Culturally Necessary Art

>>8597670

>Nobody in 1000 years from now will look at this time and care to read whatever passes as literature these days

How much literature from 1016 do you read, anon?

>>8597675
I'd have a hard time giving you an example of literature from that time. There are chronicles, saints lives, and other materials that seem to be only available to scholars, and even in the next century or so proper history written by the likes of William of Malmesbury is difficult to find as well.

But from a little later I have been delving into Arthuriana.

>>8597670
I think you're just an idolater.

You would most likely be saying the same thing if you lived in the times those 'great books' were published. People will always complain that the current generation isn't as good as the last and have been doing it for ages.

>>8598442
But it is not only our generation, but the one before.
>>8598419
I don't think so. He has a transcdent sense of asthetic, you don't.
>>8597675
I have read plenty of contemporary literature and i agree.
>>8597670
Our current culuture is a throw away attitude and trash is the outcome.

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>>8597670
People like you really annoy me. It is extremely rare that a person has taken in enough culture and art to be able to say anything conclusive about the past or the present, yet people have been complaining about what's wrong with their generation since the beginning of time. Look at Deuteronomy 32:5: "They have corrupted themselves, their spot is not the spot of his children: they are a perverse and crooked generation." Or look at Hesiod, who first described the past as a golden age, or how in the 1700's novels were described as having "poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge." Then there's pic related from I believe the 1600s.

Your post is on level with 13 year olds complaining that music is shit because people don't listen to pink floyd. Great books like Moby Dick did horribly when they were released, and it wasn't until many years later that it gained any recognition. So you think just because YOU haven't read anything recent that you consider good, there couldn't possibly exist anything worthwhile written in the last few decades? Yes, consumerism is the most prevalent culture today, and only the most popular works float to the top, but that does not mean it is the only extant culture.

So quit romanticizing the past, we've had hundreds of years to come to a consensus on the works that make up the western canon and you have no idea how many terrible works haven't survived. It may take us hundred of years to discover the great works of today.

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>>8598781
What you are saying is fine and well, and ironically fits very well into a cyclical conception of societies: what they experienced in the past is the same as what we are experiencing now, and we are not at all exceptional.

That is fine, but I want you to examine more closely the social forces at work.

Ever since the 1800s and the Industrial Revolution, we have seen an increasing popularization of all society. With mass education and mass production, the normally silent population of history that only rears up during the occasional riot now becomes the literary public: the consumer. Prior to this, books and works of art were written for a class of people who were trained into artistic traditions and who could comprehend the cultural currents at work.

The fact that the former peasant is now the target audience means that the great artistic traditions, the very literary-cultural link that defined the great literature of the past, has slipped away entirely. Our "nobles" do not compose works of literature. The kings and queens of our day are irrelevant icons. There are no court poets. There is no cultural voice that transcends whatever any other man can also give voice to. Our de facto aristocrats, the crony capitalists, are as literary as the genre fiction proliferating on the New York Times Bestseller lists.

In the past, there is reason for certain men to have complained. There are actual socio-historical reasons behind their complaints; and, the same very much applies to us. We have exterminated the culture class and replaced it with the extremely literate middle class. As everyone is the popular, so everything in our culture is popular.

"High art," as it were, has died--so has our culture, insofar as Culture articulates itself through its high artistic traditions. The endless sea of the vulgar--JK Rowlings and George RR Martins---that is our "culture."

>Nobody in 1000 years from now will look at this time and care to read whatever passes as literature these days.

no one reads shakespeare, dante, or livy

>>8598992
I do, because I'm not an unwashed commoner from the provinces.

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>>8598942
Yep, consumerist society has made Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon drooling idiots who must write for the masses because they need their books to be bestsellers so they can buy pizza for their families.

>>8599004
but they're not 'popular'. in any case there would still be historical interest in the literature from our time, just as there is some interest in works from 500 years ago

>>8598942
Nah pulp's existed for a long time, even amongst the perceived "upper class". What your posting is dangerous classist revisionist history

>>8599056
No, they aren't popular. They wrote literature, because their culture was going through a stage that allowed them to give voice to such pertinent things about their respective cultures.

Our culture has dried up creatively. Our genre fiction is endless recycled ideas created by the every man.

>>8599063
But literature also existed. I am not saying the one existed without the other.

