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.’”

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    81·
    9 hours ago

    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.