Is anyone else sad the way that art and literature seems to be progressing? I'm not going to be the guy who says that "art is dying" or whatever. But, there seems to be a sort of purity, sanctity to previous works of art, like the works of Shakespeare or Chaucer, or even the KJV that is impossible to recapture in the modern age. Literature has become so self-conscious and ironic over time, and it seems impossible to navigate the literary waters of the time and to still come out with a work of art of the same kind as the ones I just mentioned. I'm not saying that art is worse, though some might argue it might be. I'm just saying that there's this tone of almost divine sincerity that seems to be missing nowadays, and I really find it to be a shame. Because, of course, to try to write like Shakespeare right now would also be to make a work of art that is antiquated and out of date. It's almost like I wish I could travel back in time to when literature was first starting in order to avoid the restrictions/requirements/standards of the modern literary environment.
Anyone else have this feeling occasionally?
John Gardneer gets into that ith his book On Moral Fiction, I think you'll like it
And I definitely agree. I really don't care for all the bitter, ironic, and decadent wankery
>>7924712
Gardner*
>>7924709
>Is anyone else sad
>>7924715
Mind if I save that??
>>7924718
>society is getting worse at writing because so many people communicate through written communication now
Yeah yeah the west is muh finished, let it fall... Le college american homo intellectus ;>}
Now can you delete this shit?
>>7924709
spooks, fallacies, and delusion
everyone always thinks art is dying. if you write a good fuckin drama in the style of shakespeare people will like it. not the general public, but they're not into literature at all these days. stop memeing and stop making excuses
>>7924721
>proved his point unconsciously
>>7924709
>"Sky's the limit!"
>*goes beyond the sky to space*
>"Now what?"
>*starts to slowly descend back to earth, eventually crashing*
Art goes through cycles mate. We've had the misfortune to be born in a sterile, plebeian age. It's been less than a century since the Bolsheivk Revolution, and only 25 years since the fall of Soviet communism. Culture needs time to recover from that kind of stunting.
>>7924731
>Also, Tolkien is shit too.
nah
>Shakespeare
>etc.
Like you would recognize anything significant even if it were to set your neckbeard on fire
>>7924717
LMAO what an inane Op post
I'm under the impression that /lit/ reads very little contemporary literature, and I don't read very much of it either. You can probably find a lot of sincere and less self-aware authors if you really take the time and look for them.
Devil on the Cross by Thiong'o might be up your alley.
its just that people have shorter attention spans cause they want more immediate stimuly because they were trained to receive pleasure only from short stimuly. Basically society has been behaviourally conditioned to like the immediate and hate the intermediate-
>>7924750
This has nothing to do with being dumb or not. albeit some niggers might argue that it leads to superficiality and emotional numbness.
Just waiting for the next phase of art to begin. Everything nowadays is too real or trying to capture reality in away that is just cliche. The next movement will be some weird abstract shit I bet completely eliminating plot before it recyes again. The world is too sterile, we need some picasso, and not kanye.
>>7924756
>he next movement will be some weird abstract shit I bet completely eliminating plot before it recyes again.
That already happeed
>>7924760
It will happen again I think. But more high tech this time, whatever that means
>>7924777
I just want a new Romantic period t b h
>>7924738
Speak for yourself. War, famine, disease and unrest still kill thousands every day.
VR's gonna be a gib lead guys :D
>>7924709
Do you see the Gothic era as the high point in art and literature? If so, that's very interesting because most people tend to focus on the great masters. We may see Chaucer as somewhat wild and unconventional, but he was only growing wild within a certain kind of cultural framework.
It's funny that no one ever mentions the Bishop's Bible in association with Shakespeare... Supposedly it was issued under Elizabeth? I like the King James, but it has a terrible translation of the NT.
Not all art survives, but that which does becomes that against which we will measure contemporary works.
It might seem as if, on the whole, today's literature sucks, but there's just no way to know if it's "as good" as it was so many centuries ago. That might not even be a question worth asking. To quote Benjamin (badly, no doubt), the critic gives a work its afterlife. That's why I'm always a little disappointed when I see anons deride references to critics or criticism in general. It's as important to art as the art itself. Always has been.
