Amarna Forum

In which We Discuss Attempts of Twitter Spheres to maek works ov graet powah to own the libtards and restore the cultural science.

"We can do this, we can bring all these very interesting, very talented people together and put on a successful show."




You can just ignore me if you like and flip through this yourself, make your own judgements if you want. I link for that, and also because I think it's fair to judge people by what they're selling themselves as. First two words, 'Dissident Art'. That's what we're doing here. Allegedly. Aspirationally. etc.

https://the-exhibition.co.uk/

They really do most of the work for me. Just look at this page. Says more than I ever could at a glance. 

Quote:We come together because we are hungry for true beauty, aesthetic strength and vital expressions. Because we want to see culture that energises. Because we have been standing on the sidelines watching how the flame of true creation has been smothered by petty ideology.

This is a momentous occasion: like-minded artists from across Europe joining forces to make a cultural shift. We believe this is a pivotal moment in its nascent stage.

Inspired by the collectives that have formed before us, we stand unapologetically to carve out another route in this time of artistic stagnation.

If we don’t rekindle the fire, who will?

But let's keep going anyway.

The video is broken into chapters, and at the start we have our 'Mission Statement' section. The exhibit ran for about a week and then closed around when this video was made, about a month ago. But in their own words, this was a "proof of concept", and there are to be "many more of these". Great. But before we get excited about dissident art's future let's look at what we have now.

Let's see this room that was, "as Jonathan Bowden might say, brimming with fire, with energy, with power."



Not too inspiring a look from the front door, but maybe everything just looks gay because of how we do buildings now. So far I see an indistinct white shape and some Dungeon Synth album covers. Let's keep going.




"Now I'm no art critic, but so- but all of the art we have on display is incredible."



How do we top that tasteful Skyrim screenshot above (Just kidding, the guy didn't put his favourite skyrim screenshot on display in a gallery, that would've actually been interesting). How about a 3D Bronze of this guy's Bloodborne build? Oh and in the background we have Vallotton if she phone.

Aren't you classy, whore of today? You're basically the subject of a late 19th century pop-art piece, you are the culture. This cool classy lady of the past who would keep it real but also FUCKED is just like you. She'd listen to all the coolest podcasts if she were alive today just like you do, she gets it, you do too. And a real man of the time could see that, just like one day a real man of today will step up and recognise you too. Well it's happened. The Exhibit hosts this monument to your greatness.

Have we started the fire Brother? Do you feel the pre-socratic fire welling within you looking at this imitation of an over 120 years old style and subject if she iphone?



Here's my favourite part of The Exhibit. I call it 'Wario Land 4 Dash Attack If He Real'. Its creator apparently calls it 'Prometheus'. Prometheus huh... I can think of another thing made this century already called Prometheus. I guess the two works have to fight it out for the title in my memory now. We'll see which one endures. A year from now one of you ask me if I like 'Prometheus' and we'll see what I think of.



I keep posting their faces as they're commenting rather than just the work itself mostly because I consider this guy important. I recommend watching at least a little bit so that you can see his face remain like this for the entire time as he comments on the "heroic energy" on display. As you can see he's saying things, but he doesn't seem to be feeling much.

"It champions strength and power, not minority concerns" says the one who seems to be trying harder to believe in this. He says that, but having looked briefly yourself, do you believe it? If nobody was saying this, if it wasn't plastered all over the thing top to bottom, is that the impression you would get? I think (or perhaps even hope) that he let his concerns slip here. He's saying what he wants it to be and telling us it's not what it obviously is. This Exhibit is a hothouse. It's a reservation. It's a protected space for minority concerns. It's a space where trad kitsch can receive support from externally motivated actors who will patronise them for the minority concerns which their work represents. Not the sheer overwhelming power they want to have. If this stuff was actually the bearer of the true fire they would not have to advertise themselves so explicitly as the painted word. They could just stand as they are and people would not resist. If human destiny is in the fire then we will seek it. In an age as dark as our own it will be radiant. Even if you aren't advertising people will find you (not to say you shouldn't advertise, as I said elsewhere leverage is nice to have).

