I would add to all of the above the social recognition and appreciation of all of the structural infrastructure, off or backstage if you like, that help to create and support any artist. Teachers, technicians, designers, editors, manufacturers of arts or film or materials etc…
Yes! The way the faces of movies are usually only the directors and actors when half of the work is the grueling hours of editors and set design, costumes, casting, sound, audio, stunt artists, etc. They also participate in creating beautiful artwork and deserve much more recognition!
Yes, I think this is an important counterpoint to the idea that "AI" video generation software should "democratize" and replace Hollywood. What many people see as simply empowering more idea-havers to be seen, is actually replacing one support structure for another.
Since i write a lot about money, I was particularly interested in your comment ; "There has to be an understanding that money and art come, essentially, from different domains. Money is a very imprecise evaluator of artistic quality..."
In so many aspects of art, however, there is a confusion of those two domains, more so in my opinion with contemporary painting and sculpture than in any other field. Perhaps time is the ultimate critic.
Agreed David. These things are always going to be highly confused. Interestingly, I think a great deal of one's life as an artist - for anybody being sincere about it - is to work through their relationship to money.
I respect money and find it to be very beautiful and expressive, actually, in a lot of ways. How what people spend their money on is reflective of their genuine needs and desires, as opposed to what they think people want to hear. How money facilitates friction-less and often non-violent social exchange with all kinds of strangers.
But art tends to operate according to different principles. Much of it is based in the idea of communicating with an era that doesn't even exist yet - and is of course not concerned with our money. And then art tends to push into domains of the subconscious, of inchoate inner life, of archetypal structures that very often precede and are deeper than the very adult parts of our brains that are able to grasp how money works. Don't get me wrong! - I am always interested in treatments of money in art, and I am very drawn to writers who do it well (Nathanael West, Richard Yates, Dostoevsky, etc), but I think the "worth" of a work of art belongs to some matrix of criteria that is very different from what money is good at assessing.
A problem I see is what is quality in the realm of the arts? The very word means qualitative, that is a subjective appraisal, which implies taste, which is an idiosyncratic thing.
This sort of assessment is going to be resolved via social learning biases. So while there will be direct bias (assessment of quality by knowledgeable observers), there will also be prestige bias (assessment by cultural influencers) and frequency bias (we tend to like what others like).
An example was my statistics class project in 1981. I did a blocked design evaluating beer preferences using my friends who were coming up to watch the football game (and get hammered). The question being addressed was, could I buy a keg of a cheap beer for a party and put the label of an expensive beer on it and get away with it because nobody can really tell. As a prelude to the test I asked the participants to rank the six beers (all mass-market light beers). I then asked them to rate each beer and give their guess as to what it was. The a priori ranks were all the about the same and matched the choices made by Kyran, who was able to correctly identify all the beers (he truly knew his beers). The rest had no idea of what they were drinking and evaluations what they thought were low-ranked beers high and vice versa.
The results were yes I could get away with the cheap beer plan as long as Kyran wasn't there for he would know. The ranking of beers people made before the test were those of Kyran. He functioned as the influencer in the group., based on his actual competence in knowing what he was drinking and knowing what he liked.
Yet if you had surveyed my little group who would find X as the beer of choice, but that really reflected Kyran's taste, the others all rated other beers as their top choices. But since Kyran was the only person with the discernment to know what he was drinking, his taste defined that of the group.
Haha! What a good story and survey! I'd be very curious to see that experiment with expensive wines! (Vice's "The Shed at Dulwich" episode is a good illustration of how it can work with restaurants.)
I don't think a large quantity of cultural production means a healthy artistic culture: art has to aspire toward high artistic heights as well. Quantity does nothing to measure that. The Middle Ages had a lower output, but works like Dante's Divine Comedy are among the best ever written. Money is a poor measure of art because numbers in general are a poor measure of art; no one thinks Joyce Carol Oates is better than Joyce because Oates has been more prolific. Numbers are for machines: art is for people. And no amount of popular literature referencing the Fibonacci Sequence as if they're the first to have heard of it will change that.