>>7924760
I'm inclined to agree. I'm working toward something like that, and it's always refreshing to know there are others. I'm constantly looking for boundry-pushing formal experiments with narrative. I draw heavily form Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Gaddis; to name just a few (close to the only few that I know) who've laid significant tracks.
I won't abandon plot. But I will disfigure it. And certainly the ubiquity of electronics is important here, not least because of the semiotic flux we engage in while using nearly any computer/television.
(I'm skeptical, however, of the possibility of a "movement" in the classical sense today)
>>7924819
I personally prefer a clear and well directed plot. I have no interest in dissolving it like so many other writers; It can be a very powerful thing if it's handled carefully.
>>7924788
That's pretty fucked up. Obviously you shouldn't be depressed over everyone that dies because there is nothing that you can do about it, but they are still your fellow man. You should care about their suffering.
>>7924717
It's all yours my friend. Glad to have you with us tonight
People don't read anymore in large numbers outside of a school scenario, technically though you have more "educated" members of society, but people just want entertainment nowadays, if there was no /videogames/ or /tv/ in the world still everyone would sit around and read and maybe you'd see an influx of quality in books.
It has to be fast though, fast and easily digested.
Reading, outside of the NYT best seller lists and the sort is largely a dead/dying art, dead but still alive just in different ways, there'll always be good content produced but kids nowadays are too focused on other things to grow up reading heinlen or byron and the sort.
Also
reading isn't cool.
>>7924837
*that should read anti-depressants, right
>>7924824
This is true. If abstraction is to be effective it must be done delicately and very deliberately. There must be a reason for it, otherwise it will be little more than arbitrary stagnation.
>>7924717
Get out.
Even sincere work these days is underwhelming. People's beliefs are generally so sterile that They can't say anything even slightly interesting.
>>7924709
Too ignorant to recognise the decadence in historical texts.
![51LFMjjiiaL._SX318_BO1,204,203,200_[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/dxD0i2W.jpg "51LFMjjiiaL._SX318_BO1,204,203,200_[1].jpg")
>>7924709
I recommend reading Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?, it's the best analysis I've ever read of why so much current literature feels like a waste of ink. He attributes the lack of sincerity to the realization of artists that they have no authority to back up what they are saying, and the ultimate arbitrariness of their creations.
>The notion that the new reality inhering in novels depends on their attention to detail fails to distinguish between ‘reality’ and what theoreticians call ‘the reality-effect’. In fact Thirlwell uses the two terms indiscriminately. But putting a faint scar on a face or alerting us to the fact that the carpet is turned up in the corner, like describing the smell of sweat and semen during the act of sex, no more anchors the novel to ‘reality’ than writing about stars in the eyes of the beloved. The novel is still made up of words, is still the product of a solitary individual, inventing scars, carpets, smells or stars. Of course we warm to a novelist who surprises us with his attention to detail, though as much or more depends on the way it is done, the style, rather than the detail itself...Too often the attention to detail in modern novels reminds me of what Clement Greenberg once said of nineteenth-century academic painting: ‘It took talent – among other things – to lead art that far astray. Bourgeois society gave these talents a prescription, and they filled it – with talent.’
>Thirlwell's failure to distinguish reality and the ‘reality-effect’ is symptomatic of his – and his English colleagues' – failure to grasp what was obvious to every artist I have been looking at in the course of this book, that what is at issue is reality itself, what it is and how an art which of necessity renounces all claim to contact with the transcendent can relate to it, and, if it cannot, what possible reason it can have for existing.
>>7924885
>Cervantes may suddenly suspend his narrative and go on to tell us that the manuscript broke off at this point; Proust may later reveal that what had been said earlier was wrong, and then later still that this new revelation was itself wrong. But it is not these things that make their novels modern. It is partly that they hunger for that ‘relentless contact’ which so haunted Stevens's Comedian and for a form of fiction which transcends the anecdotal – the dreariness of ‘the marquise went out at five’ – so that they are unwilling to settle for that fixed distance from the language they are using and the story they are telling, which is such a feature of the English writers I have just been looking at; and partly (the two are of course interconnected) that they understand that, in Wittgenstein's words, a certain language-game can no longer be played, and that this does not mean that we can simply shift the ground and find another language-game to play. For all Philip Roth's playfulness (a heavy-handed playfulness at the best of times), he never doubts the validity of what he is doing or his ability to find a language adequate to his needs. As a result his works may be funny, they may be thought-provoking, but only as good journalism can be funny and thought-provoking.
