dinner parties where I cook for my friends. The value of that activity is more than what can simply be purchased with money, even if I personally have done it for money in the past.
Human experience is for experiencing, and nobody can take that away from me.
It’s commodified in terms of social media. Either “for sale” literally, if indirectly, through monetization (which is increasingly the goal for many people) or not-quite-literally in the sense of likes/social media attention. The act of dancing in this context, for instance, is no longer done as an expression of genuine emotion or to connect with people or express oneself, but instead being traded for clicks, monetized or not.
In that regard, even if not personally affected, I think that consumer culture can and has taken the purpose of human experience away from many and twisted it from experience as experience to experience as performance.
Edit: to expand on a dance being commodified: a TikTok dance has to be learned by consuming TikTok. That is the product: the content around the dance. Then the user further contributes to the commodification by entering their own content into the marketplace (TikTok). Whether the user makes money or not does not change the fact that this content is for sale by TikTok. TikTok gets more viewers and trades viewership for advertising revenue.
I guess I’m not seeing a reduction in the number of people doing these things for themselves: drawing because they like to draw, taking photographs because they like the craft, lifting weights because they want to get stronger, baking sourdough because they want to reconnect with old traditions, foraging mushrooms because they find it interesting. Yes, some of these things happen on social media, which also may influence what hobbies or pastimes or projects people take on, but if that’s what you mean by commodification, then that has been part of the human condition for as long as people have been social and have had free time.
Commodification is part of it. But the idea of patronage of the arts goes back to antiquity. It isn’t a capitalist innovation so much as Pop Art, which is a pure manifestation of commodity fetishism.
What’s really changed in the art world over the last twenty years is the obfuscation of Master Artists as a productive force. You no longer have this popular understanding of Van Gogh as a guy who does paintings or Stan Lee as a guy who writes comic books or Hayao Miyazaki as a guy who makes movies. Now you just have these commercial juggernauts that simply churn out generic slop. When you see a drawing of Mickey Mouse we no longer really ask who drew it. When we see some CGI-'d Marvel eye-ball gouger, we barely even recognize the studio that did the graphical designs. Netflix releases anime and we barely know if its Trigger or Madhouse or MAPPA that’s produced it (nevermind the actual individual artists who made the original images), because those credits are cut short to push you into the next episode.
I think OP’s image misses the essential desire for a hobbyist to chase improvement and distinction from peers. Making Art has historically been a cultivated skill with a real lineage of professionals, schools, and mediums. This isn’t just birds singing, on instinct or bees hiving for survival. It is humans attempting to influence one another through passionate expression and collaborating to create works that will outlive them. That’s necessarily going to require skill.
But the people who make the art are fundamental to the art’s creation. The modern capitalist drive is to remove the art from the artist and turn the medium into a fungible unit of exchange rather than a tool of communication.
Professionalization binds the artists to their works by making it exceptional and distinct from peer works. Capital moves us in the other direction, homogenizing and anonymizing the labor to make it easier to price and more saleable in distribution.
I would argue that Capitalism wants us to be bees. To be these mindless workers who do the same job reflexively, over and over, until we die. All so the capitalists can obtain cheap uniform honey.
I like your point a lot better because the dehumanization of the worker is more the attribute than the commodity
Damn. Yeah really good points all around
some people make steel frying pans all day to pay the bills, some people sing at restaurants to entertain them, others people work in the kitchen to fry them both their dinner
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.
He’s clearly educating us on the lifecycle of metal cookware. Fascinating stuff.
I’m terribly bad at all three by societal standards but I enjoy all three when no one is around.
(Or atleast I did, before I got a chronic illness that prevents me from doing them)
My baby niece started bobbing up and down when a song came on, happily waving her little fists and shaking her little diaper butt.
I was like “that’s terrible, you’ll never be a star, keep your day job you untalented hack!”
thought i was on linkedin for a sec
Lemmy is LinkedIn for NEETs
Honestly I’d bet the average lemmy user is more likely to be employed than the average LinkedIn user. My experience on LinkedIn was a bunch questionably effective recruiters who rarely even understood the words in the job requirements they were trying to fill, where my lemmy experience so far has been “all of the people working in tech who hate silicon valley technofeudalism”
It was just a half baked joke, NEETs are based anyway
Capitalism causes us to commodotize everything. I saw this switch as well during the 2000s in Internet culture. It went from people making websites about their cats and stuff to people chirping out “but how will that be profitable?!” in response to most ideas.
I remember 11 year old me trying to monentise a crappy weebly site I made.
Before late capitalism forced most everyone to make their art more “commercial”, there was this thing in modernity called symbolic capital, and in the artistic fields this brought the cons of competitive spirit, but a pro - in my view, at least - was enabling approaches to art which are more sophisticated, albeit requiring specialization also on the part of the reader (for the pleasure of “writerly” texts see Roland Barthes; for why many people want to passively consume elite art rather than participate in democratic art, “The Weak Universalism” by Boris Groys is some food for thought). More exactly, modern artists placed their bets on getting recognized by critics and historians for their efforts at innovating art without the pressure to always meet halfway the audience.
Downsides included the possibility - in bourgeois capitalist societies, not so much in, say, Yugoslavia - to starve before receiving due recognition, being dependent on the critics’ whims or agendas… and being dependent on there being an infrastructure for the art world, gatekeepers - which suffered from more or less systemic biases such as sexism, though sometimes sexually transgressive authors got away with upholding the idea that somehow art is never moral, but instead quintessentially aesthetic - and all… And, of course, in the background should still lie classical education of sorts, in the lack of which today some might end up believing they’re reinventing the wheel or that it’s nonconformist to be conformist, aka hip to be fash square…
At least these are my (more than) two cents as a writer from Eastern Europe who witnessed the fall of the traditional literary system - which in other circumstances could have been enabled me to secure a modest but content existence through a stable job in one of their state-funded magazines - and read Pierre Bourdieu and Pascale Casanova to make some sense of all this. As a lower middle class person, I was privileged to have been supported by my parents to pursue literature for years without the pressure of making it on the job market - now I work almost 7 days out of 7, leaving me in no mood to read or write books… Alas, I was looking forward to UBI or negative income tax, but it seems like we have to fight a techno-feudal dystopia first.
I don’t get it. Do all of it if it makes you happy, but get paid if you can and love doing what you do…
This only applies if you give a shit what other people think of you doing innocuous things.
Paint a terrible picture and have fun doing it. Dance your way down the sidewalk when the mood strikes you. Sing whenever you want. Sometimes I’m in the grocery store and they start playing a banger on the speakers, damn right I’m gonna sing along to it while I’m evaluating the pros and cons of competing spaghetti packages.
