Art and Culture # 48: The Age Old Questions
-For the Uncensored!
Throughout the years of my adult and childhood existence, art has always been part of my life. It’s always been there for me. Even when I had been loneliest the most. The Age Old Question for me is: “Is Art supposed to repeat old techniques in order to find immortality?”
It’s a good question. Does it make sense to keep repeating what people already know? I think the conversation prepares us to ask a deep prolonging nagging thought. If I am an artist is there a contract between what people want and should artists really create something new when people want the same old thing?
With the moniker, “Don’t give me what I need, but what I want” being the topic of 2021, it comes as a disparaging time for anyone who wants to create art. I have no ill will on readers or what they think of my work. Being an artist is learning to let the audience have there opinion. It’s called freedom of speech. It’s why I only encourage debate when there’s actually a position to take.
As an artist does giving people what they want provide any real sustenance for an artist to create a story without pressure against an artist trying to create something new? There’s a problem within any community as the Boomer and Gen-Exers are facing there end of days. Once was a beautiful time to be an artist, the possibility that major gatekeepers, like Hollywood and the Big Six Publishers, have to hand off the business to a new generation. It’s not likely the same practical thoughts that move each generation.
What matters more in the culture? But the question is, does a generation have to pick up the mantle where the previous generation left off? Is the complication behind this all too troublesome? If books, video games, movies are to exist, where is the transition of power? Who is allowed to be the ruler among the land? Is success actually worth it if you sacrifice all your talent just to have an in at a fancy publisher or game developer?
Much of art is a reflective piece of deranged people who have there worldview. Damage is what most genuine art is based on. Not perfection. Perfection is a trite existence of what privilege can do to most talented people. It doesn’t give them hunger. It doesn’t allow them to say what they think.
One must struggle and face such existence through the words, images, or ideas that we all have to create. But if woke culture seems to pervade through 2021, and beyond is the danger behind woke culture proving that we have no more patience for Art? Art has to be complicated in order to prove a point. Art helps us learn from our mistakes. It’s up to the reader to decide what messages they can find within.
If the fixation upon art in 2021 is how accessible it has become, but can anyone really live off it? Unless you have help from a major publisher or studio backing up your vision? Patronage is the clear consensus of what makes art a viable source of income. That’s part of the Age Old Question.
The deception in making money is the idea that Ron Disney said, “When Value is clear, decisions are easy.” Value is what makes most entertainment part of the pride that a backer, or investor must feel. Explaining it in an elevator pitch is what helps the money people rest easy, and the value in perfection can sometimes be misleading. Many who saw “Blue Velvet” were disgusted by the emotional heartbreak a film can do, but the act of watching a film over again provides value where most people don’t get a director’s vision.
If everything has value, like Baudrillard said, what has value the most? Attempting to answer this requires a conversation about who we as individuals see as good or shit. A decision to buy a book, movie, or game has to come from what people see as individual value. If value is based off moral necessity to find ourselves in what we see in the art in front of us. It comes from fans who must make a persuasive case about what they see in the film as well as what the film or a piece of art is representing.
The unending consequence of how to change and what matters most? Do people always find value in the familiar or the tangible persistence of what must be new? There are varying answers to the questions. If what people have to find is the familiar there is no purpose of creating something new. People get cynical when they see the same thing over and over again, and a once valued piece of art becomes a brand, not just an idea. A brand is what marketers talk about.
Branding is what you expect when you put a microchip in your dog. It brands the idea within a staple that doesn’t require too much provocation, revelation. It’s often a blood curdling idea to change things, and while such perceptions are reminders of what comes before, the wave of PC culture in 2021 is that no one must create anything new and cancelling projects for the mere mention of taboo subjects is a damning decimation of how to never create anything new.
If what we want is new, do we always want it in familiar terms? Being familiar never actually produces anything new. Most people know this, and most rational people, when you pull them away from there twitter account, would agree.
Being familiar doesn’t always create a sense of perceptive or brilliant piece of art. If the understanding of art is always through familiarity, there’s no difference between Mcdonalds Big Mac and a 50,000 hamburger. Taste is always subjective in art. That is true. But if familiarity is all we want, it also means where the meat was made. What is the difference in value that comes with each example? The same can be applied to the age old question. What is the cost between each products.
Art, even as Chuck Palahniuk said, “is not food” and it’s what people see in order to find what place in what people see. If a book is more expensive, there has to be a reason why. It’s usually because of the paper density, whether the spine is new, and it might be signed by the author as well. It’s complicated when you start to put a price tag on what people love as well.
But what people have is not just taste, but bias. People, as long as we have remembered, have bias as to what Art they hold dear. Some see buying hardcover science fiction and horror classics as it adds value to their collection. I have such a faithful essence to collecting such pieces of art, but the difference is the will surrounding us to buy everything and nothing.
The will to hold back on pleasures and decide what we hold dear. Because we’re not going to live forever. We’re not going to bring our treasures with us. But as Frank Herbert said, “I love the fact that we can’t predict everything that will happen.”
It’s constantly boring if you have to write the same thing over and over again. If the foundation of society is built upon what we know, does this mean that art must face the same dysfunctional lifestyle of “give us what we want and not what we need?”
And the typical argument is that you have read every Stephen King book to know what his style is like. You start to understand it and it gets boring. The dysfunction of giving what people want is that people will get tired of it anyway. Some people will just move on from the work, and then go onto another author. The Age Old Question is that each failure of an author is that whether you gave what everyone wanted, you will ultimately disappoint someone anyway. It’s okay to disappoint your fans. The question is if you do disappoint your audience will you both be as receptive as you can in order to build new bridges in your art? Are you looking at what makes people like your work and are you finding out what doesn’t work?