>>7924885
Interesting, I always saw the use of intimate details like that as only to aid the vision being conveyed, not as some expression of reality itself. That entire idea is just weird.
> that they are unwilling to settle for that fixed distance from the language they are using and the story they are telling,
When I read this I think people like that really should just write poetry then. Somehow they tricked themselves into being novelists when they care nothing for narrative.
>>7924827
Why? Most people are scum.
>>7924908
What a misguided view. You have any evidence to back that up? What has happened to you that has made you so cynical?
>>7924788
You're. So. Cute.
>>7924921
As someone who actually does (try to) care for everyone, everyone is scum. Every single human being is awful in one way or another, some are awful in more tolerable ways but they're still shit.
Humans by nature are selfish and greedy, full of illogical bullshit and hate, viewing everything through the warped lens of a self centered ego, myself included. There isn't a single "healthy" person on this planet that doesn't instinctively hate something or someone, perform acts for purely selfish reasons or on some primal level would find pleasure in putting others down for their own superiority or will to dominate. Very few people actually truly understand the extent of that, some talk the usual anime watching teenage loner crap without actually understanding it, and fewer still try to actually transcend it and be something better.
Sometimes I think it's not really just the nature of humans, but of the universe. Whatever we do, whatever we become, we will suffer and cause suffering. Thus the only true path to transcendence, to winning the game, is the ultimate peace. Death.
>>7925000
what a lame explanation, if you took a different approach to the same idea such as - "most people are insignificant and misguided and while they can be nice often display foolish narrow minded behavior which serves their own needs but in the most simple of ways possible"
You should leave college, or kill yourself.
>>7924731
The idea that you should make money with art or be a success in your life time is modern. Your capitalist cuck mind is showing
> I'm not going to be the guy who says that "art is dying" or whatever. But, there seems to be a sort of purity, sanctity to previous works of art, like the works of Shakespeare or Chaucer, or even the KJV that is impossible to recapture in the modern age.
I'm reading Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann right now and Goethe keeps on saying the exact same thing, and that was 200 years ago
In other word, you're an old man
>>7924712
Ma nigger
>>7924756
>implying we live in a world that doesn't need kanye
BTFO
>>7924709
So you're mad that language has changed and you can't write like a 16th century poet without people in the modern world looking at you like you're autistic?
>>7924735
Have you ever seen a play on Broadway or even off-Broadway (or even off-off-Broadway)?
People who go around talking about art being dead also haven't seen all that there is to offer.
There was plenty of shitty writing in 1589 but non of it survived the test of time because it was *gasp* shitty.
look for the good art the modern world has to offer before condemning all of it whole-cloth
You're having what I call historical anxiety, which is related to historical authority.
Haven't you read my essays on the subject?
>>7924908
Scum they might be but rare too.
>>7924709
The world changed, and with the world our minds changed as well.
In the time of Shakespeare, your natural life was for the most part basked in a natural stillness of noise and events. Man had not yet encountered the industrial revolution. Of course life was rough and brutal for most, but there were no cars, no humming of electricity, no production fumes, no screens.
Humanity has been used to mother earth's embrace for all of it's lifespan, we all are descendants of hunter-gatherers who used art as a way of expressing their relationship with it with cave drawings and idols.
Think of how close we are born to the introduction of all these invasive life concepts compared to the lifespan of the human race.
Humanity has been disillusioned. Nothing is "sacred" anymore because we created a world where nothing truly is special, people no longer have to think for themselves.
>>7924709
>sanctity
>purity
Are you a Christian? Because it sounds like you got memed the fuck out by the bible. Shakespeare, for example, was wildly popular because his work was cynically designed to appeal to as many people as possible at the time. Even if we jerk off to how deep or artistic it was today, it was very deliberately constructed and extremely self-aware. There's even metafiction in several of his plays.
I think you're just some undergrad who has an extremely shallow, romanticized understanding of the classics.