This Exhibit does not work. It is self conscious, awkward, cheap looking, and just not alive and burning in the way it aspires to be. "Cnaiur tried harder than any to be of the people, and so he would never be of the people." The Exhibit is trying very hard, I'll give it credit for that. It's trying hard, but they have not achieved a burn. They are not fire. This is not a burning font of energy which draws in fuel, consumes, and grows more powerful. What is power? What is fire? Well, for a potentially fruitful line of inquiry, why don't we look at what people do like? It should be obvious, I mentioned leverage above and will elaborate again, social factors can multiply and divide something's force of impact but they can't entirely obscure the truth of what's going on. Ben Shapiro pulls in bigger numbers than these guys, but he's also backed by a supporting network of media infrastructure that burns enough energy every year to send a rocket to the moon. With all of this leverage put towards multiplying his initial force he can do an okay job at getting some people to kind of half care about him, mostly zombies just kind of instinctively reacting to bad stuff around them and looking for a vaguely authoritative verbal droning to tell them their feelings are right. That's not fire. That's a shitty chinese electric heater that gives you carbon monoxide poisoning.



The numbers are there, but this will never be real. He's not burning. It's a false heat.

What is power? What is fire? Well... what is the opposite of Ben Shapiro? What is something that is enduringly and inexplicably successful? What is something that seems to succeed despite the forces leveraged against it? What is something which burns and glows? An irresistable light shining in darkness? A mercilessly consuming and growing force that seems to be tapping into some kind of perennial element which will never die? The Futurists of 100 years ago this Exhibit is trying to copy were doing their best. And the fact they have cast a shadow so long that 100 years later people are anxiously trying to work within their footprints to be cool and current is testament to the real strength they had. But what that doesn't mean, is that the Futurists worked out the future. They did not, there is more to be done after them. The fire is eternal, the shape is not.

Reaching for the future is something between a process and a series of natural life cycles. The future is something which we are realising and living our way towards if we are not sterile faggots. The Futurists of 100 years ago created things which were powerful. The world was paying attention then, and people remember now. And history kept moving. People stopped looking at their work, people stopped making things like it. This isn't because people forgot or became corrupted. The Futurist vision is not sculptures of craggy man moving fast forever. It's about force and potential. Even a couple of decades after this stuff what do we need 'craggy man runs fast' for now that we have Warner Brothers. Some guy in California (a cool place at the time) draws his imagination to life and creates something so obviously bursting with life and potential that sculptures and static art as basically done as a subjects of organic public interest. Fellow observers have told me that I am not actually the first to see the Futurist's surpassed (or perhaps fulfilled, as this doesn't make them wrong) in the pop-art that followed. Allegedly Arthur Danto said that Tom & Jerry became a greater fulfillment of the aspirations of these sculptures of energy and power. Which I consider a respectable thought.

You can see there's something trashy and commercial about this, unheroic maybe. But what's undeniable is that American animation was power. The industry was an incredible thing, the energy of its works was irresistable. Images from the imagination rendered into motion and beamed across the entire world. To fast, too funny, and too new for everyone not to look. If one looks at the character of the captains of this industry, the general direction of their vision, and the fate of it all once they fell away and were not replaced, I believe that concerns of orientation or nature are put to rest. These were heroic times, these were powerful times, and they couldn't be one without the other. If they lacked some heroism that just means they weren't as powerful as they could have been. The moment their outlook and concerns became truly wrong the life bled right out of them despite all the infrastructure and inertia behind them. A phenomena which we've covered elsewhere on this site.



I didn't really answer my above question. What is alive?

American pop-animation I think is a good Post-WW2 example for what follows the Futurist exhibit and drawings culture these people are trying to reproduce, but it's not too good for us now. It's far further from us than it was from the Futurists. Far enough for us to have grown decrepit and disgusting and profoundly unfuturistic. They had some fire, then they lost it. But while they were alive and burning they were seen. And real fire catches and spreads.



If America was unmatched in power but maybe even in its prime lacked something of the heroic, the Japanese started out in an inverted spot and have been working to build both strengths rather admirably since. I don't remember if it was here, but I know I've posted before about Roy Lichtenstein's comic panel reproductions which he sold in galleries. Very cool idea to stick it to boring theory people in that way, and surely refreshing for gallerygoers driven insane by abstractions which only make sense in the context of bad theory. But I'll repeat myself on what I think is essential to take from the story. That Lichtenstein's work was nice because the comics were nice, and if being a galleryfag is about being cool and fearless in your taste, what's cooler and more fearless than foregoing the gallery entirely, telling the stupid middleman to get lost, and just reading your nice comics because they're more in touch with what you, as a living human being and disciple of fire, actually care about?

