A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary
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Take https://www.patreon.com/sonicether who earns $50k a month creating shaders for Minecraft. That sounds mundane until you realise that he's probably enabling tens of thousands of people to create transcendent art from the comfort of their homes.
He doesn't think much of the artists creating comics either. Maybe he thinks only artists that display their work in galleries are "real" artists. Personally I think artists like Bill Watterson and Randall Munroe have done more to push the cultural zeitgeist than any artist in the last 30 years.
If you want to appreciate your fine classical works in a museum while listening to an orchestra and sipping your Pinot Noir, that's fine. But I think it's incorrect to presume to know what "real" culture is and labeling everything else "ordinary".
This. Why should I allow anyone to define what kinds of art should I find transcendent and, worse, which kinds of art are non-transcendent?
This article is weird and full of stereotypes; it's written from the point as if art was easily and objectively classifiable. No, art is not classifiable like that, and something that one man calls everyday trash can be eye-opening and mind-blowing to another. This fact alone disproves the main assumption that this article is based on, and breaks the point of the whole article for me.
Because else you're in an endless loop, where you define what you like by what you like.
It is (or, perhaps, it has been) generally understood, that being schooled into things, learning about them, their history, aesthetic rivalries and ideas abotu them, and appreciating the cultured opinions of people who have studied them more, helps one appreciate finer things and cultivate their preferences.
The alternative, "because I like it", sounds like a regression to childhood.
I find it worthwhile to listen to people who describe what touches them and what they are indifferent to. However, the tone of the article describes the "mundane" and the "extraordinary" from an objectivesque point of view, which I personally find silly due to the fact that art is an inherently subjective experience.
I don't think that's settled. For that matter, I don't think that's true.
Like how there’s good code and shit code.
I've only heard the 'art is subjective' defense from people with uncultivated tastes. Myself, I don't know much about chemistry, and something I don't do is wander into conversations with chemists and expect my unfounded opinion to be anything other than a nuisance to them. When it comes to art, for some reason, people who haven't done their homework nonetheless expect their opinion to matter.
Because you need to wait for the generation who enjoyed his work during collage to be the political / social elite.
The kind of art he supports already gets plenty of funding. No one seriously expects MOMA or the Met Opera to go bust any time soon.
Patreon is a successful alternative for relatively small-scale public-supported art. Of course it reflects public tastes. That's what it's for.
Or what once was known as "refinement". It's not like high/low culture is some kind of settled issue, and everybody agrees that it's "all the same"...
>The kind of art he supports already gets plenty of funding. No one seriously expects MOMA or the Met Opera to go bust any time soon.
Isn't that part of the author's point? In that the MOMA or Met Opera's funding are quite distinct from what the masses fund (and from what the masses consume). Not to mention that museums shouldn't be where the culture is consumed, that's where already established culture goes to die.
100 years from now, this guy’s socio-economical equivalents will criticize whatever is popular then while revering the lost transcendent beauty of Minecraft shaders ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Just let people enjoy things. I’ve also found that making things yourself is much more rewarding than telling people that they shouldn’t enjoy what they enjoy.
> It is between those who believe in aspiring to something greater and those who do not. (...) something greater and grander than everyday life.
So "transcendent" would mean "concerning things that are not common encounters in daily life".
What they do not properly motivate, in my opinion, is why that would be better ("high") than focusing on ordinary life. I wonder if they're also turned off by Impressionism?
I didn’t find the author criticism the artists as much as their subject matter. Talking about Elon Musk or nuclear technology or philosophy is transcendent. Talking about the everyday life of a Charleston crab fisher is ordinary.
I like both! But I agree that pop culture fetishises the latter while looking down on the former. (It reminds of of revolutionary France, dialled down orders of magnitude.) I also agree that a healthy culture embraces both.
Virtue signalling in popular culture increasingly looks down on transcendent subjects as out of touch. It’s an interesting recapitulation of classical virtue signalling, e.g. eschewing rock for the opera.
I think the author gives us a hint about what is ordinary:
"They tend not to be representations of noble ambition, or of a classical or romantic vision of how human beings might achieve greatness."
As an aside and don't take this personally - perhaps your question was actually "I am sure what they mean but I'm trying to disagree" ? Or perhaps it's "I wouldn't be able to make the decision if I had to do it"? I never know about this use of language. It's like asking "I don't understand why someone would vote for X" when the question is really about them actually understanding and wanting to state ones opposition to it? That type of question is not asking the reader "help me understand", right? It's confusing to me.