I'm too busy reading and writing to be a whiny, contemporary bitch.
>>7924709
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwfQl2LGhwc
watch this
>>7925742
>Shakespeare, for example, was wildly popular because his work was cynically designed to appeal to as many people as possible at the time.
You're really too much. Shakespeare left about £300 in his will, right? This was more than a schoolteacher could expect to leave others, but 'The Bard' was never well received by Ben Jonson's set, and his girls married very late as a consequence of this. He was an 'also-ran' from London's perspective.
There are no descendants of Shakespeare living in England some 50 years after his death. It's quite possible that most of them died in a state of poverty. Think about that.
>>7925987
*There were
Without reading the rest of the thread, I agree with your sentiment OP, and it's something I think about a lot. Shallow times produce shallow writers. Current society is so easy and comfortable and the culture so saturated by mediocrity and thoughtlessness that I find it hard to believe that anyone from our generation will be able to produce much of any worth.
If you become Catholic you can write hymns to the Blessed Virgin Mary and the angels and not worry about writing propaganda pieces for this dying civilisation that the Church will outlive :)
Man, this thread is shit. OP isn't talking about shallow writing or bad writing or cheap writing, he's talking about self-conscious writing, i.e. authors who write with major attention to the relationship they're forming with the reader and the fact that they are an author writing a book.
To that, I'd have to say it's sad that this is a trend, but it's important to note that for the most part it's only an issue among lit's contemporary favorites. Most writing is sincere, I think. As an easy example, pretty much all genre fiction authors (exempting cash grabs and modern fantasy settings) are just trying to write compelling stories.
>>7926054
>tfw Dune is a monument to this
Bless Big Frank
>>7926021
>a crumbling institution that's a shell of its former self
>outliving anything
Well spooked lad.
>>7926054
>"""""compelling""""" stories are somehow more noble than things I don't like
Riddle me this fagtron, what makes giving handjobs better than jerking yourself off?
>>7926072
Giving handjobs are more fun.
>>7926111
If you're a cocksucking faggot, maybe.
>>7926072
I'm not sure what you mean. I wasn't saying cashgrabs and modern fantasy settings are worse, they simply tend to be very self aware.
Cashgrabs are inherently self aware because they are specifically made to conform with current pop culture and profitability. This doesn't necessarily make them bad, but it is largely unavoidable. It's more likely that cashgrab books become bad through the compromises and shoehorning required to make them fit into more marketable categories.
As for an example of good modern fantasy being self conscious, the percy jackson books make up a modern fantasy series and they are quite good according to my girlfriend who reads a lot of fantasy. However, they are clearly quite self aware from her descriptions because at every opportunity, the author takes the most ironic course of action. e.g. Demigods go to summer camp; in his norse series the main character is a demigod of the fruity elf god or something; I wanted a third example to balance the sentence but couldn't think of one.
>>7925370
or goethe and OP is right and we're in a general state of decline
>>7924709
I think the problem is that the modern age enables so many people to experience things second-hand, through the internet, or television, that very few people have authentic experiences. I think the sort of clarity and beauty and wisdom that comes through in some literature is a product of authenticity, experience and skill. I think a lot of authors today, while they may strive to be authentic, lack the capability, no matter how skilled they are.
>>7925394
The only decent contemporary playwright is Martin McDonagh. I:m a diff anon, one who watched, mouth agape and horrified frenzied tears streaming down my fevered cheek, as I watched local troupes so!show manage to butcher the Greeks. Somehow manage to butcher Brecht, a man who famously proclaimed bad acting was an advantage I'm revolutionary theatre, but wasn't perhaps expecting a gargantuan gender fluid woman to interpret his work in... Creative ways
If you're anything like me, them you have no worry about poverty or death and when yiu experien e art, you're immediately reminded that you should create and exceed at this hunt.
What I'm trying to get at is that the problem isn't just self-aware writers, it's also severely distracted readers. Can I enjoy a book without feelig it's cool that I can now express an opinion on the web?