Lichtenstein lifted panels from American comics, I have to make a point of that because it's another now old medium. So old it grew corrupt and died as a vessel for fire. Many decades ago maybe you could get in touch with cool through comics, some life, something of some kind. But even by his time it was really a way of playing with plastic kitsch. A joke on the sensibilities of people who were laughably wrong. "Hey your gallery full of gay Jewish fake nerd crap is less fun than a panel I lifted from some stupid printed soap opera." If only he knew how right he was. If only he had the drive, the vital fire, to really believe in what he was doing to these people. If he did he would have started actually making comics and he would have become a true artist and vessel of fire.

What America was clearly waiting for in this cultural moment was for someone to embrace the power of mass media and what life there was in the plastic kitsch that was all Americans could collectively identify with anymore. And they got it a year after Lichtenstein produced his most famous panels in Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising.



Kenneth Anger was possibly the most shamelessly honest and clearsighted man in America. This film is him saying "This is what we are. This is what we love. Junk, kitsch, cheap excitement!" but he's not an essayist or journalist. He won't just write this. He's not a writer, but he was a curator. Not only is the stuff you see in a gallery tired and pointless by the 60s, the idea of a gallery as a vital cultural space was outdated. You want to share your soul with the world, you want to start the fire, you make a movie. I unfortunately can't just give you a youtube link anymore, but the film is well worth tracking down and watching in its entirety. It is the opposite of the painted words of its contemporary art exhibit cultural scenes and the unfortunate Exhibit of 2023. Kenneth Anger took kitsch and fuelled fire. Nothing that lives on in the heart of humanity bears the DNA of even the livelier subversives of the 60s galleries, but if you haven't heard of Kenneth Anger and Scorpio Rising, people you've heard of have.





Perhaps calling Scorpio Rising a film doesn't entirely capture its importance. Perhaps I could call it multimedia. But perhaps I'm also getting ahead of myself.

If America had an actually relevant cultural space in which to exercise power, in which it was possible to awe people into correctness, that space was the cinema. Not from Anger forwards, from its inception forwards. Anger just revitalised things by doing what could have been done decades earlier, were America not a gay country bent on sending people like him to jail. Perhaps calling Tom & Jerry a vital work of power is a bit much to accept, but how about Scorpio Rising? How about the works of the guys who watched Scorpio Rising? The culture which really impressed itself against people against the odds and stuck because it was good regardless of what the official voices said is almost entirely cinematic in the second half of the 20th century.





Remember ARE SIDE'S based woman Amanda Milius? Wasn't her dad famous for something too?




Film is an old medium. And it hurts to say but it's true, they're another medium which isn't just old, it has also grown decrepit. Like the novel I don't believe it can truly die due to the utilitarian simplicity of shooting things with a camera, but this tradition (or countertradition) of American cinema is over. No I will not watch The Northman. I will not eat the bugs. etc.

Cinema is old, but people still love Scarface. People post Conan. Its warmth lingers and provides some comfort for those who don't know where to go from there. Would you point them to The Exhibit?



Look, I think that's a motorbike on that one. Aren't you excited? Don't you want to devote your own time to this when nobody's paying attention? Maybe not. If so I can understand why.




How about these bikes?

This film is 35 years old now, but do you feel it? Look at that thumbnail, one of the most imitated frames of animation of all time. This upload of this scene is only a year old and has a quarter of a million views. It's still beautiful to look at, the most expensive anime ever made when it premiered. You can feel the money. The amount of craft and vision directed towards the realisation of this two hour vision is still probably unmatched in animation. This film had the fire. 35 years later and you can still feel it watching it. It's something like five weeks since 'The Exhibit', who's ever going to look at that little colourful bike pictured above and feel anything comparable to this? Could they have when it was new, will anybody feel anything in 35 years? Will the future be anxiously looking back to this? It's not impossible for anybody to do. The world still anxiously looks back upon Akira.

And something I didn't plan, but a fun way to move forward. Look at this youtube user's pfp (at the time of writing). It's Lain!

Imagine trying to explain Lain to a time travelled Futurist from the 1920s. I think of all the art or media things we could show him created since his time, that might be the one to genuinely induce a future shock and kill him. After all, Lain is not about the past.



