art & fascism

thoughts - began when I was stoned

I saw a tweet that made a connection between absurdism/dada & conservatives/fascists.

I think a lot about how conservatives are not funny, how they do not generally create good or interesting satire, how memes in conservative circles are generally not strong.

CCM & trigger warnings

I think back on the contemporary christian music I grew up on, often explicitly marketed as appropriate and moral knockoffs of other bands or music. Evangelicals are good at parody, but often quite bad at satire. Satire requires teeth, and often evangelicals have no teeth, only venom. As always, I think that so much of the way in which culture is now structured and the way mainstream social media functions is so obsequious towards the desires of the moral "majority". Christians demand that not only their behavior and communities exist within specific guidelines and boundaries, but also, that anyone they interact with does so as well. If you applied modesty/purity culture rules to all culture this will make more sense. american evangelical modesty culture is not content for themselves to be modest, but also for everyone around them to be modest, because they essentially believe that immodesty is a trigger for those who struggle with lustfulness. They accuse others of wielding "trigger warnings" like a weapon, because in their mind, if a trigger were real, everyone else should bow to it. They just don't respect triggers because they dont think they're real, but they expect their rules on morality and modesty to be respected the way that they pretend college professors enforce pronouns.

so when they see immodesty or immorality in media or social media, they expect it to be erased, eradicated. because you are forcing them or triggering them into sin by simply exposing them to this. hence the dogmatism.

dada & fascism

I saw some on twitter say that "dada is a way to identify fascists"

This functions because dada can only be good with an uninhibited joy of upending expectations that someone whose built their life on creating and upholding expectations will find unnerving & destabilizing.

Fascists like realism because it allows the ability to destroy both text and subtext. any art that allows multiple interpretations means that one of those possible interpretations could violate their code of ethics. they believe that there are secret messages in everything (because media literacy is devalued/diluted). This is also because they constantly deal in dog whistles and assume if they are encoding their text with an insidious and destructive subtext, than others must be as well.

originality & hegemony

I wonder if part of why the most interesting or forward thinking art/music/media seems to most often come from marginalized communities, is that making good work requires an okay-ness with the possibility it won’t be accepted. For art to be interesting it must be new in some way. When something is new, there’s no focus testing that can be done, there's nothing to compare it to to determine or predict if it will be liked or accepted.

Communities with power require a hegemony and certain level of acceptance from peers to maintain status, access, and power. When you are trying to maintain those things within a non-marginalized community, the things you do and make must be liked and accepted or you face, expulsion and a cutting off of access to the same kinds of power. But when you’re queer or POC, you’ve already had to face or experience rejection & this lack of access before. Your artistic expression no longer has to fit within these things, so the steps you take, the risks you take, can be more novel, more interesting, more risky. Once enough people within the In-Group have accepted something, then it is safe to reproduce at will.

In the real world, the power of a regina george is lesser, smaller. on a larger scale, the boob cut tank top does not work, even the Kardashians can't pull off anything truly new.