>>7924798
le shitty handwriting notebook man
>>7924712
>John Gardner
my nigger
>>7926182
I'm talking about the "compelling" stories you don't consider cashgrabs. This is a dialectic rebuttal to the idea that self-indulgent fiction is masturbatory. My spin on it is that if self-indulgence is masturbatory, then crowd-pleasing (or "compelling" in a "sincere" way) tendencies are like handjobs or even sucking cock outright, and I don't know about you, but if I'm going to have cum on my hand, I'd rather it be my own than someone else's.
>>7924709
Let the childish notion of sincerity die and stop clinging to old bargain bin bullshit.
There are plenty and plenty and plenty of writers/poets nowadays that run the entire gamut of genres. /lit/ is just pleb and spams a narrow margin of rather shit ones.
Shakespeare was ANYTHING but sincere. For god's sake read some lit analysis/critiques.
>>7924718
The screen has not dumbed anyone down. It has given more voice to those who would otherwise be even dumber. And it has opened new avenues for new forms of literature. Obviously it is not a black and white issue either-way, but do not forget that a greater number of individuals are far more literate now than before.
>>7924746
this
>>7924830
see my other reply, spend time outside reddit and 4chan.
>>7926559
You are trying too hard to fit your position in a humorous analogy. Just cut to the cheese fagtron. Your spin on it is just that, your spin.
>>7926570
It's not meant to be humorous. I'm using the same sexually-charged terminology as the proponents of "selflessness" who look down on putatively "masturbatory" works.
>>7924709
You can live under a rock all you want my man, but the world will always be moving on and growing, with or without you.
This goes for everyone who really believes that earlier literature was more sincere than contemporary literature is.
It never was. You just like to go the easier route and have other people tell you with certainty what's good and what isn't. When in fact neither you nor those people are actually capable of reading an earlier work of literature from the shoes of its contemporary, and therefore can't even properly consume it as a work of art, but rather just as historical evidence.
The future of art lies in the regions of the world that haven't been tainted by the hectic modern first world lifestyle.
South America, the Himalayas, lost jungles in Africa, some isle in Philippines
>>7926595
But what if I am not overweight?
>>7926595
PS pic unironically related as an example of very fucking pure, captured literature absolutely on level with Shakespeare and Milton and whoeverthefuck
>>7926595
I like how Wallace and Franzen play so hard on their 'emotional' damage that surely everybody else has. But they always fail to elevate beyond the grayness of boring humanist values. Wheres Joyce had it right, to strike with a madcap of thunder from/for the perspective of a cuck.
The future will need more Nietzsche, and less woe is me Hegel, that has been unrightfully devoid of Hegel's madness.
>>7926595
Well said. Most of what people think of "The Classics" is a Romantic construct. The Ancient Greek, Shakespeare, everything we have now is a reading by some idealist German cuck. Fuck the 19th Century.
>>7924709
>But, there seems to be a sort of purity, sanctity to previous works of art, like the works of Shakespeare or Chaucer
Actually rather funny how similar this is to the sentiments expressed in Swift's "Proposal" (not the modest one), as well as other calls for the creation of an English academy that were fashionable during the Restoration. Like you, Swift is concerned with the "purity" of the English language; the same term is used by Johnson in his "Preface" to his dictionary. And it represents the wider zeitgeist of the era, an age where critics and poets were beginning to realise that the same forces of linguistic change that made Chaucer increasingly obscure would likewise eventually affect their own greats. "Suffer not our Shakespeare, our Milton, to become two or three centuries hence what Chaucer is at present," wrote the Earl of Sheridan in 1756. And hence Edwin Waller:
But who can hope his lines should long
Last, in a daily changing Tongue?
While they are new, Envy prevails;
And as that dies, our Language fails.
Poets that Lasting Marble seek
Must carve in Latine or in Greeke;
We write in Sand.
Some things never change I guess, including emotional appeals to the "purity" of certain tongues. But that the English language, which is essentially the bastard child of every tongue in Europe, should have any pretensions to "purity" is an irony too far for me. And if you would like an analogy for this, spend some time studying Johnson's Dictionary. Initially, Johnson declared of his dictionary that "the chief intent is to preserve the purity and ascertain the meaning of the English idiom" (and there again is that word "purity"); but by the end of the project had come to the realisation that such a goal was sheer folly, that trying to stand against the inexorable forces of linguistic change was like trying to "lash the winds". So take it from the teachers of the past, that there is no point fighting against the inevitability of linguistic change. Entropy affects language too. And there simply isn't anything that can be done about it.