PRESENT DAY, PRESENT TIME. And what a time. By all the way back in 1998 Culture and Technology had progressed to the point where it was possible for a Japanese concept artist to start with an image of a girl, and from that image create a quick and complete sprawl of multimedia. A tv anime that seems to draw comfortably from cool dangerous youth culture, experimental and arthouse film techniques and history, and the vibe of the internet, which it both accurately read, dramatised, and created by turns.



Yoshitoshi Abe was doing more than mercenary character design when he created Lain. He was doing more than drawing a lost and sad looking girl. He was tapping into some kind of force. He was discovered by professional culture industries as a trouble graffiti artist. There's something about his work. He belongs to a strange and I would even say miraculous (or demonic) kind of new wild human creativity. The mysterious fire aspired towards in images of Conan the Barbarian alive and working alongside the taste and sophistication of a modern Japanese man of high craft. This shaman-like to reach beyond and touch what we all feel is there is perhaps not supposed to reach such high levels of refinement. Abe was the original shaping hands, and then writers and producers and countless fine artists and craftsmen did their work and something truly new was born. The vision and instincts of a shaman privileged and aided by some of the most advanced culture and media infrastructure in the world. Granted multiple media bodies with which to begin driving towards its own future in its own strange and new ways without any regard for the world around it, A future which it is continuously creating as it blazes its mysterious course through The Wired. 

Cool things have been made since 1998, but Lain is elevated by the fact that it is still going. Lain is not a tv show that came out in 1998. It was a force unleashed upon the world. A force which more than 20 years after its inception is capable of making world class intellects mutilate their bodies and worship her visage and the singularity. If nobody was putting up plaques and making podcasts telling you it was supposed to be so nobody would look at The Exhibit as a work of power. On the other hand, I challenge you to convince me that Lain is not a work of power. Lain is not in an exhibit. Not because it is not worthy. But because an exhibit could not contain it.



We live in an age of popular racing simulators in which you can break 1000km/h in your living room, violence simulators are the most popular media on earth, multimedia sagas of war heroes contemplating nietzschean perspectives on violence culminating in an interactive fascist action rock-opera affirming that war is indeed the hygiene of humanity. Children are empowered to build their own monoliths and even their own online war and crime simulators. The fire is not out yet. There are still good things out there which energise humanity and in turn are capable of drawing it back into themselves.

The great works of power, beauty, aesthetic strength and energising heroism all around us, but these poor fools running The Exhibit are too busy looking for works of power and heroism to ever notice. If you go beyond believing in what The Exhibit extols, if you've actually felt it before yourself, you will feel no positive desire to actually look at The Exhibit.





Don't strain yourself so hard looking for the future you miss it being born right in front of you.

I am not contributing much when I say that these works in The Exhibition are not imbued with a sense of life/inner fire/futurity, since that is immediately perceived by anyone scrolling through.

There is an underlying principle, a false one, that has been placed in the heads of "Dissidents": because Italian Futurism, Vorticism, and its fellow-travelers were at the forefront of Modernity, those who are outside established art should imitate their example. This isn't exclusively about FrogTwitter (or whatever you want to call it), some spheres like the Hazcels have their own version of this. Here is how they model their vision of the future:



The horror.

The Exhibition, and other such attempts, is caused by a misinterpretation of what an artistic tradition truly means; the type of thing that was deplored by T.S. Eliot in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent:

Quote:Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, 'tradition' should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.

To have the pretense of imitating Futurists or any artistic forefront creates unavoidable problems, requiring active minds not steeped in the past. It also requires people who are capital-a Artists. The people involved with The Exhibition would lead much happier lives if they did not concern themselves with the importance of Dissident Art, emulating the life-path of Thomas Kinkade instead (or, if they are a writer, Stephen King). Everything after their conversion to political causes will be their greatest misery.

When this self-conscious transition is made, and these types are devoted to making super serious art, the creator of these things insist on the dull dreariness of their lives. The first reason being that they have some awareness of their own mediocrity — which is not too unsympathetic a state to be in — and second because they view their trade to be as miserable as themselves. I used to try reading short stories by heavensite people, and decided to stop one day because of this. The stories that I have read disappear from my mind about a day after, the authors stop existing as do the titles. To call these stories sketches justifies too much, because a sketch of a story can have some permanence in the reader's mind. When someone imparts to an audience the sketch of a story, it reveals possibilities that the artist couldn't live up to. That is no unimportant thing since people still fantasize about cancelled movies. What we're speaking of is less than that, it is a blob of colors mashed together, and the audience is supposed to perceive the pareidolia of a story.

