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grumpy-baby

it's my god-given bisexual right to be dramatic

30-something polyamorous slut | disaster bisexual | adhd manic pixie nightmare goblin | NSFW

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grumpy-baby · 2 days

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but this is why we have both art *and* journalism. they’re entirely separate. art is meant to convey emotion, not facts. an artist uses art to express how they *feel* about the awfulness of the world.

while yes, there’s something to be said for reexamining the tacitly agreed-upon signifiers across all artistic mediums that indicate emotions - red for rage, minor keys for lament, etc - we still need art, not journalism, to connect emotionally with a topic. in an age of constant saturation with journalism and media, it’s easier than ever to emotionally detach from it all. so while art is not a source of objective truth, it’s a reminder that we can and should feel grief and rage at the state of the world. and the same can be said of joy and wonder too.

A lot of art since the end of the first world War has been dedicated to depicting the awfulness of the world, and I'm not against communicating the awfulness of the world, "the world is full of an immense amount of suffering" is a significant truth, but I feel that art is not very good at conveying this. There are two main reasons for this

The first is that art is usually false. And the bad thing about the suffering in the world is that is real. Obviously art can depict real things. But I think it brings an inherent distance, the distance created by the artist. There are three actors in a work of art, the viewer the artist and the subject, and I think the artist necessarily comes between the viewer and the subject. There are kinds of art about the awfulness of the world that could avoid this but I think artists are usually not the sort of people to remove themselves to that degree. Like... An artist that was doing an effective job of closing that distance would essentially be a journalist. I mean journalism can be art. But artists are not usually trying to be journalists.

The second factor is beauty and ugliness. I think it's very difficult for art to separate bad and ugly. It's just part of the nature of the beast. And so it's hard for artists to depict the badness of the world as being centrally about something other than ugliness. But it's not about ugliness. Ugliness is bad, I guess, but this is not the primary badness of the world. The bad can be beautiful and the ugly good. But how do you convey that honestly through an aesthetic medium? I don't know if you can. I think the closest you can get is stripping away as much aesthetics as possible, try to debias the viewer, see facts as facts. Again it's just sort of journalism

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grumpy-baby · 6 days

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