The question I want to know is not how many novels are published in brutto: but how many A Farewell to Arms,' Crime & Punishments, Anna Kareninas, etc. do we have in our day and age. When someone can answer that question effortlessly then and only then will we know we've returned to a Golden Age.
Artists should also champion their "right" to solitude in a time when collectivism is guilt-tripping almost everyone into believing that individualism doesn't exist. Literature is an individual production no matter how much help the author receives from others: all the authorial biographies I've read (which incidentally people encourage other writers not to read) are crystal clear about that. The fact that many artists have been greatly assisted by others should not be interpreted as an argument toward collectivist servitude. The guilt-tripping into collectivism popular nowadays reminds me of a proverb used in The Count of Monte Cristo: che a compagno a padrone. He who has a partner has a master. Because of the postmodern condition, the power plays utilized by postmodernists in these relationships is another suspicious factor contrary to the health of the arts. It is no coincidence that those who advocate for this collectivism are those most interested in power-mongering. Not only in corridors of power, but socially so that "the stupid people" know what's right. (Anyone overly concerned with "the stupid people" is most probably a postmodern powermonger) And as a plus, younger artists separated from the greater tradition of old are manipulated because "Joyce couldn't do it without Nora Barnacle" and other questionable claims that are framed to look helpful but that in fact originate from petty and popular envy of the artist and the Harrison Bergeron desire to control them. (Joyce could just have easily fallen in love with another woman and remained James Joyce) How this environment is healthy for literary humanism is a question for which I don't expect to hear a good and healthy answer. Perhaps the "safe spaces" you mention - much as I abhor that concept socio-politically - are a logical response to this?
Apart from these two points, I agree with everything else. Glad you emphasize the risk-taking element: I'm sick of how tame contemporary literature has been since the Infinite Jest era. Those who say literature isn't controversial are wrong: the issue isn't that literature as an art form has ceased to be controversial; but that authors, so to say, "have no balls." (Except for James Ellroy, who once said "I write the novels that no one else has the balls to write.") We know this because of at least one contemporary author (apart from Ellroy) with balls: Michel Houellebecq. I've met people who get riled up at the sound of his name. Agree or disagree with his literary vision, no mainstream American author would dare to write literature as he does because they care about their image more than the arts. That's another one for your list.
Felix, I felt a bit lightweight and New World as I was writing this. Very happy to see your Old World gravitas setting me straight!
I've done significant internal battle in my life with a tradition that I think of as the Harold Bloom/Vladimir Nabokov sensibility, which holds pretty much that there are only a few people who have "It," who are in touch with the continuity of hight art through the ages and that it's better overall if everybody else just shuts up. In my life, I've decided to really revolt from that vision. I think more people having the opportunity to express themselves is more important, actually, than masterpieces.
But I do respect the other point of view. The compromise I've come up with in my mind is that there is such a thing as objective evaluation of quality, but that what tends to distinguish it isn't "genius" or innate "talent" but the willingness to take risks. So there is a broad entry into the realm of art but that doesn't meant that everybody is good: we are all in intense competition with each other, depending most of all on how brave we are able to be in it.
How do you define a good quality artwork without any measurement, of course maybe for art we don’t need strict measurement or anything as art is artist expressing emotions and the world around herself, but we have to agree that not everything is good enough! Or has a high quality which is also very subjective, I might enjoy modern art and not necessarily all the conceptual art, but some might still think traditional painting is the best art (which I would like to discuss with them and change their mind ;) or better say lighten their bias) but it makes it very difficult. Specially nowadays that you can do all sorts of random bs and call it art and some people will be amazed by it. To which I always say it is different but it’s not necessarily nice or artistic or even having a meaning!
Good questions Sara! It's totally possible to spend one's whole life arguing over these questions. I do think it doesn't collapse into complete relativism. There is such a thing as standards, which have to do with some very deep structures in the human brain: we get very upset by bad art and astonishing things happen to us when we run into good art -- and startling numbers of people react more or less the same way when faced with the same work. But, yes, there are layers upon layers to these questions!
