[Click > Here > For > PDF > version] (I recommend reading it like this, this is the intended format)
For Sep:
POST-MORTEM: CULTURE:
Your parents, your parents’ parents, your parents’ parents’ parents have all collectively built 0.0001% of the new world. Hippies failed, punk failed, grunge failed. By any measurement art is dead. Popular media is just a rehash of every boring trope established in the last 60 years, marvel is makes roller-coaster movies for children and people with the brains of children (me!), pop-music artists are learning how to make their coolest 70s/80s/90s/00s revival. They are there just to distract you for a minute from reality.
Experimental media is even worse. In its attempt to distance itself from popular
culture which neutralises some of the most interesting and subversive art I have ever seen. Hiding themselves in white rooms in museums or in the deepest corners of the web. All we strive for now is some message of the dead letting us know they are watching. The spectres of lost futures haunt us.
So young artist what will your footprint be. Will you be the revolutionary artist you image yourself, the inventor of every new genre to be invented in the next 100 years, create art that will single handedly bring down capitalism or will you be just a loser artist, making your goofy little artsie-warties while coping with your dept and the death of the climate as we know it? I can feel the melancholy just radiating from your .mp4 files.
WILL YOU BE THE GREAT ART-MESSIA?
lmao no
let’s put you in perspective. You are a young ambitious artist; you want to change the world. Fair. The world should be changed, art has become in parts dull. But you are 17 years old
“All artistic activity must be joyous and exciting in itself. You cannot escape from dreariness with more dreariness.” (Fragile 21:4)
The radical new you strive towards can quickly become another lost future, a spectre you are looking for, this fetishization of the new won’t get you anywhere. It will only make you more mournful of the present. Mournful of the present.
“Make art relevant to your everyday experience of life. The farther away the object of our political concern, the less it will mean to us, the less real and pressing it will seem to you, , the less it will mean to us, and more wearisome art will be.” (Jerma 9:85)
Your experience as a young post-internet artist is already something new, an experience that you can use to build upon. And there is a place for rejection, you can and maybe even should reject (not ignore) the past.
“To accomplish those first two steps, entirely new artistic approaches and methods must be created. The old ones are outdated, outmoded. Perhaps they were never any good, and that’s why our world is the way it is now.” (Cruelty 6:45)
This “new” of yours won’t be a spectacle on the contrary. It should avoid being a spectacle at all costs, it’s just another day.
“Enjoy yourselves! There is never any excuse for being bored . . . or boring!” (sophie 4:20)