> a classical or romantic vision of how human beings might achieve greatness
How does a singer-songwriter provide this but not the minecraft shader guy? Is there something I'm missing?
We don't.
We spend huge amounts of energy and time trying to convince each other that our needs are whats best for everyone else.
In reality, people and their needs are on as wide a spectrum, as the needs of a cactus and a banyan tree. And it doesn't end there, those needs change with time and context.
The saving grace I think are podcasts. There is some authentic intellectual stuff going on there, it's a renaissance medium that humanises debate and invites nuance and complexity.
How about just looking at Hollywood box office numbers? A Michael Bay explosion spectacle makes way more money than some insightful art house movie dealing with complex issues.
This information could also help make the author's point -- depending on the quality of said "cultural zeitgeist".
We don't want to keep working for nothing, we don't want to keep hoping for that next raise, we don't want to pretend to be smarter or cooler or better than we are. What a horrible way to live in the age of plenty. Maybe, we like cold pizza.
Bougey is a dirty word. We want to chill. We want fairness. Simplicity is where Happiness lies. There's nothing bad about that.
What is "grand" anyway? Those 500 people currently living that the rest 7+ billion should aspire to be? Nah. I'd rather be like my grandfather. Smiling even when I'm old.
It's hearkening back to a simpler time, and this gives me hope that more people might be "getting it"
edit: typos
Is this US slang?
bougey
(pronounced: boo-G) a condensed version of the word bourgeoise, used to refer to capitalists, the upper class, gaudiness, and profit-oriented viewpoints
> Epicurus believed that what he called "pleasure" (ἡδονή) was the greatest good, but that the way to attain such pleasure was to live modestly, to gain knowledge of the workings of the world, and to limit one's desires. This would lead one to attain a state of tranquility (ataraxia) and freedom from fear as well as an absence of bodily pain (aponia).
It's a good way to live.
Even if you were assuming the patrons were all American (obviously false) the most popular creator would have fewer than 1 in 10,000 people subscribing.
Patreon is an obscure way to fund yourself that a very small number of people make their living from, it's not a bellwether for the American heart.
I don't know what high brow things the author finds missing from the list that would change his conclusion, but this seems very much like a conclusion looking for scant evidence for to justify something to write. That page would have been better left blank.
Gosh, one wonders what could have happened? Maybe two decades of pointless soul-rotting stupid wars, all supported by the most patriotic and pious among us? That has certainly sapped this correspondent's patriotism. (His piety, though, something else sapped that...) Next you'll be telling us that trigger-happy crowd-murders are more common, and we'll think of all the wedding parties, funerals, open markets, etc. we've incinerated in the Middle East. It's as if chickens... come home to roost!
TFA is definitely the most pedestrian, limp, effort-free deposit one has ever read from Cowen.
> Next you'll be telling us that trigger-happy crowd-murders are more common
> It's as if chickens... come home to roost!
I'm a bit confused, are you of the mind that there is some relation between mass-shooters and the wars in the Middle East? Or just those wars are why people feel less positive about patriotism?
The things that we're encouraged to blame for these mass murders: guns, crazy people, Republicans, white supremacists, etc. we've always had in USA. What has changed? I submit that over time we've been subjected to ever-increasing levels of war-media conditioning. We're constantly encouraged to fear, to hate, to destroy. Right now we're hating on Iranians and Venezuelans, with plenty of leftover hatred for Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Russians, Chinese, etc. The idea is that we'll funnel that insanity into voting for, or at least tolerating, increased payments to armaments manufacturers, and the contrived wars necessary to "justify" same. Some people just aren't mentally pliable enough to focus on the desired end goal. If you tell them often enough to fear and kill, eventually that's what they'll do. Maybe they'll try to kill mostly "others" on their killing sprees, but maybe they're such loners that anyone human parses as "other" to them.
It's not a coincidence that the "first" one of these things took place in 1966. The military-media-industrial complex was pulling out all the stops on their first big project since Korea.
Yes, also, obviously, the wars have killed patriotism among thinking people. Again, though, it hasn't just been the wars, but also the industrial-strength war-media war conditioning that was necessary to bring them about.
Two? It's hardly a new development. Vietnam was just as pointless and soul-rotting.