Money is very important in my life. I don't know,why have you unsent the letter. First of you can achieve the points in your matter. But I will never anything. Only show your social media
What is quality and what is not quality. You will grace only your substack. My opinion is that Health is lost, Something is lost, character is lost everything is lost.
'...endless rounds of gatekeeping, a kind of social promotion of those who for whatever reason have already made it through or around the gatekeeping system...' - omnipresent and one of the challenges for younger generations. Only if a major event happens, usually a tragedy, the gates open for a while.
Yeah, these things are a problem in every era, but I think we're actually in a surprisingly narrow and closed-off artistic culture. The outlets of art - book publishing, etc - feel that they're under assault from the internet and video, that their profit margins are shrinking, and so they get into a very defensive crouch and tend to reward only that which is already within their guild. As a culture, it may not be so dissimilar to France in the era just before the impressionists and modernists.
There are so many things here that I agree with... most certainly the money aspect; when artists are stigmatized as starving, why would anyone want to become one?
FWIW, I thin Taiwan is home of the most promising work being put into healthy culture on a national scale, due to Audrey Tang, Minister of Digital Affairs, and an awesome software engineer as well as culture engineer, who wrote the first implementation of Perl 6 in 2006 (whose design had been going on since 2000) in Haskell "in order to learn Haskell", and who designed a public social media ecology largely responsible for the seeming miracle of Taiwan having under a couple dozen deaths from COVID in the first 18 months, with no general shutdowns or censorship, but an anti-disinformation system modeled on the body's immune system, but with a sense of humor (very strict regulation, however of travel to and from the island). Taiwan is vary likely far and away the country most bombarded by disinformation, thanks to it's big neighbor.
No lol! It's from a SimCity program (I think). Very interesting what you're saying. I've been reading some different things recently about what an amazing culture Taiwan really is. Would love to know more.
Thanks. I'd like to know more too. Please let me know if you come across anything very interesting. It's hard to get any kind of coherent view of anything in this post big media "X"-Twitter/substack/YouTube/commercialized-search-engine/etc. world. I think AI, if under very strong pressure to be more human-centered, has promise as an integrating and balancing filter for getting some since of how "the knowledgeable world" sees any given topic.
One of the centers of my attention these days is https://prosocial.world, which, along with Braver Angels, to try to bring about positive change in these areas.
In terms of what *kind of change* in the world might give the best bang for the buck in terms of individual effort to make a sanely democratically self-governmening set of nested worlds, it might surprise you to know that I'd chose "Ranked choice" or "instant runoff" voting. I lot of talk about what makes for the good democrace centers around fairness, I doubt we can achieve anything (towards fairness or anything else) if our ability to think as communities is a totally hopeless mess. I think RCV, together with a well thought out plan (not well thought out yet, but needds to be), could greatly improve the epistemic nature of functioning democracies.
This article randomly popped up in my recommended reads, and I really liked the title "What Does a Healthy Culture Look like?" I think of it in terms of youth culture, and more than just for artists, but for youth in general. And I agree with basically all of your points. I also love your endpoint: “A healthy culture is looking, constantly, to best itself.” I love the Greek word "metanoeo" which is often used in the Greek translation of the New Testament, which refers to this concept of improving oneself: change of breath, change of mind, change of spirit. It is much more inviting and friendly than the translation from Latin which uses the word "repent" from the Latin "penitir."
Basically, a "healthy culture" is one in which relationships are prioritized and we are constantly seeking to connect better with those around us and to contribute meaningfully to something greater than ourselves.
Very interesting Kreg. This is a gorgeous sentence:
"Basically, a 'healthy culture' is one in which relationships are prioritized and we are constantly seeking to connect better with those around us and to contribute meaningfully to something greater than ourselves."
