ART

I failed to die in the snow today, so things turned out pretty okay. In fact, most of Portland reacted remarkably sanely to the weather, by that I mean they stayed off the damn road. Tomorrow is supposed to be ice all day long, so I imagine that state of affairs will continue.

Anyway, I've been thinking about caring about stuff, specifically pop culture things like music, movies, and TV, you know, the mass produced stuff that people who care about things refer to as trash and not worth our time. People who do care deeply about it, or even act like it is worthy of consideration tend to be looked down upon by those interested in "real" art.

But in a lot of ways, this stuff is more of an honest commentary on our lives and culture than any amount of finely produced underground stuff, let's take movies as an example, right now among a lot of people who care deeply about movies it is cool to hate on the Marvel films, or really superhero movies in general, some of the critique being that is is all just flashy schlock designed to distract you from the fact that they are devoid of substance. There is an element of truth to that critique, but only an element, the Marvel films in particular tend to spend some time addressing themes of the surveillance state, profiling, and freedom versus security in between team up battles and explosions. The discussion might not include every nuance of the issue, and the solutions frequently involve building autonomous androids, but it is still there, and I don't see how it is a bad thing for stuff like that to be seen by millions of people a year.

I feel like a lot of people have the idea that because something is successful and appeals to a large market, it loses the ability to start a conversation on things that have meaning. I mean, hell, look at the Twilight series, both novels and movies were terrible from a basic storytelling perspective, but they spawned parody and discussion about issues ranging from writing and publishing all the way through consent, you can, if you wish, spend a lot of time in thought on the series and it really wouldn't waste your time.

But they don't have to be deep, there doesn't need to be any goal beyond, "look at this thing I made" maybe it means nothing to them, if it's popular, it is worth taking a look at, you don't have to like it, but understanding it and why it is there helps give insights into the world we live in even if the artist never intended to do so. A while back, "Blurred Lines" was topping the charts, that song was basically the most popular date rape anthem since "Baby it's Cold Outside" lyrically it's a huge piece of shit with a good beat and the writer deserves a good beating, though I think his wife ended up leaving him at least partially over it, so that works. The point is, it was all over the place, and controversy inevitably popped up around it and suddenly we were having conversations about consent, like real, informative conversations, in various TV news and article formats, I would venture to guess that in the end the song did more to raise awareness of the more "subtle" forms of sexual assault than any number of PSA's that came out during the same period, and that isn't to say anything against the PSA's, they just didn't have the penetration(hur) of a Billboard top 10 song.

In the end I kind of feel that the existence of art justifies itself, no one has to like it, but saying it shouldn't exist is basically writing off entire sections of our culture from critical thought, it's part of us and ignoring a part of you never helped anything.