So what's wrong with fascism?

[Angst]

That also stuck out to me: "culture" has little to nothing to do with governing policy. The world isn't a Civ 4 game.

And just a general fyi: Liberalism - in its modern, open age of information - produces the most culture seen in all time. And it's not denouncable by saying simply that it is not high culture. High culture is merely the tastes of the political or cultural upper class, rendering it something oligarchic and incestous, not something open and flourishing. And even if you went by that standard, everyone today, to a much higher degree than earlier, has the resources to produce "fine" or "high" culture over that of "mass" consumption.

Honestly, I'd wish for Kyriakos to finally post a thread for which we could systematically debunk his views of culture. "High" and "mass" culture is merely a construct of the obnoxious. It doesn't really make sense when applied; especially since most "high" culture today is either "mass" culture of the past or incredibly obtuse and a remnant of a time with incredible poverty and sorrow.

 

[Kyriakos]

Sadly i see no point in making such a thread for you to simply attack your simplified notion of my views

We do seem to have a failure in communication here. Some people seem keen to discuss things online, including rather serious and open-ended questions. On my part i am not that interested in doing this on some place in the internet. I am indeed of the view that there is art which expresses something important due to its relation to the deeper realities of the human psyche. That is what i refer to as high art. I am not really interested in presenting my entire thesis on why this seems to me to be true, sorry

 

[sophie]

Sadly i see no point in making such a thread for you to simply attack your simplified notion of my views

We do seem to have a failure in communication here. Some people seem keen to discuss things online, including rather serious and open-ended questions. On my part i am not that interested in doing this on some place in the internet. I am indeed of the view that there is art which expresses something important due to its relation to the deeper realities of the human psyche. That is what i refer to as high art. I am not really interested in presenting my entire thesis on why this seems to me to be true, sorry

What the hell does High Culture even mean? What does it entail? Does it strive towards some kind of predefined standard? And how does modern art and culture not achieve this standard?

If you regard Shakespeare and Mozart as High Culture then you're going to have to justify "Much Ado About Nothing" and Die Zauberflöte

Thanks for making bold unjustified claims repeatedly and then backing out the instant somebody challenges you on them.

 

[Kyriakos]

You are welcome Like i said before, you should learn to accept that others can have different priorities or interests, which do not involve focusing on a web-based discussion. To expect one to grant similar attention to such a debate as the one he did while preparing university work is a bit of a hyperbole. Given that my own examination of such issues led me to form a more complicated view of them than one which can be practically presented in such a forum, it is more honest of me to just not venture on elaborating my understanding beyond a certain point. Now what that exact point is varies depending on many factors, the behavior of the other people debating being one of them.

 

[Lord Baal]

Owen was debating you just fine. You can't make a claim then refuse to back it up. If you do that, then you are the debater at fault, not Owen.

 

[Kyriakos]

Quite right, given that this is a fascist thread afterall

 

[Tahuti]

Nominal growth absolutely requires growth in the money supply. Otherwise it won't be nominal growth. It's pretty much a tautology.

The problem is - I'm finally able to get back at you btw - that you can devise a lot means to measure economic wealth nominally. As mentioned earlier, one can use apples to measure economic growth. Or the currency the past year's value. There you go. If you freeze the value of the money for the purpose of measuring growth, economic growth will nominally rise when growing.

And just a general fyi: Liberalism - in its modern, open age of information - produces the most culture seen in all time. And it's not denouncable by saying simply that it is not high culture. High culture is merely the tastes of the political or cultural upper class, rendering it something oligarchic and incestous, not something open and flourishing. And even if you went by that standard, everyone today, to a much higher degree than earlier, has the resources to produce "fine" or "high" culture over that of "mass" consumption.

Talking about fascism, this Kyriakos line of reasoning on the supposed cultural depravity of liberalism comes awfully close to fascist claims (and Frankfurter schule loonheads, but that aside). Indeed, the liberal "ideology" has allowed for more culture to flourish than anything alternative.

Sadly i see no point in making such a thread for you to simply attack your simplified notion of my views

You do know that the Beatles started out as low culture, but now is a darling of Soviet-Harvard-Postmodern-Pseudointellectual kind of people and thus "High culture"? (not that I'm trying to discredit the Beatles though, I respect their musical oeuvre) As Angst noted, High and low culture - if these are even terms at all - are dependent on the people who like them, not on the supposed "essence" of culture.

However, I figure you're a fan of Plato.

 

[Angst]

Sadly i see no point in making such a thread for you to simply attack your simplified notion of my views

It's not an "attack". We are not "enemies". Culture (including assumed "mass" and "high"), aesthetics, cultural consumption, cultural history, especially in the field of the arts, is what I study. I find it the most interesting thing in the world, and when someone makes seemingly wrong claims about my favorite topic-to-discuss, it's fine for me to ask for the framework of the view behind without the other person feeling attacked.

