culture
To spot weird signals, you need to go down rabbit holes. Follow your intuition. And remember, pursuing rabbit holes is not always an act of procrastination. Sometimes, it’s simply your mind telling you to follow your curiosity.
Alexi Gunner • Research as a form of pattern disruption
14. All those nasty, rebellious songs that defy authorities are now owned by hedge funds.
Ted Gioia • 14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture
Sylvia Plath on Living with the Darkness and Making Art from the Barely Bearable Lightness of Being
Maria Popovathemarginalian.org
Whatever initial appeal this argument has, it owes to the unpleasantness of corporate drudgery in general, not to the predicament of female corporate drudges in particular. Invariably, the job that features in articles like Andrews’s is soul-sucking, pointless and therefore presumed to have been chosen solely for the prestige it confers (although... See more
Becca Rothfeld • Women’s Work | The Point Magazine
For all its good intentions, art that tries to minister to its audience by showcasing moral aspirants and paragons or the abject victims of political oppression produces smug, tiresome works that are failures both as art and as agitprop. Artists and critics—their laurel bearers—should take heed.
Anastasia Berg • On the Aesthetic Turn | The Point Magazine
“The contemporary man should not find it difficult to play a role in which modern life is casting him. Glued to his movie or television screen, fed his daily dose of scandals, always watching and never acting, he has become a Peeping Tom.”
Leo Nasskau • René Girard, mimetic desire, and society's biggest rat race
Instead, art and culture have been safely neutralized as interchangeable commercial objects just like everything else.
At its best, cultural criticism is love and art that exists to give love to other expressions of art. It’s beautiful in its indulgence. A positive feedback loop that gives everybody exactly what they desire. Gods, scribes, muses, an audience, a culmination. This is what we want out of art. Something that feels grand, meaningful, connected to the ages. That doesn’t happen on its own. It needs context, dedicated space, deeper knowledge, appreciation.