>>7926670
tfw you realize Wallace took all of his shit from Nobokov... Especially Pale Fire...
The Pale King is a direct reference.
Many of the main characters 'Hal/Orin.' and others from other Nobokov novels.
tfw Wallace is a bloated emotionally unstable man who wished to write like Nobokov, and be a controversial rebel, but lacked the chops.
>>7926723
this post is corncobby as fuck
>>7926723
>Wallace cribbed Nabokov
Did you get memed by those blurbs on the back of his books that compare them? I've read plenty of Wallace's shite and the Nabokov connection is tangential at best. He was really trying to crib Joyce but in a more bland, 'Murricanly-sentimentalized, dumbed-down way with some heavy Pynchon, Gaddis, Hawkes, Barth, and DeLilo influence. The effect comes off like a modernist, emotionally incontinent version of Kafka.
>>7926723
>mispells Nabokov three times, showing that he actually thinks Nabokov is spelled Nobokov
>le morality with the dull bits cut out man
>>7926759
>doesn't even give it much though because it would only count as one error in an academic setting
>which is all that matters
>muh purity
>>7926759
get rekt kid
>>7926654
The future will take whatever it needs. It always does.
It's not our job as the contemporaries to predict what the future will take. It's our job to play whatever part in it that is the most true to ourselves. After all, we don't only consume the present, we're a part of it and we directly influence it.
Imagine if der Führer was obsessing about whether Joyce was a good author.
You know that feeling when you read an opinion article or watch a video that seems to be trying to send one message, but near the end they drop just this one line that subconciusly hits all the right strings in you so that it completely reverses the context of the entire article/video?
The message that sums up literature today, that our generations of artists will retroactively have sent to the future generations, works much the same way -- it's full of small turnarounds which completely change the big picture.
>>7926668
what the fuck are you talking about dude, hes talking about the content, not the language its written in
>>7926567
The internet and TV have both dumbed people down and given a voice to those who never should have had one. The more influence the masses have over society, the more mediocre and shallow the culture and society will become (and is becoming, has become). A greater number of literate people isn't really a good thing unless it's paired with good value judgement and a degree of intelligence which most people simply don't have.
>>7926883
Please ignore this guy, your post was very interesting.
It's interesting to consider the role of colloquialism in fiction. William Archer took the 17th Century Playwrights to task for their excessively formal 'wit' and reliance on archetypal Passions. Both techniques have kind of an extreme bent where they are played out. DFW seems to have had an uneasy relationship between colloquialism and formalist speech.
My impression was that Milton was far better received in England than either Chaucer or Shakespeare, despite the marital alliances the latter men managed to grasp. The apparent wish to bring language into stasis or to return to a purer tongue is quite an amusing contrast to a 'futurist' like DFW.
>>7926930
>>7926930
>TV has given a voice to those who never should have had one.
>The more influence the masses have over society, the worse
seriously senpai? The people that you can see on TV (show hosts, news anchors, actors in dramatic series) are the opposite of 'the masses'. The people who produce the contest (directors, producers, editors) are even more the opposite of 'the masses'.
That they might not be living a vita contemplativa, doesn't automatically make them part of the masses. The problem with the TV people (and all mass media people) is even worse.
But it's a different problem entirely than the one we're tackling here.
also
>The internet
>dumbed people down
literally kys
>>7926952
*the people who produce the contents (paragraph 1, line 3)
>>7926949
>please ignore the guy trying to keep the thread on topic
lmao ok dude
>>7926952
He's using the term 'masses' in a western, cultural context and not in a Marxian one.
>>7926966
It's nothing against you but I'm interested in how 'sincerity' might be defined in a social service technocracy where few people work in an agrarian context and a large amount of people are on anti-depressants. Comparing today's sincerity with Gothic or Elizabethan notions of sincerity is a jarring concept.
>>7927019
What's the difference, effectively?
So we agree that getting your face put on television requires an amount of social status? But social status is correlated with good education? Most especially in the west?
