today i will bother you with an autistic rant about all the half-baked midwit "common sense" takes that everyone in every community dedicated to the discussion of art indulges in all the time.
most of this post will use pop culture examples because that's what the vast majority of online discourse revolves around. but i've seen all of these applied to other kinds of art.
>cool robot
i despise this fucking meme.
yes, gundam is an anti-war series. it puts a spotlight on the meaningless horrors
and tragedies of war. however, it is also a series about a cool robot. the cool
robot is there, all the time, looking cool as it strikes heroic poses and slaughters
enemies. one cannot simply say that one prominent aspect of the series is arbitrarily
important and definitive while another is just for fun and should be ignored.
but here's the bigger thing: can anyone stop for five seconds and at least consider
that the tension between its anti-war perspective and its inevitable aestheticization
of warfare actually makes gundam a slightly richer series to experience and think about? is that so gundamn hard for some people? does everything have to be so damn singular, linear, literal?
similar examples: <insert crime story> here can't be aestheticizing crime because it shows that the criminal is immoral or he dies at the end etc. berserk isn't a power fantasy because guts goes through a lot of shit.
guess what: the misery and tragedy makes these characters cooler.
i am not commenting on whether berserk is actually a "power fantasy". i think it's a stupid discussion to begin with. what i'm baffled by is that people seem completely unfamiliar with the concept of ambivalence. the simple notion that you can have positive and negative feelings towards the same thing is almost non-existent in online discourse around art and it encourages less nuance in both creation of and engagement with art.
>x is <bad thing> so it's bad, buy y is <bad thing> ironically so it's good
they are the same text.
i know that the "there is nothing outside of the text" is controversial and maybe goes a little overboard. but is it not more absurd to imagine a scenario like "i thought this work was fascist, but now that i've learned the author actually intended it ironically, i can engage with it as an illumination/lampooning of fascism"; as if you needed permission to engage with it in a particular way? why is starship troopers a valid "window" into "fascism" but not mein kampf? sure, one of them is entertainment and softens the blow, but is this all it is, the vanity of spoiled crowds wanting to engage with a severe subject without feeling any of that severity, wanting to be "edutained" about horrible things rather than treat them with the proper seriousness? i am not criticizing starship troopers or any work that makes light of a serious subject; but if the reason for making light is the idea that the audiences cannot handle it otherwise, that just seems pathetic.
i don't necessarily advocate for completely removing context (including intent) from one's engagement with art, but the idea that *everything* has to rest on it, that it completely separates what's valuable and isn't, that it so overpowers anything in the actual object of art itself that it can single-handedly determine whether you should even touch it… no, it's wrong. it's ridiculous.
>this trope has been subverted so often that seeing it played straight becomes refreshing again
you fool.
you've shown yourself as the perfect mark for the laziness and mediocrity of the culture industry. they can sell you things that were done better a hundred years ago under the guise of returning to the good old values, because they know you're not gonna watch old shit anyway. you think it's icky or looks weird or whatever.
so lo and behold, they made superman edgy and it sold, and now they made an anti-edgy superman and it sold to the same audiences who "got tired" of edgy superman, and yet this dance has been going on for so long that nowhere within it has anyone made a unique contribution to the character and its genre that genuinely advances it and explores new possibilities.
>art is just for entertainment/escapism
there's nothing wrong with someone using art for entertainment and nothing else. it's your life.
but as a factual statement, one that necessarily belongs to art history and
anthropology, this is wrong. full stop. art for as long as we know it has been
used to celebrate virtue, display mastery, mock the powerful, honor the dead, direct rituals and ceremonies, etc. and note that i did not have to bring "wisdom" or "learning" or didacticism into this.
one can well question whether any of these things have use to them personally, but this is what art has always meant for humanity as a whole. objectively. absolutely. undeniably.
>this story's portrayal of human nature/behavior is unrealistic
and i suppose you are the perfect arbiter of how humans think and act in
all circumstances, o 22-year-old shut-in loser on reddit?
(yes, this *can* be a salient complaint, if the behavior portrayed is ridiculous
enough or contradicted by history, but in more subtle cases, no, no one has any grounds to stand on to say "this would never happen, no one would ever behave like this".)
>art doesn't have to have "themes"/it's an outside imposition to discuss "themes"
all art has themes. read that again. all of it. everybody poops has themes. beavis
and butt-head has themes. stupid people on the internet think if you talk about the
"meaning" of a work of art you're ascribing an ideology to it, or a deliberate
message, etc. and assuming didacticism.
yes, even the stupid thing you think you like because it doesn't have a bitch in your ear telling you what it's about has themes. dragon ball z has themes. if dragon ball z were otherwise identical but everyone failed at the end of the saiyan saga because willpower and friendship weren't good enough (or however that went, i have not watched it in 15 years), it would not be nearly as popular, and you probably wouldn't like it. you like it because it's a story about determination and friendship and facing adversity in a particular way, and the eventual success that the story implies comes from that. those are not themes any academic wants to base an essay on, but they are the reason kids dress up as goku and latin american politicians posted tributes to akira toriyama on social media.
>style over substance/it has no plot/etc
no one has ever said this shit about a painting or poem, because it doesn't make sense. because more or less the point of poetry is to emphasize the expressiveness of form (style) over mere content. because if you rewrote "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow / creeps in this petty pace from day to day" as "boy howdy time sure moves fast" you would be retarded.
but the moment something has a hint of narrative or is in a tradition where narrative is expected, this completely binds you to narrative for some fucking reason. a painting can not have a plot and it's fine, but if the painting now moves and becomes animation, now you *need* to have a three-part structure with rising and falling action and character development, otherwise it's ~objectively bad~. son of the white mare is bad because what about the plot man? but inside out is art because it taught me that it's okay to feel sad sometimes.
and yes, the rejoinder that "style is substance" is often quite lazy, but not nearly as bad.
>justifying your opinions by appealing to market logic, positioning yourself as a "consumer", etc
this is the most pathetic trick of all. art has existed for as long as humans have. it is not inherently bound to capitalism or markets, although of course as it is made and exists today, it is.
it's not unlike friendship, or comfort, or looking at a pretty sky. it's an activity that the system forces to be at least a little transactional. and yet there is all the difference in the world between the slightly uncomfortable and unavoidable fact that your friends from work are only your friends because your similarity in class and social status allowed you to mingle at the same job, and outright "dan is my best friend because he gives me expensive gifts".
which is to say, fuck you.
this concludes my fag talk.
also, i hate the application of the term "postmodern irony" to anything that's too cool for school or "quippy" or whatever. pomo novels were called ironic because they called attention to and subverted specific assumptions about the novel that existed back then. those assumptions don't exist with modern popcorn movies. marvel movies have shit dissonant dialogue because it's an easy style of writing that lets them play to both halves of the audience (the ones who think they're too cool for the material and the ones who don't). i promise you it has nothing to do with thomas pynchon giving his characters overtly artificial names and ending novels mid-sentence as a reaction against the idea of the novel as an enlightened liberal-humanist sense-making counterpart to myth