The gothic novel was genre fiction, but it was also published at the same time as literature proper. Genre fiction is an entirely different beast from culturally necessary art. A rip roaring novel set in ancient Rome could be written at any time, but it only in I,Claudius does it become culturally necessary.

>>8598942
But there are subsections of literature that have a massive influx in their heyday, and then dissipate. Travel novellas, gothic literature, autobiographical verse - things that were all incredibly popular in the vulgar sense, but then died out. A few truly great pieces will rise above even the most proliferated cultural milieu.

The problem is that are only means of comparison are to look to the past; and, yes, those were very different conditions to today. I agree with you on the idea middle pseudo-literary class that makes teen fiction the most popular works.

But we don't know what to look for now; that is to say that whatever work from this age that becomes a classic won't be what's being pushed to us by our culture. It will be something subversive, ignored, and outside of our culture. And in being so it will capture what this age of consumerism means to the human soul.

I admit I share your concerns; no age has ever lived in which information was so wide, and so lacking in depth. This is the age of metadata; it will be literature's greatest challenge; but art has met every challenge before.

Personally, I think it will take the next great conflict - whatever form it takes - to break us from this ennui. There hasn't been a major upheaval of the paradigm since WWII.

But none of this matters and I probably don't believe in any of it anyway.

>>8599087
it hasn't dried up creatively, just that almost by default the entire population is educated. suddenly the writings of educated people aren't as remarkable as they once were and as such lose the 'magic' of 'transcendence'

>>8599096
But what you are continuing to do is to use what happened in the past as a formula for what is going to happen in the future. You accurately recall the many cases in the past where only posthumously or even a century later has an author finally been recognized as a literary icon, and assume the same will be the case for us, simply because it happened before a lot.

But in this time of overwhelming literacy and genre fiction, what kind of person could possibly rise above it all?

At this point, the "middle class revolution" is a a thing of the past: it has already happened. If a great work of literature were to be produced, it would be written by the every man--just like what happened with Hemingway or Steinbeck. That was the artistic movement, the voice of the ascendant middle class.

But that time has passed. We do not convey great messages about our culture through literature.

Or through visual art. Painting is genre-art. It deals with one of the available schools and imitates it without originality. There are no great plays that are no just popular creations like Hairspray. If someone today were to write a great epic poem about American history, it would fall flat: nobody would care.

Literature is over.

>>8599117
literature isn't over just because no one cares about modernism anymore

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>>8597670
>>8598942
>>8599087
>>8599117

holy shit you are a pseud

>>8599117
The only modern play I can think of that I enjoy is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead... which was written in the 60's. So I’ll concede that little of undeniable merit is produced these days.

I tentatively agree . I just want to think of the way out of this.

I believe that the greatest problem we face now is how everyone is slowly being indoctrinated to think like a computer. I read a research article recently about how our brains --- in a natural response to their environment --- are beginning to adapt to think with computers, not alongside them.

As in, we place less emphasis on memory, and more on a sort of mental hyperlink: a code or key to recall the information when we need it, since it’s always available. Even our life experiences; why remember them when we can just look up the 100’s of digital photographs we have? Our brain has adapted to think in the context of infinite storage.

So perhaps literature is failing because imagination is failing. In order to imagine, we reconstitute memories. Why bother, when an image is out there somewhere, and we merely need to find it?

>>8599144
Good point.

I think arts have become more curatorial than creative.as a result.

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>>8597670
>Because what makes a work great is not the aesthetics or even the story the author has to say, but that it reflects a stage of the cultural organism before its creative light has been extinguished.
That is historically incorrect. Art gives birth to culture, not the other way around. Homer, while drawing upon the Greek heroic culture, did not end up writing for it, but for the city-states. Virgil wrote for the still growing Empire. Dante preceded unified Italy. Very rarely are the greats purely crystalizers of an apex--not that they're incapable of writing in the appointed style, but that they reach beyond that.

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>>8599251
Seemingly, when we conceive of culture in the conventional way. But in my Spengler's conception, Culture is an organism. What you are referring to is the face of culture: visible culture. On the surface, surely, Homer contributes to Greek culture, just as Virgil contributes to Augustan culture, just as Shakespeare contributes to Elizabethan culture--sure.