I would add to all of the above the social recognition and appreciation of all of the structural infrastructure, off or backstage if you like, that help to create and support any artist. Teachers, technicians, designers, editors, manufacturers of arts or film or materials etc…
Yes! The way the faces of movies are usually only the directors and actors when half of the work is the grueling hours of editors and set design, costumes, casting, sound, audio, stunt artists, etc. They also participate in creating beautiful artwork and deserve much more recognition!
Yes, I think this is an important counterpoint to the idea that "AI" video generation software should "democratize" and replace Hollywood. What many people see as simply empowering more idea-havers to be seen, is actually replacing one support structure for another.
Great point!
Since i write a lot about money, I was particularly interested in your comment ; "There has to be an understanding that money and art come, essentially, from different domains. Money is a very imprecise evaluator of artistic quality..."
In so many aspects of art, however, there is a confusion of those two domains, more so in my opinion with contemporary painting and sculpture than in any other field. Perhaps time is the ultimate critic.
Agreed David. These things are always going to be highly confused. Interestingly, I think a great deal of one's life as an artist - for anybody being sincere about it - is to work through their relationship to money.
I respect money and find it to be very beautiful and expressive, actually, in a lot of ways. How what people spend their money on is reflective of their genuine needs and desires, as opposed to what they think people want to hear. How money facilitates friction-less and often non-violent social exchange with all kinds of strangers.
But art tends to operate according to different principles. Much of it is based in the idea of communicating with an era that doesn't even exist yet - and is of course not concerned with our money. And then art tends to push into domains of the subconscious, of inchoate inner life, of archetypal structures that very often precede and are deeper than the very adult parts of our brains that are able to grasp how money works. Don't get me wrong! - I am always interested in treatments of money in art, and I am very drawn to writers who do it well (Nathanael West, Richard Yates, Dostoevsky, etc), but I think the "worth" of a work of art belongs to some matrix of criteria that is very different from what money is good at assessing.
Cheers!
- Sam
A problem I see is what is quality in the realm of the arts? The very word means qualitative, that is a subjective appraisal, which implies taste, which is an idiosyncratic thing.
This sort of assessment is going to be resolved via social learning biases. So while there will be direct bias (assessment of quality by knowledgeable observers), there will also be prestige bias (assessment by cultural influencers) and frequency bias (we tend to like what others like).
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-cultural-evolution-works#:~:text=One%20of%20these,on%20the%20internet.
An example was my statistics class project in 1981. I did a blocked design evaluating beer preferences using my friends who were coming up to watch the football game (and get hammered). The question being addressed was, could I buy a keg of a cheap beer for a party and put the label of an expensive beer on it and get away with it because nobody can really tell. As a prelude to the test I asked the participants to rank the six beers (all mass-market light beers). I then asked them to rate each beer and give their guess as to what it was. The a priori ranks were all the about the same and matched the choices made by Kyran, who was able to correctly identify all the beers (he truly knew his beers). The rest had no idea of what they were drinking and evaluations what they thought were low-ranked beers high and vice versa.
The results were yes I could get away with the cheap beer plan as long as Kyran wasn't there for he would know. The ranking of beers people made before the test were those of Kyran. He functioned as the influencer in the group., based on his actual competence in knowing what he was drinking and knowing what he liked.
Yet if you had surveyed my little group who would find X as the beer of choice, but that really reflected Kyran's taste, the others all rated other beers as their top choices. But since Kyran was the only person with the discernment to know what he was drinking, his taste defined that of the group.
I wonder if this is how it works with the arts.
Haha! What a good story and survey! I'd be very curious to see that experiment with expensive wines! (Vice's "The Shed at Dulwich" episode is a good illustration of how it can work with restaurants.)
I don't think a large quantity of cultural production means a healthy artistic culture: art has to aspire toward high artistic heights as well. Quantity does nothing to measure that. The Middle Ages had a lower output, but works like Dante's Divine Comedy are among the best ever written. Money is a poor measure of art because numbers in general are a poor measure of art; no one thinks Joyce Carol Oates is better than Joyce because Oates has been more prolific. Numbers are for machines: art is for people. And no amount of popular literature referencing the Fibonacci Sequence as if they're the first to have heard of it will change that.