I can only remember the best example because it is a meme: Logo Daedalus' Selfie, Suicide. Coincidentally, the plot is centered around an event called The Exhibition. Why can't an art exhibition be named anything else other than The Exhibition? Does their imagination really not go further than this?

This is how Lolgo's Cairey Turnbull is represented on the first page:

Quote:"So he’s drowsy and out of sorts, but he’s been that way for years. This thought is itself routine, & if he were honest, it doesn’t come to him without a hint of vertiginous thrill"

Cairey needs some bedtime.

Quote:"He chocks it up today to the chemicals in his bloodstream- the caffeine from his morning draught of cold-coffee, the side- effects of his prescription pills, the fetid soup of his abnormal brain, & of course, all of that uncelebratory champagne he’d quaffed in citric disguise. All of these poisons combined so early in the AM explain his lack of poise or so he assures himself. The nauseous sensation in his throat is tied in his mind to a sort of car-sickness he suffers from"

Here is a part in a later chapter, where Caisey Turnbull experiences anxiety:

Quote:"He feels all of the foreboding symptoms of abysmality & future ruin & fuckup- the nauseated panic, the esophageal choke of inexorable embarrassment, the gelatinous knees of humiliation, the swift shriveling of the fearful scrotum, & the flushed heatpangs of total-blush. Just as he’s felt some measure of invisible stability in himself, unseen in the anonymous crowd of stream voyeurs, he is being thrust, once more, into a nightmare of nudity. He feels he’s doomed to be bound by the spotlight- to become subject to a crowd of eyes glinting like scalpels- their eyes like the eyes of monsters half-glanced in the shadows of dusk. Oh what a fool he thinks himself now, for lowering his guard like this, for living on in this rapacious torture world".

I will forbid myself from quoting this book for here on out.

Cairey Turnbull, the Not-Alter-Ego of Logo Daedalus, is characterized by these habits: anxiousness, making pornography commissions, doing drugs because his high school peers told him it led to "creative insights and revelations", being once treated for hypothermia, feeling neurotic about being seen, the list goes on. Everything that Lolgo appends to the full story is window-dressing to the character of Cairey Turnbull, who is in every respect a weak specimen. This is coming from an author who is concerned about Christianity, The Classics, and the "mythopoetic" (a term used in the book). I am sure that he has justified this novel existing by referencing figures like Wyndham Lewis, stating that it is a satire of the times. Regardless, it is little different than a Tumblr girl writing a novel about her anorexia and fears of getting catcalled, with not-so-vague pronouncements about the art scene's corruption. I guess he does distinguish himself from this cohort by creating a character named Simon LaFeint, a wealthy "bohemian" artsy character who spits Epic Rap Battles of History-tier rhymes at Cairey Turnbull about the art world. Highbrow Art made manifest.

Without hyperbole Anthony, besides the accuracy of the analysis I thought this post was both moving and a critique in good faith, two things that are increasingly rare in writing, perhaps the medium most vulnerable to the same errors that motivated The Exhibit. Since your description of their ostensible goal (cultural energy) and how severely they missed the mark (the gallery and the painted word) was so apt, I’d like to focus on the possible motivations of the participants and organizers in The Exhibit. However, because I don’t know any of these people on a close level, this will only be my most charitable guess as to their motivations and more generally the mentality that allowed them to collectively think this was a good idea.

It was great that you singled out the faux-futurism on display and described it as missing ‘fire’, because it allows me to critique their cliches with another:
“'Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.'”- Gustav Mahler

The central issues as I see it are conflation and self-deception. The first major error of The Exhibit is that they conflate ‘fire’ with ‘tradition’. Let’s say someone believes that all the works of art that have made it into the big basket we call Tradition are united by an animating energy, that fire that makes them able to be remembered for millenia, that makes them art in the first place. Now the conflation occurs when that person puts the reified version of Tradition they have in their minds before the essential, animating fire, assuming that imitating old forms will bring back this energy. This imitation can only produce ashes.
This conflation allows them to ignore Marinetti’s manifesto about bulldozing the Coliseum and destroying museums. How would the Futurists feel about The Exhibit using their name to sell itself? Would they feel consoled to know that they had finally made it into that big basket of Tradition, the thing their fire and energy had sought to burn down? Or would they say that such labels are irrelevant and even harmful when it comes to understanding their art for what it is on its own terms?
As you said, true fire is too hot to contain in a gallery, it burns, it destroys old forms through the process of creating the art that takes new, revitalized and most importantly, temporary forms in the world. Their fire was unique and in that way was more properly traditional than any notion of a reified Tradition, and it is the fire that must be preserved not the ashes that have been branded as something they are not.

