Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q-RVnpqOUg&pp=ygUWaW1wcmVzc2lvbmlzdCB0d28...

I'll have to think on this for awhile. On first read I generally agree. 

"The present day composer refuses to die."  --Edgar Varese
 

Human creativity and innovation is ongoing, you just have to poke around.  It's generally not on Sonos, Spotify, Instagram, X, or any of the multitude of instant gratification mass media consumption vehicles geared towards a herd mentality.  It is underground, "left of the dial", guerrilla art, that by the time the establishment museum's and music conveyors present it is passé.

I don't follow visual art as closely, but I am constantly being exposed to music, especially in the experimental, left-field electronic, and avant-garde Free Jazz genres, that pushes the envelope.

Culture is not your friend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0JneoZwQ_E

ive thought about this kind of thing a lot, and not just concerning music. when i was growing up in my teenage years around 2001-2008, looking back on the time my parents or grandparents lived in seemed like a different world. even just looking back on the 80s seemed like a different world.

today, the world i live in now really does not seem that different. gen z clothing styles look slightly different than what we wore in school but not super different, and the emo/scene influence is incredibly strong. music seems pretty similar, and people dont seem to be focusing on a 20-30 year period of music like they did when i was a kid. when i was a kid nobody really cared about the music of the 40s and 50s, and the "popular" old music was exclusively from the late 60s onward. it would have been absurd to suggest kids listen to 50 or 60 year old music. i listened to plenty of big band records with my grandparents and was never interested in any of it, but today, kids are still interested in 60s and 70s bands.

Oddly, Daylight, the Millennials and Gen-Z kids also love the 40's and 50's Greatest Generation music that the Baby Boomers and Gen-X generations thumbed their nose at.  They clean me out of my Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie records, and buy most of my Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman records, although they persist in calling them "vinyls", lol. 

If I blame video games how far off do you think I am?

Video games are one example of our consumer culture, judit. We used to make things, now we buy things. That's a huge part of the problem.

I like how Billy Strings is altering bluegrass. 

Admittedly, I've never played a video game, and never will.  

However I am also not creating a new culture....I am, however, reading a lot of new ideas, contemporary writers. (As well as the classics).   

Some say art is a repetition of prior art....I heard that a lot while working with pottery.  

Culture has not come to a standstill but the internet certainly killed the demarcation lines that existed in the pre-connected age. The time and space in which everything once developed is now spun out to worldwide audience and it immediately starts mutating. Hence it becomes difficult to have definable cultural shifts. 

While Billy Strings is certainly reinvigorating Bluegrass and bringing a lot of folks to it that never really paid it much attention, his approach is based on the Progressive Bluegrass music that came to the forefront in the 1970's with acts like New Grass Revival and The Tony Rice Unit, who retooled the traditional instrumentation and songbook of Bluegrass Bands.  Outside of the EDM beats, lightshow, and electric amplification, it's not particularly groundbreaking, and all of those innovations beg the question whether what he is playing is actually Bluegrass.

Garcia once remarked that a great ossification and standardization of popular music occurred when phonographs and radio came into general use. The local vartiations got ironed out when everyone could hear everything.

Art will endure, but the art business, whereby artists get paid for their art and might even earn a living,  depends on critics, galleries,, and buyers, most of whom want more of what there already is, rather than something new.

They just want it to seem new while actually being the same old, which is what the public really wants.

i find it hard to believe that new songs come out..........what is there left to sing about that hasn't been sung or written about?  What is left to draw or sculpt about?   

After splitting the atom and showing one another just how great we are in every aspect of competition and the human endeavors of literature, film, the arts, sports,etc.,  and after filling the skies with satellites to give us instantaneous everything-all-the-time and a space telescope to show us pictures of time near the birth of our existence..........what is left that's new, that people haven't seen , felt or heard???????????  Very little.  Much of the mysteries of life have been answered by science. What can artists do that hasn't been done somewhere on the planet?  With 8 billion people in existence, there has to be a point in time in which creating new visions or sounds that are new to eyes and ears anywhere begins to slow and culture simply becomes variations on regurgitations. 

I can see various sides of your question re art / culture being stagnant - I guess it depends on wether you look at the "local "and micro or the "global "and macro. What's your timescale?

For instance, it the Sphere a whole new visual art?  Something like that has never been built before. Is it  a whole new art form creating a visual experience never before witnessed? Or is it just part of a continuum of light shows?

How about art within virtual reality? Completely digital and divorced from the standard physical forces of nature. That's new. Maybe we're so jaded we won't recognize a new art movement until some time passes and it becomes historical.

I sometimes combine two technologies in my work --- the ancient technology of stone carving and  the modern technology of holography. Am I creating something new or just recycling? And the "Jack-In-The-Box " image itself that I created is new (I've never seen anything exactly like it) -- even though the technologies used to make it are not.  Am I stagnant? (Well, maybe on a Sunday afternoon after a football game).

I don't have any answers at the moment. But I enjoy pondering the question.

^ shameless artistic plug - Jack-In-The-Box  just won second place out of 400+ entries at an art gallery in Frederick, MD this past Saturday. The theme was Humor. Best yet, I won $250! Sweet.

