https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wxRxSfhw6I

This is the real shit. Being an artist today is a very egocentric, professionalised position that we structurally only encourage through for-profit individual efforts. I couldn’t afford the decades or degrees required to be a good cellist. There’s no community role for a mediocre amateur cellist or community support to develop them. If I became a great cellist, the only secure positions for me would be playing the music of aristocrats in exclusive venues with $100 tickets. If I became a great non-classical cellist, celebrity is such a weird thing that it encourages someone to be the worst version of themselves.

For us there are the hard materialistic aspects to value. Lapis lazuli from Afghanistan is so rare in Europe that blue becomes associated with its most venerated icons. A Roman icon of Ceres is a protoscientific understanding of agronomy, the cult and its rituals making sense of nature to survive the year. Japonisme is a rebellion against French academic art that only happens due to packaging from colonial extraction in Japan, Japanese perspective being so radically different that it’s as new as cubism representing 4D subjects. Art nouveau is a cultural language for degrowth that gives us something more enriching than commodities, made locally by local artisans to turn their communities into art venerating the nature greyspace alienates them from. Dada is like if Hexbear existed in the 1910s-20s and we were commenting on WW1 instead of the 2-3 Week War.

There’s also value to critically understanding the idealism, seeing how the stories those cultures tell themselves reflect deeper histories/structures and modes of consumption/production. I don’t have any cultic relationship to a salmon image, but in tribal nations where that’s a staple food it serves the role ecology does for me in formally defining human-natural relationships. I hate NFTs, but I obsessively watched that spectacle because I loved the social psychology of people doing what Walter Benjamin was talking about. Seeing the failures in postmodernist works teaches me why the society they produced fails. For our own work the idealism is rooted in modernism or meta-modernism. The idealistic message is that anyone can create something genuinely new and use that to teach a new kind of beauty to anyone else, with different movements trying different approaches to achieve some form of that. All of my favourite leftist comedians today are absurdists who do unfunny things until they’re funny in a way that subverts the medium. My favourite leftist artists made things that attacked the values of their cultures because those values were wrong, with art being the way to illustrate new values.