But what I'm talking about is Culture with a capital C. Culture is a grand organism that goes through stages of life, and the various movements and possibilities of artistic expression are nothing more than this Culture articulating itself through chosen voices. The very fact that something like Paradise Lost is able to be written, AND received so well, AND make such a lasting expression, AND still remain as a landmark work of literature demonstrates that it was Culture articulating itself with Milton as the voice.

If someone today were to write a work that is artistically parallel to Paradise Lost, in that it was written in the same aesthetic style and was therefore equally beautiful and had all the themes that Paradise Lost had, it would fail spectacularly. Because our Culture stage has moved on, and that person would have produced nothing more than a conscious imitation, not a "revealed work" of Cultural necessity.

My argument is that there is no more Culturally necessary art. Because our Culture is dead or dying. It is for this reason that not only do I honestly find it impossible to consider anything written lately as "literature" (Zadie Smith for example is genre fiction of the minority experience), but that I could never produce a great work of art. Our Culture simply does not permit it.

Unless you can travel to the future you cant say that any of our current books tv shows or movie wouldnt stand the test of time maybe when you are a lot older you will see your grandchildren marvelling at a tv show or book you thought had a short lifespan.

And dante was so boring....

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>>8599927
The fact that it is even possible for you to find Dante boring, assuming you are well-educated and individually capable of appreciating good literature, only illustrates my point: that our Cultural mode has provided us with limitations and a certain tunnel vision that restricts everything we do to the level of the popular.

We read old works with a certain reverence, treating them as perfect and almost mysterious. We approach them with several different critical theories and are at an utter lack for answers all the time. In short, the doings of ascendant Culture are unknown to us. The scholars in universities devote their lives to unpacking and unlocking a Cultural relic that to its contemporary audience had an obvious and easy meaning that reflected their experience. Shakespeare surely spoke to an early modern in a way that we will never truly understand, just as Dante spoke to his Renaissance contemporaries in a way that will forever remain a mystery to us, but which his contemporaries could appreciate as if it were gold.

And by contemporary I don't even have to mean immediate contemporary, but the audience within a century will do.

>>8598781
>yet people have been complaining about what's wrong with their generation since the beginning of time
Red pill: It's all been going down the shitter since the invention of agriculture and the conception of civilization.

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>>8599968

>>8599976
Yes I am familiar. However I'd argue we've been dying ever since the invention of consciousness, a necessity of culture.

>>8597670

I agree that the rise of universal literacy and the market permeability of the information age has made our literary culture deluged in shit, but I don't see how this prevents worthy art from being created.

Someone who's smart enough to write something worthy isn't going to be polluted by mainstream culture.

>>8599980
Unrelated, but would you argue that for the hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, consciousness only appeared at a later date in that history?

>>8599982
Yes. Around the time of the invention of agriculture. Before that humanity directly obeyed commands from the spirit world. This break is represented by the tale of the Garden of Eden and various similar bronze age myths.

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>>8599981
>something worthy
Then let's delve into the specifics: what could be worthy?

Everyone is a writer. As a culture, we are obsessed with writing. We are quick to destroy another person because of grammatical or spelling errors. The first thing that we do when we encounter someone else's writing is categorize how it is problematic: >>8599129

There are thousands if not millions of writers trying to get published. There are probably countless unpublished epic poems that are grander and vaster in scope than the Iliad; sonnets more beautiful than Shakespeare's; novels better written than your favorite Dickens story. And yet the very fact that there are millions of these things makes all of them unfortunately nothing more than the popular.

The tyranny of the popular prevents the existence of literature. That Song of Ice and Fire was elevated to public consciousness has little to do with merits but mostly to do with the coincidences that lead that particular popular author to fame. ASOIAF, just like Harry Potter, is just the popular.

A person writing a social critique that highlights our experience will just be writing genre-fiction of the social critique category.

Etc.

I simply cannot see how the future critics are going to sift through the countless millions of novels, plays, poems etc written in this age and make the decision that a list of x many gets to count as literature compared to genre fiction.

>>8599922

Jesus Christ, Marie. They're Minerals

le wrong generaygun xd

>>8600085

So it's the right generation then?

>>8600099
Pretty much, yeah.

>>8600105

Isn't that just as much an ideological position as thinking you're in the wrong generation?

>>8600120
If you use the claim that the past was worse to justify everything that's still wrong with modern times then I guess so.