It just depends on what feedback your audience wants from you. And getting in touch with your audience on social media is a good thing. I may be writing my stories, but someone is going to read it at some point. I spent a long time creating artistic novels, but once you learn to edit your work, the vision gets easier to manage. Part of this requires another question to be asked: “But what if it’s a clear vision and it had great test results?”
Unfortunately art is not an algorithm. Art is not always based on mathematics. A test screening doesn’t always prove the film will be able to sustain a huge massive following. Many critics are paid to give good reviews to games, movies. When you see authors like Stephen King, John Grisham, provide a recommendation on the cover, and what you think about the book can be decided from the authors you read.
If you approached a Greg Bear book, you might see authors recommend the book you have never heard of. What happens is one of two things. Depending on the authors writing or whoever gives a blurb on the back of the book can be two things that happens. There are readers who read everything, and authors blurbs don’t matter to the reader themselves.
Walking through a library or bookstore requires you to find your next book, but Art itself requires the chance to be seen or heard. But what if you only followed critical reception? But if critical reception is the primary source of what books or art you consume, does it only mean you are divided when people like it? The same can be said if a reader doesn’t always agree with what a public has to say.
If a piece of Art is based upon legacy and not upon artistic merit, does the implication of Art require the will of the people to drive a piece of art to its success? Again, Art doesn’t always have to hit at the same time. Dark Souls doesn’t always appeal to everyone, but everyone has played a Souls like game at some point. Heavy on RPG elements and crafting weapons with upgrades. Or Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. It proves that while everyone knows the form of a Souls like game, not everyone is dead set on a publisher such as From Software, and there difficulty meter.
By that example, not everyone is into difficult pieces of Art. Some people just want to read something or play and put it down. Difficulty is hard to place any pieces of Art. Difficult words always used to put a higher value on books. Difficult games also had a value, at one time. With difficult games come higher rewards, but this is all part of the greater question dedicated to Art and Culture.
The phrase repeated throughout the 2000’s to 2020 was, “I’m sorry I can’t date because I’m just too busy.” With millennials having to work more than three jobs to pay the bills, consuming art, but stats from stastista.com prove that book sales have remained incredibly healthy “750 %”[i] increase in 2020, against the “print media counterparts, like newspapers.” What the failure of this means is that while everyone is working they are also consuming. So my thoughts were betrayed by the stats. But is the age old question based on technique or is the form one more matter to discuss?
This does provide more as difficulty is the promise of expanding horizons that people don’t see. If censorious measures are done to hold people accountable for freedom of speech, then artists now have to face a more desperate accuser: the media and the corporations guiding such censorious intrusions on free speech. If a higher difficulty made illegal by corporate publishers, then the decision to have a difficult vision dumbed down by censorious media conglomerates can deny an artist his vision too.
What the Age Old Question proves is that we are willing to talk about this in order to understand 2021, and beyond. If value is destroyed by corporate measures, then that vision is not unique and provides no insights into the moral complexities human beings are offered. The Age Old Question is the sobriety that men in there prime often want, but rarely ever experience. To figure everything out is not what an artist does at the beginning of there existence.
What existence often provides is a template, and the power of existence is what people create when they aren’t grinding away in there day job. To find that beautiful perception that a friend can find in you is what people rarely have. It’s not just about consumption. You aren’t supposed to read or play all the games you want. But if the existence beyond men in there daily understanding could then perform the bitter enclave between men who see there way through the wisdom of men and there life perceived.
If the derelict interpretation of men who face there own seismic consequence within the blundering guilt of men who silence there words and no longer preserve that status beyond the normal echelon on what they consume, then it turns into free fall.
The Industry itself has this very God like mentality over what people have and consume. Frank Herbert gave the example that “I’m on the stage, and the audience is looking up at me”[ii] and the problem is today, there is not just one stage. There’s a power of infatuation that people find so incredibly powerful in art.
If the outcome is gradually realizing that all stages provide the normal purpose of artist and audience relationship, the understanding is that you don’t often find the wisdom of artists all that perceptive. The Art is what most people focus on. My words by themselves only have validity when I am encouraged by inspiration or the way one feels when they have to imagine a place that nobody else has ever seen.
The large scale presentation of a film is what most people who walk into a theater look for. Or those who read a book want to read what an author is going to write on the page. The difference is the realization that people now have the ability to be what they want and who they want.
Avatars are no longer a thing of the past. It’s complications that only perform such sobering acts of love and respect. Art needs an intoxicating yet sobering perspective. If the failure to which society will never learn, Art is the staple that gets to ask every question that we can ask. But if that’s being under threat, what will the world become? A nightmarish Borg planet where everyone sees and thinks the same thoughts? If the continuity between sober thoughts and the world we create, is the question that most of us dare to question. But if the will to ask questions are over, then what does that mean for society and the progresses that we have made?
[i] https://www.statista.com/statistics/422595/print-book-sales-usa/.[ii]
-Louis Bruno is the author of more than 19 books, including, The Michael Project, The Michael Project: Book 2: The Lost Children of Eve, Thy Kingdom Come, The Disintegrating Bloodline, Apocalypse Soldier, Hierarchy of Dwindling Sheep. His books can be found on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Lulu. He can be found on Gab, https://gab.com/thereallouistbruno, Minds https://www.minds.com/lbruno8063/. Instagram @lbrruno8063 and @louisbrunoofficialbook. Our Freedom Book https://www.ourfreedombook.com/thereallouistbruno17. He has written for the Intellectual Conservative and Ephemere. His next series, City of Sand is out now:https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/louis-bruno/city-of-sand/hardcover/product-rke9jz.html?page=1&pageSize=4. Also, if you can’t subscribe so that you can get members only content, please be sure to share the articles, as well. Every little bit helps in the war against Big Tech. Thanks for reading.