-- Walter Benjamin, lecture at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris, 27th April 1934
> The relatively new trouble with mass society is perhaps even more serious, but not because of the masses themselves, but because this society is essentially a consumers’ society where leisure time is used no longer for self-perfection or acquisition of more social status, but for more and more consumption and more and more entertainment… To believe that such a society will become more “cultured” as time goes on and education has done its work, is, I think, a fatal mistake. The point is that a consumers’ society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Between Past and Future"
> When books or pictures in reproduction are thrown on the market cheaply and attain huge sales, this does not affect the nature of the objects in question. But their nature is affected when these objects themselves are changed rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies. This does not mean that culture spreads to the masses, but that culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.
> The result of this is not disintegration but decay, and those who actively promote it are not the Tin Pan Alley composers but a special kind of intellectuals, often well read and well informed, whose sole function is to organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects in order to persuade the masses that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and perhaps educational as well. There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture - Its Social and Its Political Significance", http://www.celinecondorelli.eu/files/arendtcrisisinculture_v...
Entertainment has shifted from TV to the internet in recent years, and as it grew more popular it also grew more mundane. - But looking at TV entertainment of previous decades, I think it is hard to claim there has been a reduction in quality.
Is this correct? My understanding was today's youth in the U.S are taking on more debt than ever.
Perhaps these "ordinary ambitions" have become something unachievable by so many people, that it can highlight the relativity of the statement itself?
Starting "culture wars" about mundane shit isn't my definition of extraordinary either. If so, Burger King vs. McDonalds could be a culture war.
But compare that content to former reality TV and I can only see improvement everywhere.
On the other hand, I don't mind the loss of splendor, pomp and royal weddings. I do like architecture and jazz though.
But yes, I would prefer to have an "ordinary" house first instead of some abstract effort to build the pyramids 2.0. Does the author work for a bank?
But let's be honest. The idea of human has mission to achieve greatness by itself is, just a belief. Human life can be any form it needs to be, if the owner him/herself desires so. And the in the age of internet, it is easy to at least observe afar what your desired life would be like by watching others do it. I'd argue people are much aware and resourceful to decide what he/she wants to be, and being ordinary yet full-filling is perfectly fine goal to pursue, and it is arguably not easy still.
I am inclined to believe this because of past stories involving the Mozilla CEO and the Occulus CEO and James Damore all being fired for basically not having heterodox views.
From the comments that I read across various forum websites whenever this topic comes up, the takeaway seems to be a chilling effect POV of "if you're right-leaning, make sure nobody finds out, and just do your job".
Of course it's very difficult to form an opinion sitting in another country based on what you read on the internet, so I was curious to know how true it is.
However, in my experience extreme right wing social conservatives can be pretty good at self-cleansing by constantly sharing their amazing opinions on superior races, the problem with 'those people' and my favorite, informing people that they are living in sin.
Apparently a political podcast is ordinary, things that are NSFW or dealing with history are ordinary, and photos of New Yorkers are ordinary. The only things it considers transcendent are educational videos and Amanda Palmer.
As examples of what he means by transcendent, he mentions ancient Greeks, Christianity, Enlightenment, classical music, the US Constitution and scientific revolutions.
But honestly, hasn't the ordinary always outnumbered the transcendent? There first needs to be an 'ordinary' to transcend. Even during the height of enlightenment, the world was filled with the ordinary. We remember the transcendent because it is what changes things.
Sure, there is crap like MxR Mods on the list, but there is also stuff like crash course & clickspring. I don't know if I'd call clickspring's videos themselves art, but what he is producing in his shop is certainly art and the opportunity to view the process is just magnificent; this is certainly a channel that shows how great online video can be.
And Contrapoints; while very much political, does an excellent job of engaging with topics much more deeply than what one normally reads in publications like Bloomberg. I honestly found reading this list encouraging; most of the top 50 creators definitely deserve that place and I'm glad that the people benefiting most from Patreon deserve it. Aside from MxR, he's a cancer on the Bethesda modding scene.
When looked to see the name of the author, I was very surprised to see economist Tyler Cowen
Still I don't see what beef a libertarian economist should have with voluntary donations to "ordinary" causes.
Very possibly, if you are doing things that random economics professors consider "transcendent", you are probably extremely well served by the far more lucrative network of grants and funding that exists outside Patreon. He nods briefly to this idea before rejecting it and just plain making some shit up:
"Maybe, but there is another possibility: that Patreon is the tip of an ever-growing iceberg."
Awful.
Also this: "As today’s young become wealthier [...]" . Where's the evidence fit this assertion?