Now this conflation leads to self-deception, where a reasonable pride in some technical artistic skill causes them to believe that these ashes they have been crafting are indeed animated by the fire they have been seeking. From what I’ve seen the people whose art was presented at the exhibition are talented, and as I don’t know them I imagine they do believe that what they have created looks cool, aesthetically pleasing, if not entirely original then at least respectable, and I could agree. The problem is, as you said, all of this does not make fire. Not only are energetic cultural movements not born this way, if
something has to label itself as part of an eternal Tradition, it is as a man having to constantly proclaim himself king to assert his authority. The Exhibit can only decide what it wants to be, it cannot decide what it is.

As for that, it has already been pointed out that the old form of the gallery is an anachronism, cargo cult, empty status signifier, etc. But the reason why it was chosen by people who like to label themselves ‘right-wing’ or part of ‘Tradition’ can be narrowed down. The most obvious is social media clout, such as the video coverage Anthony discussed, and the peer pressure to be part of such a ‘movement’ to get one’s name out there (a relatively innocent motivation as long as they are not the ones slapping grandiose labels onto their own work).
But to continue with the self-deception theme, I believe the Exhibit organizers themselves said that by putting on their show in a gallery, it was meant to ‘take over enemy territory’ so to speak, capitalizing on their online audience’s rather justified notion that all modern galleries are for rich liberals laundering money or garbage labeled conceptual art. Yet the next thought should be obvious, why is that barren territory in any way desirable?
The medium of a gallery exhibition cannot hide behind any ideas of Tradition discussed earlier. Were they thinking that the concept of galleries in general deserved ‘revitalization’ and that their art was going to make not just Tradition, but galleries cool again? Probably not, which means they chose a subpar medium on purpose. How many of the people walked through the gallery doors because they were already fans of these Exhibition people from their Twitter and Instagram? Of course seeing art in person is different than seeing it on a screen, but the point stands, one of these mediums is the vestigial appendage and it isn’t the online one.

All these threads come unraveled when just thinking briefly about the superfluity of a gallery. I suspect, given all these disadvantages, that the only reason it would be chosen is out of the belief that it is the only way their art can be displayed. On some level I can sympathize, because if you sat down one of the Exhibit members who was open to new ideas I suspect he could be persuaded that Lain or the other examples are the new, energetic, artistic mediums, but that wouldn’t help someone who dedicated a decent portion of their life to painting or sculpture. To declare that entire artforms have no more potential for energy life would be too harsh and likely untrue in my opinion. I think some of these people must feel lost.
But the organizers deserve little to no sympathy because they have essentially created a gilded cage. Again, I don’t know these people well so the dichotomy between organizers and members might be off-target, (I know the sculptor Fen is also the main promoter and participants always have some complicity), but the main point is that people with talent are suffering because of a refusal to move on from the ‘ashes’ we spoke of earlier.
They have essentially adopted the enemy’s frame, the old and decrepit frame that says this is how paintings and sculptures must be shown off. They will readily acknowledge the content of galleries is filled with modern art that is bad, but they still cling to the idea that the gallery is worth preserving because they use it as a status symbol.
To a certain degree, putting on the Exhibition is like touching grass. A symbolic act that distracts from where the real energy is, a facade of superiority that can be maintained by willful ignorance of the energy that keeps it on life support.
This false sense of superiority is linked back to the self-assertion of one’s kingship metaphor, wherein acting like something is “high culture” does not make it so, and acting like something with energy or fire is “popular culture” does not mean it can be dismissed. What comes to mind is the middle school cliche that Shakespeare was the “popular culture” of his day, certainly a position that has been used to artificially elevate things like negro music, but the nugget of truth is that energy and fire can come from such environments despite certain online pretensions that established hierarchies and aristocracies are always the tastemakers.
So the people behind the Exhibit have not only set for themselves a tall order they cannot fulfill by failing to revitalize anything, their false advertising has the potential to mislead people into looking down upon those mediums that have the potential to do so, whether that is anime or interactive multimedia.