The question I want to know is not how many novels are published in brutto: but how many A Farewell to Arms,' Crime & Punishments, Anna Kareninas, etc. do we have in our day and age. When someone can answer that question effortlessly then and only then will we know we've returned to a Golden Age.
Artists should also champion their "right" to solitude in a time when collectivism is guilt-tripping almost everyone into believing that individualism doesn't exist. Literature is an individual production no matter how much help the author receives from others: all the authorial biographies I've read (which incidentally people encourage other writers not to read) are crystal clear about that. The fact that many artists have been greatly assisted by others should not be interpreted as an argument toward collectivist servitude. The guilt-tripping into collectivism popular nowadays reminds me of a proverb used in The Count of Monte Cristo: che a compagno a padrone. He who has a partner has a master. Because of the postmodern condition, the power plays utilized by postmodernists in these relationships is another suspicious factor contrary to the health of the arts. It is no coincidence that those who advocate for this collectivism are those most interested in power-mongering. Not only in corridors of power, but socially so that "the stupid people" know what's right. (Anyone overly concerned with "the stupid people" is most probably a postmodern powermonger) And as a plus, younger artists separated from the greater tradition of old are manipulated because "Joyce couldn't do it without Nora Barnacle" and other questionable claims that are framed to look helpful but that in fact originate from petty and popular envy of the artist and the Harrison Bergeron desire to control them. (Joyce could just have easily fallen in love with another woman and remained James Joyce) How this environment is healthy for literary humanism is a question for which I don't expect to hear a good and healthy answer. Perhaps the "safe spaces" you mention - much as I abhor that concept socio-politically - are a logical response to this?
Apart from these two points, I agree with everything else. Glad you emphasize the risk-taking element: I'm sick of how tame contemporary literature has been since the Infinite Jest era. Those who say literature isn't controversial are wrong: the issue isn't that literature as an art form has ceased to be controversial; but that authors, so to say, "have no balls." (Except for James Ellroy, who once said "I write the novels that no one else has the balls to write.") We know this because of at least one contemporary author (apart from Ellroy) with balls: Michel Houellebecq. I've met people who get riled up at the sound of his name. Agree or disagree with his literary vision, no mainstream American author would dare to write literature as he does because they care about their image more than the arts. That's another one for your list.
Felix, I felt a bit lightweight and New World as I was writing this. Very happy to see your Old World gravitas setting me straight!
I've done significant internal battle in my life with a tradition that I think of as the Harold Bloom/Vladimir Nabokov sensibility, which holds pretty much that there are only a few people who have "It," who are in touch with the continuity of hight art through the ages and that it's better overall if everybody else just shuts up. In my life, I've decided to really revolt from that vision. I think more people having the opportunity to express themselves is more important, actually, than masterpieces.
But I do respect the other point of view. The compromise I've come up with in my mind is that there is such a thing as objective evaluation of quality, but that what tends to distinguish it isn't "genius" or innate "talent" but the willingness to take risks. So there is a broad entry into the realm of art but that doesn't meant that everybody is good: we are all in intense competition with each other, depending most of all on how brave we are able to be in it.
- Sam
How do you define a good quality artwork without any measurement, of course maybe for art we don’t need strict measurement or anything as art is artist expressing emotions and the world around herself, but we have to agree that not everything is good enough! Or has a high quality which is also very subjective, I might enjoy modern art and not necessarily all the conceptual art, but some might still think traditional painting is the best art (which I would like to discuss with them and change their mind ;) or better say lighten their bias) but it makes it very difficult. Specially nowadays that you can do all sorts of random bs and call it art and some people will be amazed by it. To which I always say it is different but it’s not necessarily nice or artistic or even having a meaning!
Good questions Sara! It's totally possible to spend one's whole life arguing over these questions. I do think it doesn't collapse into complete relativism. There is such a thing as standards, which have to do with some very deep structures in the human brain: we get very upset by bad art and astonishing things happen to us when we run into good art -- and startling numbers of people react more or less the same way when faced with the same work. But, yes, there are layers upon layers to these questions!