Or do I not understand what 'masses' means in a western, cultural context?
How do you guys select books/writers of this era? (I mean i just go for the classics writers and read their cataloge) Theres so many... I dont want to miss someone thats gonna be important or relevant
Just read reviews and shit?
>>7924709
We live in a fundamentally insincere world, clinging to this idealised concept of sincerity is itself an insincere rejection of the world. Shakespeare and Chaucer were good precisely because they made use of all cultural resources available to them, their work was subversive, irreverent and ironic by the standards of the day. Rejecting reality for an imaginary platonic wasteland strewn with geometrical figures and marble white neoclassical statuary won't do you any good.
>>7927046
He could say what he meant by 'masses' far better than I could. I think it's just more abstract for the west.
Arguably the mass mind in a cultural context is a self-professed 'futurist'. He may be well-educated and in a high social status, but he doesn't know or care about history, and he's focused on living 'in the moment' or 'in the distance'. DFW is a good example of a writer for the western 'masses', in spite of his limited circuit.
Shakespeare is an example of someone who was of upper-middle income, and did not find fit the example of the masses. Ben Jonson is an example I would use of someone representing the masses in a high position.
>>7924709
The problem began with the demise of the monarchy and the natural order. Eventually, people disregarded the importance of a classical education, abandoning the very foundations of western civilization. Man ceased to strive for truth and beauty, opting instead for mere novelty and scandal. Finally, the arrival of mass media and popular culture, which now taint every corner of our world, making reality itself something unclean and undignified.
>>7927118
You should read more.
>>7927118
Is there a remedy to this most awful predicament? How can we instill an enthusiasm for the classics in our iPhone addled youth?
>>7927137
I have studied the classics for over a decade, and it has only served to reinforce my convictions
>>7924732
>using le ebil gommunism as the scapegoat for everything
>>7926952
Television, believe it or not, is shaped by what is demanded by the people who view it (the masses); it's a response to a demand, and the people inevitably (having no basis for discernment, and really no desire to make value judgments in the first place) demand mediocrity. The television only shapes people's views to an extent, and it is very much a collaboration between those who produces and those who consume. The internet encourages degradation in pretty much every realm; the cultural, social and moral, because people are more willing to justify their ignorance and mediocrity (for example through Marxism) than to actually learn things.
>>7927155
Your convictions are dead wrong.
>importance of a classical education
I am not debating the importance of such, but the perspective on such education has always been more about economic/social mobility than an actual education itself.
>Man ceased to strive for truth and beauty,
There has always been nihilist movements, and there are plenty of movements striving for both of these today.
>novelty and scandal.
The Greeks had plays surrounding these two things. And dramas of 'lower' issues have been prominent ad nauseam.
>mass media and popular culture
There has always been popular culture. Reality has never been clean or dignified. Shakespeare makes fart and cunt jokes. Joyce makes the same. I recall plenty of Greek tragedies with what would be deemed as silly sexual conduct now days. etc,etc.
You are picking and choosing, but I see your perspective. I do not totally disagree, it is not a black v white issue, but in a totality the aspects of culture that seem dignified and glorified in modern times have always had counter points of bowel movements.
>>7927165
You're wrong about the demand shaping the product because marketing has evolved to the point where the ads shape the demand.
>>7927165
>it is very much a collaboration between those who produces and those who consume.
so if that's true we then cannot say that television is shaped by what is demanded by the people who view it, because it wouldn't be the whole truth?
Tell me then, based on all the collaborations you've ever been a part of, do people with higher education/better social status naturally get a bigger say on the course of action or not?
>muh marxism
>slipped in a subtle commie connotation there
>REEEEEEEEEE GET OFF MY LIT COMMIE YOUR OPINIONS ARENT WORTH ANYTHING HERE
>>7924731
>Mediocrity is the new mediocrity
I...what? This is the most pseudo-intellectual statement I've ever heard...
>>7926723
This is pretty good bait.
>>7927211
You're wrong, demand shapes the product - the role of the producer is to produce what the consumer demands, that is what I mean by a collaboration.
>do people with higher education/better social status naturally get a bigger say on the course of action or not?
They get a bigger salary, but that doesn't really mean very much.