Congratulations - looks like a new home for Thing

"...what is there left to sing about that hasn't been sung or written about?"

Covid, for one.  Although not many folks sing about viruses. Well, Ween did.....

Or how about climate change? 

Or the end of civilization as we know it, (the most photographed!)  

There's that to sing about, I guess.

This video, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y97gX9QSwZk&ab_channel=BillyStrings) created by indecline, (https://thisisindecline.com/),  during the height of covid, I thought was creative.

I  immediately noticed that, as with covid, faces aren't seen.  The bandanas represent the masks we had to, or still, wear.  

And the lyrics are certainly poignant.

But enough about Mr. Strings, I'm just trying to defend that there is still some creativitiy out there.  Or trying to be optimistic about it.  

Of course, "...culture simply becomes variations on regurgitations" ~ that's always been the case. 

I mean, how many times do we need to see advertisements using sex to learn that sex sells? 

I was actually going to include the Sphere, but then i thought, what can't 2.3 billion dollars buy?   That's not culture, that's engineering and investors.

Does america have a culture other than consuming, profiting, and showing the world how run a country on economic slaves generation after generation?

> what is there left to sing about that hasn't been sung or written about?

> Covid, for one.  Although not many folks sing about viruses.

Sure, we have. Maybe you remember this one from your childhood? We know John Perry Barlow sure did.

Ring around the rosie,
A pocket full of posies.
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down

That one commemorated an outbreak of bubonic plague in London in 1665.

https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2014/07/ring-around-the-rosie-metafolklor...

> I was actually going to include the Sphere, but then i thought, what can't 2.3 billion dollars buy?   That's not culture, that's engineering and investors.

That's commerce, in a word, and, as they say, that's entertainment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-K9LPwzAM8

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SfhDL2d2cVY&pp=ygUTQ3VsdHVyZSBqb3NlcGggaGl...

Q: What's the difference between [Fill in the name of a city you don't like] and yogurt?

A: Yogurt has an active culture.

Ok - how about drone art? Synchronized airborne lights creating unique imagery with the natural sky as the backdrop?  That could be considered a "new" form of art. It's already evolved past preprogrammed firework displays. It's even theatrical now. Maybe it's something that will stick around as a form of expression. Again, maybe because we are living thru it, we don't recognize it as an artistic and cultural milestone. Or maybe it's just a high tech continuation of a caveman waving a torch around in a cave. 

My current take on the topic is that artistic milestones and noteworthy cultural artifacts are for historians to talk about.  Looking backward, they can put chalk marks on their timeline because categorizing things makes them easier to digest. The artist creating is working in the now. The interested audience member is experiencing it during a moment. If it's new to them, it's not stagnant. The art, audio or visual, has changed their reality in some way, however minor. 

If I was younger with the right connections I would push Peter Shapiro or some other movers&shakers to finance and produce a Grateful Dead themed audio/visual experience in the Sphere. Without a band so it's not like a concert. Like one of those old Planetarium shows, but much cooler.

[“The screen goes from ground (level) to 250 feet high, all the way around…” says Claffey, the Sphere operations officer. “It keeps you fully immersed when you’re sitting in that bowl. I used to love IMAX in New York City, but this will blow that away.”

Sphere’s producers promise next-level audio as well. Claffey says that more than 160,000 speakers spread around the bowl will deliver the same pristine sound to every seat, whether someone is in the top row or down on the floor. The venue also is equipped with haptic seats that can vibrate to match whatever is happening onscreen – an earthquake, for example – and 4D machines that can create wind, temperature and even scent effects.]

> maybe it's just a high tech continuation of a caveman waving a torch around in a cave

Bingo, Alan. The things we express, and the means by which we express them, haven't really changed in thousands of years, but the tools we use get updated with ever-increasing frequency.

And to jump back a bit...

> Am I creating something new or just recycling?

All expressions, whether artful or not, respond to, and are therefore derivative of, a thing that was expressed before them. Nothing exists in a vacuum; all is connected to the past. And for proof of this, you needn't look further than two posts below the pic of the hand in the box sculpture:

r n (terrapin1977) on Wednesday, October 11, 2023 – 11:39 am

Congratulations - looks like a new home for Thing

However, the expression is a new thing. Nobody ever saw your hand in a box carving until you carved it, Alan. But we've seen polished stone carvings and boxes and hands and keyholes and holograms and bialys before. We've just never seen them in the arrangement you fashioned.

Or maybe it's just a high tech continuation of a caveman waving a torch around in a cave.<<<

And, of course, we know there are other uses for torches.

I fear I will one day look back upon the close of the last Folsom show as "the good old days" in regard to how drones are used. 

Face taking the long view. I like it.

speaking of drones.....

https://www.wweek.com/news/courts/2023/10/11/portland-police-bureau-has-...

Suzanne Somers died today.

I've long held the opinion that one of the main manifestations of the decline of American culture, was Three's Company being a hit tv show -- when bad writing and sexual innuendo were celebrated over clever (I Love Lucy) or insightful (All in the Family) comedy. When popular culture embraced the vapid. When a junior-high schooler mentality went mainstream. I date it to the late 70s.