Money is very important in my life. I don't know,why have you unsent the letter. First of you can achieve the points in your matter. But I will never anything. Only show your social media
How do you define your good quality , without network. Your s mail is selfish issued matter
What is quality and what is not quality. You will grace only your substack. My opinion is that Health is lost, Something is lost, character is lost everything is lost.
'...endless rounds of gatekeeping, a kind of social promotion of those who for whatever reason have already made it through or around the gatekeeping system...' - omnipresent and one of the challenges for younger generations. Only if a major event happens, usually a tragedy, the gates open for a while.
Yeah, these things are a problem in every era, but I think we're actually in a surprisingly narrow and closed-off artistic culture. The outlets of art - book publishing, etc - feel that they're under assault from the internet and video, that their profit margins are shrinking, and so they get into a very defensive crouch and tend to reward only that which is already within their guild. As a culture, it may not be so dissimilar to France in the era just before the impressionists and modernists.
There are so many things here that I agree with... most certainly the money aspect; when artists are stigmatized as starving, why would anyone want to become one?
Thank you Bethel!
Is that Taiwan, by any chance?
FWIW, I thin Taiwan is home of the most promising work being put into healthy culture on a national scale, due to Audrey Tang, Minister of Digital Affairs, and an awesome software engineer as well as culture engineer, who wrote the first implementation of Perl 6 in 2006 (whose design had been going on since 2000) in Haskell "in order to learn Haskell", and who designed a public social media ecology largely responsible for the seeming miracle of Taiwan having under a couple dozen deaths from COVID in the first 18 months, with no general shutdowns or censorship, but an anti-disinformation system modeled on the body's immune system, but with a sense of humor (very strict regulation, however of travel to and from the island). Taiwan is vary likely far and away the country most bombarded by disinformation, thanks to it's big neighbor.
No lol! It's from a SimCity program (I think). Very interesting what you're saying. I've been reading some different things recently about what an amazing culture Taiwan really is. Would love to know more.
Thanks. I'd like to know more too. Please let me know if you come across anything very interesting. It's hard to get any kind of coherent view of anything in this post big media "X"-Twitter/substack/YouTube/commercialized-search-engine/etc. world. I think AI, if under very strong pressure to be more human-centered, has promise as an integrating and balancing filter for getting some since of how "the knowledgeable world" sees any given topic.
One of the centers of my attention these days is https://prosocial.world, which, along with Braver Angels, to try to bring about positive change in these areas.
In terms of what *kind of change* in the world might give the best bang for the buck in terms of individual effort to make a sanely democratically self-governmening set of nested worlds, it might surprise you to know that I'd chose "Ranked choice" or "instant runoff" voting. I lot of talk about what makes for the good democrace centers around fairness, I doubt we can achieve anything (towards fairness or anything else) if our ability to think as communities is a totally hopeless mess. I think RCV, together with a well thought out plan (not well thought out yet, but needds to be), could greatly improve the epistemic nature of functioning democracies.
This article randomly popped up in my recommended reads, and I really liked the title "What Does a Healthy Culture Look like?" I think of it in terms of youth culture, and more than just for artists, but for youth in general. And I agree with basically all of your points. I also love your endpoint: “A healthy culture is looking, constantly, to best itself.” I love the Greek word "metanoeo" which is often used in the Greek translation of the New Testament, which refers to this concept of improving oneself: change of breath, change of mind, change of spirit. It is much more inviting and friendly than the translation from Latin which uses the word "repent" from the Latin "penitir."
Basically, a "healthy culture" is one in which relationships are prioritized and we are constantly seeking to connect better with those around us and to contribute meaningfully to something greater than ourselves.
Very interesting Kreg. This is a gorgeous sentence:
"Basically, a 'healthy culture' is one in which relationships are prioritized and we are constantly seeking to connect better with those around us and to contribute meaningfully to something greater than ourselves."
Thanks again Sam. Keep up the good work.