As a last self-indulgent autobiographical note, one reason this discussion about energy and fire hits home for me is because I have always gravitated towards the old, precisely those things which once had more fire and energy but no longer do, yet they retain their beauty. More specifically I’ve focused on religion and some art, and to fight the entropy that continually tries to smother their flames with ashes is the work of men stronger than many of us can imagine. That fire can still be found in some people and their work, and I am lucky to have read about and encountered them.
Right now I am pursuing an art form under the tutelage of a mentor who hammers home the bleakness of his traditional discipline, what he calls the ‘suicide mission’ of attempting to preserve it against the overwhelming tide of imitators selling to tourists and people who are focused on merely its value as a historical artifact to be stuck in museums and talked about in lectures full of old people or bored college students. I am no better artist than the Exhibit people, but this dose of honesty along with my commitment to learn this art regardless of any advertisement or future benefit is what keeps me sane.

whoops forgot to log in, above is me

Galleries are nice to visit, I'm not sure why one would think they are dead, dying, etc. The other option is to visit someone's personal gallery, which also will never die.

The exhibit itself seems alright.

As for old forms, new forms, etc. Galleries will easily be able to display new forms when/if they exist physically. A gallery is simply a place to display works. New forms might still spring up in "old" media (paint, paper, ink, sculpture, etc.) I don't know what "frame" has to do with this at all...Because you can frame a gallery this way or that way, but it remains a gallery.

There is simply nothing at this particular gallery or exhibition that reaches to a height that compels one to go towards it. This is not surprising given the level of human degeneration that has occurred. It is beyond an artist's scope to "fix" this. If you have a world-shaking war, then all the gravity of said war is now contained in the era, and this gravity goes into all media too. If you have genuine heroes, the same. The catch is that it must be well-understood too...As in, people must be structured to see what this all means. If you and your neighbors see the rest of the world as aliens, savages, villains, then you being to approach this structure. If you see yourselves as the rightful best, along with your land being the rightful best, then you are closer. With this sight, war is as it is, and all things charged-by-war gain the respective power of such a thing.

Art is like love in that it requires a given. You might have works towards God, towards country, towards heroes. All of those things must be given by the audience first, and there must be a commonality. The exception proves the rule, in that only those somewhat trained or sensitive can see the value in "alien" works.

The exhibit in question is alien to me, but the ones holding it wish for it to be a "country" of its own. And a people. Maybe there is some audience that is somewhat there, and maybe this pushes that along, but I doubt it.

I enjoy games, film, etc. Most of the art I consume is games. But there is a different feeling and pace to them versus slowly digesting a painting etc. over repeated viewings. Still, I can't disagree that games are the only living medium at the moment. The good part of that audience holds the given, although much of the audience is not this good part. And of course, much of the good part is naturally my enemy just as some of the good part is naturally my friend.

If I were to hold a gallery exhibit, it would be private. If it had to be public, there would need to be some test beyond money to enter it. This would at least begin to set the proper consciousness of the audience. Maybe a fist-fight etc. Perhaps older would-be patrons could elect champions. These are vague ideas now.

One thing I find funny about this affair is it's another addition to the growing corpus of self-refuting online works. There is a mass fixation on the idea, especially among the e-right, of making the virtual into the physical as some token of progress. It seems to be an implicit goal of the right that online must be transferred to "the real world" in order to matter, and The Exhibition is just an extension of this thinking. Yet, the ability to brand itself as vital and urgent and some sort of capturing of fire can only be done through the virtual world, as it's actual physical manifestation, as well as its real-live-flesh creators, are utterly limp and agreeable, begging for scraps and what you characterize as creation of a minority space for themselves. The dilemma they face is this...either they can pull off the spectacle of grandiosity through manipulating the virtual world, or they can exist in a humbled scale in real life. I don't consider either end in themselves to be bad. Both are potential sources of dignity, either being the digital trickster who uses virtuality to induct people into their cult with cunning or machiavellianism, or being a small tenacious organism that refuses to back down against the tides of entropy, but they can't really embracr either position. Having known one of the creators somewhat, this is ultimately an issue of agreeability and self-consciousness why it doesn't lead to any serious notion of vitality. You cannot, and should not, be attempting to cover your weak spots from all possible observers. Either embrace the obscurity, or embrace the psychological nudity, as it doesn't come off as dignified whatsoever to try and please everyonr and shield yourself from the maximum amount of criticism through social and philosophical contortionism.