No, it's not.
> it's hard to be patriotic when every country has so many skeletons in the closet you'd think it's perpetually Halloween
When did nations not have skeletons in their closets?
I'd say both are orthogonal to each other. The religious view of the world explain the "why do we exist?" and the scientific view the "how do we exist?".
God created the heavens and the earth, created man from the dust of the earth, and woman from man's rib. There's no room in that for the big bang, modern cosmology or evolution - one cannot accept the latter while believing the former to be anything but prose, which would make it no longer religion. Thus religion can only coexist with science as long as religion isn't taken seriously.
For example, you probably didn't have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinozism in mind when you said religion.
> Even when "natural laws" were discovered, those laws were divine in origin, and thus could conceivably be arbitrarily suspended or changed under divine will.
We still don't know the origin of natural laws. It's very probable that such knowledge is unattainable.
I have to speak up in defence of people who lived in the 9th century. In the Middle Ages, allegorical approaches to Bible interpretation were popular, and they weren't wedded to literal readings of it – e.g. Augustine of Hippo (4th/5th century) argued that the six days in Genesis 1 were not meant to be understood as six literal days – and Augustine's views on this were very influential in the centuries that followed. People sometimes seem to back-project 19th/20th/21st century American fundamentalism on to the Middle Ages, when that sort of wooden literalism was very alien to the mediaeval spirit.
Easiest example is “god made people this way” vs “people are the result of random processes that came about due to happenstance”.
--
[0] - an important realization is that evolution isn't a completely random process - it has state in form of environment and path dependence, both of which concentrate the probability mass.
I don't think science can be used to find any proof of the existence of God
Can anything be used to provide any proof of the existence of God? If not, why continue to argue for the existence of God?
And you overstate "explainable" - we are only able to explain things in terms of math and fundamental (well, the most fundamental found so far) physical laws. But we cannot explain the source of either of those - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics#Fou...
The problem comes when people make decisions based on god making the desired outcome to pass, such as “don’t worry about climate change, everything happens for the better and god will take care of us”. There are religions that believe their purpose is to breed and multiply, without regard to the parameters of the system, because god will take care of the problems.
Also, culturally, in the majority of the "Western" nations, religion and belief in an omnipotent god are synonymous. There are outliers and exceptions, but they have little to no sway on the zeitgeist.
Those who define science as truth are being lazy with the definition. Science is a series of experiments to determine what doesn't seem to be true, so we can narrow down what might be true.
I'm not meaning to be oblique or argumentative, and I actually respect the right of anyone to believe anything they find to be personally gratifying to believe (otherwise science wouldn't progress). I just tend to get entrenched in these discussions because I find religion (and faith) so fascinating. I see "faith" as the birth of a hypothesis, but without experimentation, it's only a hypothesis.
There is crossover in the Venn diagrams of religion and science. History has shown that as scientific knowledge increases, the area that religion has previously laid claim to decreases.
They definitely, and historically, conflict until you're left with religion laying claim to the area that is un-provable, and therefore, un-falsifiable. This is the root of the "god-of-the-gaps" fallacy, and seems to be usually only met with the "fine-tuned-universe" theory, which is, if you think about it, a circular argument at best, and self defeating at worst.
This is, like your comment, taking strict definitions for both "why" and "how".
"why" we exist can have answers ranging from "we're the current latest bunch of mutants resulting from this whole evolution thing" all the way to "as self-realized, intelligent beings, we inevitably ask this question, and asking this question is the only predictable outcome of being intelligent and self-realized."
"how" we exist can be answered anywhere from "with a whole lot of luck" to "badly".
You need to specify what you mean by "why" and "how" for your distinction to have any debatable qualities.
To this range of answers, I'd add "because God created us (because of reasons outside the scope of this answer)"
"how we exist" is how does the universe works, which is explored and explained by the various scientific fields
Yes, but which god, and why does this explanation get any greater credence than Douglas Adams' writing "the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of The Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel."
The religions of the world disagree with each other on the "why", and none of them seem to be interested in demonstrating the veracity of their theory. This is why science generally ignores the "why". No-one has come up with a reasonable way to show, one way or another, which theory may be truer (or more aptly, falser) than any other, and therefore the question currently has no meaningful answer. If this changes, it will show that all, some, one, or none of the current religions are correct, but thousands of years of discussion haven't produced anything close to solving this problem, and this discussion has been going on since before Akhenaten.