>>7927058
Basically. Or, winners of major award like the National Book Award or PEN/Faulkner are usually worth checking out (but not the pulitzer which is a fucking joke). Recipients of MacArthur fellowships too.
>>7927195
Marketing works because it appeals to base human nature: people are only tricked by marketing to the extent that they let themselves be: all the things which advertising plays on, vanity, sex, covetousness etc. are effective because those are the things which motivate the lowest common denominator in the first place.
>mfw this thread
>>7927265
WHAT
So even after the term 'Marxism' gets thrown around in a bad way in this thread, you actually have the guts to come out with the ugliest fucking looking case of ideologism (for the ideology of capitalism, in this particular case) that science has ever witnessed?
Whoever mentioned anything about salaries? Or companies? Is that seriously the simplest example of a human collaboration that pops into your mind?
>the role of the producer is to produce what the consumer demands
no, you're an autist. and the role of the producer, especially in capitalism, is to convince the consumer that he wants whatever is easiest for the producer to produce.
PLS tell me, is this bait?
>>7927384
and just to add, no, it's not only that they get bigger salaries. they also get a bigger say. you doofus NEET semi-alive sperg.
>>7924718
>We're not going to get a Shakespeare, Chaucer let alone a Nabokov or even a Burgess for quite some time.
Except forme
>>7924709
wew lad this thread sucks.
You're just a Romantic, and that's been out of fashion for a couple hundred years
>"transcendent" values
>the glimmer of the sublime
>a splash of the mystical dionysian fire
We've inherited the disenchantment of industrialism, a couple world wars, and a few decades of possible nuclear armageddon.
We cannot write the Divine Comedy any more than we can go back in time.
Stop grasping for values that have been tested against history
If you want to watch a Terence Malick film, go to the orchestra, play the videogame Journey, and read epic poetry you can. But to whine about not having a 21st century shakespeare is intellectually and emotionally dishonest.
Now for the inspirational part
>Embrace the constraints of 20xx
>Create a new mouthpiece.
>Meditate on a contemporary definition of spirituality.
You were born in a culture that produced Yung Lean. I think you should be capable of realising that our aesthetic sense encompasses an absurd range of definitions.
Also read the Decay of Lying by Oscar Wilde. You can see someone much more articulate than yourself moan about exactly the same problems.
>>7927489
rood
>>7927489
missed his point completely, re-read and try again
>>7927576
no I didn't. He's talking about "divine sincerity"
Pre-modern belief in transcendent values.
Modern self reflexivity, irony, stream of conscious followed as a reaction to Romanticism. His complaints stem from this iconoclastic gesture.
That's why I bring it up.
You can still be Carl Jung, William Blake, or Swedenborg. But like OP says, it will be antiquated.
>>7924709
its ok! art, literature, and critical thought were all mistakes. we're currently going through an ironic "enlightenment" period, in that everyone is getting dumber and making shit art. eventually we will be liberated from delusions that we are worth anything and we can finally burn all the books and kill ourselves
>>7927700
seconded.
>>7924718
>le dumb and brainwashed masses meme
excuse me as i kek into the sun
there's nothing less intellectual than the belief that the majority is stupid and yet this notion spreads like a cancer because so many people today cant separate their intellect from their ego
bumporoonie
>>7925000
>head so far up the arse
oy vey man
>>7925000
nah man, that shit's all only true if you're rooted within the duality. practice rooting yourself in nondual consciousness, and you will certainly cultivate peace, joy, and non-self-interested compassion. And once your consciousness is rooted and centered, you can play in the duality however you like, but without tension, clinging, and attachment; and more of an instinct for avoiding inflicting suffering on yourself or others
>>7927700
y u such a Cluster B personality though my man
>>7924798
C O M F Y
>>7927692
Sorry I'm not to well versed in literature or literary theory. How was modernism a reaction to Romanticism? Just to be clear I'm not questioning the claim, I'm just interested.
>>7929885
>too
Ever stop to think that the diminishing of attention spans and intelligence presents some of the most interesting challenges to art that there has ever been? When the next big artist comes along, one who has fairly earned his fame by overcoming these challenges instead of whinging about them, the world will be better off than if it had stayed the same