(Funny enough, Nobody also calls the section of his site where his works are displayed an "exhibition", a much more convincing use in the context of his work embracing the total fluidity of virtual matter and being.)

(08-12-2023, 06:53 AM)Guest Wrote: [ -> ]But to continue with the self-deception theme, I believe the Exhibit organizers themselves said that by putting on their show in a gallery, it was meant to ‘take over enemy territory’ so to speak, capitalizing on their online audience’s rather justified notion that all modern galleries are for rich liberals laundering money or garbage labeled conceptual art. Yet the next thought should be obvious, why is that barren territory in any way desirable?

[...]

They have essentially adopted the enemy’s frame, the old and decrepit frame that says this is how paintings and sculptures must be shown off. They will readily acknowledge the content of galleries is filled with modern art that is bad, but they still cling to the idea that the gallery is worth preserving because they use it as a status symbol.

The Exhibition is the perfect name. They wanted to do "the high culture art thing" only not libtarded and this is it. The context in which the art is being displayed is more of an object of focus than the art itself, so there is no better thing for its name to describe than itself. The Exhibition is... The Exhibit? Naruhodo...

(08-12-2023, 03:24 PM)Mason Hall-McCullough Wrote: [ -> ]The Exhibition is the perfect name. They wanted to do "the high culture art thing" only not libtarded and this is it. The context in which the art is being displayed is more of an object of focus than the art itself, so there is no better thing for its name to describe than itself. The Exhibition is... The Exhibit? Naruhodo...

Can't believe I bungled the names on that one. Though I was on no sleep.

And as for what ASIF wrote, discussing the Exhibition enough before this thread essentially unconsciously shaped my comments and analogies. 
"Bringing the digital into the real world" as he puts it I compared to the insistence to touch grass. And what I wrote about the mismatch between their self-advertising and what it is they are actually engaged in doing beyond the surface level of putting paint on canvas ASIF put succinctly in the simple ultimatum that they can't pretend to be both the next hot thing that will shake the world and the little guys struggling against entropy

I can't disagree with anything that has been written in this thread so far, all quite incisive. 

These artists (at least the ones I am aware of), I feel, are technically proficient and not in any way malicious. But, none give me the feeling that they are going to produce interesting or even "important" works in the future and will simply continue rehashing what has already been done better in the past, only with updated or "relevant" subject matter. There is a self awareness to the whole thing, they know what they're doing, but this awareness is in a way fake and completely effacing. The idea that they are fighting to re-ignite the fire of tradition is an idea which is absent in all of these works. There is no reaching, no longing, no desperation here at all. It feels too safe.

No, I do think the exhibit is bad, though I think most make an inappropriate setting. Art museums and exhibits should open only at night IMO. Otherwise, I believe a man's bedroom is the only place suitable for appreciating artwork. In a dark room with his face illuminated by a screen.
In those rare moments of profound epiphany, when I've been struck by lightning and ecstasy, I begin to pace around my bedroom late into the night.
'In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.''

Not going to pretend I have any spectacular insight about the modern world of art, since I do not have a particular interest in it except a cursory familiarity with its historical evolution. Still, while I agree that the works presented are generally unremarkable and uninspired, I commend the endeavor; I am unironically glad it is happening, because I am aware that the art galleries a century or two past were filled with unremarkable if technically competent works, some of which provided momentary fame and money to its creators - but most importantly they served as springboards for true masters whose names are household words of today. With some luck such a figure might emerge, to be remembered for his portfolio as well as criticism of the mores of his time.

Remembering the popular meme about the 'right' being menials as opposed to the 'left' being creatives of the today's world (both when it comes to the arts and, for example, video games), I don't see the latter creating anything lasting, epochal, but mere temporary fads. A modern artist's success is measured in twitter likes. I don't see anyone playing 'Depression Quest' a hundred years from its creation, and neither do I think the digital artists from deviantart would be rediscovered later as the masters of their time.