And if anything, even if my "simplified" notion of your views is not complex enough for you to respect, the err is with you. For you post disdainingly little about your concrete aesthetic criteria. We have to make assumptions about you. You don't know my views on culture either, and whether or not I basically respect your view. I don't know either. All I know is that your current view boils down to "it's better because it is" and that's no good.

We do seem to have a failure in communication here. Some people seem keen to discuss things online, including rather serious and open-ended questions. On my part i am not that interested in doing this on some place in the internet. I am indeed of the view that there is art which expresses something important due to its relation to the deeper realities of the human psyche. That is what i refer to as high art. I am not really interested in presenting my entire thesis on why this seems to me to be true, sorry

It's fine to not want to discuss them. But if you don't want to discuss them, don't make the claims to begin with. It is the internet, but you are posting in a discussion forum.

And you shouldn't move out on the grounds of this thread's main theme either. You were the one that apparently brought fascism contra liberalism into question on the grounds of either being able to produce the most appropriate culture. Then it is relevant to discuss what appropriate culture is to you.

You shouldn't post stuff on a debate forum and then bow out, feeling victimized and assaulted, when people throw responses at you. There's a reason I'm not spewing out my moral views right now: Because I'm not in a mood to have them challenged. And them being morals, they're valid basically everywhere.

 

[Kyriakos]

Well lets not take it too far, i am not feeling "victimized and assaulted", if i was then it would indeed be my own problem. I merely saw no point in presenting thorough and lengthy positions on such a vast issue such as art. Art, a bit like philosophy but arguably even more than philosophy, has a greater field than the natural sciences, simply because its field is the human being itself, along with the society around it. However this vastness does seem to co-exist with some sort of (largely unknown) laws of the senses and thought, which render a work of art important to many people given some prerequisites.

I recall that in my first ever lecture in university, on the subject of literature, the academician giving the lecture mentioned, jokingly, that many of the new students might have already have completed their epic poem. In that case they should go back and add an invocation of the Muse
I mentioned this little anecdote so as to end this post by saying that art may be a vast field and phenomenon, but still it is highly unlikely or even impossible that one of those epic poems by the students in the university at that time would rival the Homeric poems in literary value.

 

[Angst]

Surely.

Albeit: such it as been at all times. New people always produce that which rivals the past or at least attempts the rivalry. The destruction or forgetting of the bad stuff is merely forged by cultural actors. Do you like Bach, for example? Do you know how the taste of Bach established itself?

The current West is just producing such an overwhelming overload of cultural stuff that you're overwhelmed not only by "bad stuff", but also by "good stuff", if you want to look for it. And that's partly because of higher learning having mostly realized what "good" actually means when it comes to art, having artists scrutinize art with through work itself, as well as openly embrace and document more stuff for later generations to pick-and-choose of what is important (or more concretely: later generations will easier recognize what cultural currents led to the styles of tomorrow.)

Arg I should stop. I had more on the subject, but I realize you do not wish to discuss this.

 

[Cutlass]

The problem is - I'm finally able to get back at you btw - that you can devise a lot means to measure economic wealth nominally. As mentioned earlier, one can use apples to measure economic growth. Or the currency the past year's value. There you go. If you freeze the value of the money for the purpose of measuring growth, economic growth will nominally rise when growing.

The definition of nominal growth is growth in terms of the monetary value of what is produced. That can't be done without a measure of monetary value. If you want to designate it in some other measure, you need a way of converting it to that measure.

Nominal growth does not require that the economy has in fact grown. It could be all inflation. Real growth does not in fact require that there be an increase in nominal growth, that is, no increase in money. It just happens to be true that getting real growth without nominal growth is very difficult to do, and presents some real dangers to the system. Whereas real growth with nominal growth is both easier and safer.

 

[Traitorfish]

Talking about fascism, this Kyriakos line of reasoning on the supposed cultural depravity of liberalism comes awfully close to fascist claims (and Frankfurter schule loonheads, but that aside). Indeed, the liberal "ideology" has allowed for more culture to flourish than anything alternative.

Although largely in response to the shortcomings of establishment liberalism, it must be noted, rather than as a consequence of its glories. Establishment liberalism itself has all the cultural vitality of a half-eaten potato, it's just willing to go along with pretty much anything that can be monetised, which gives it a respectable lead over equally beige but less open-minded ideological systems.

 

[Angst]

And I assume communism would have culture flourish?

/sarcasticalbeitcuriousremark

 

[Traitorfish]

I'd imagine that not having to make culture profitable to be viable would be a positive thing, yes.

 

[Angst]

I'd imagine that not having to make culture profitable to be viable would be a positive thing, yes.

But that's not wholly the case today either.

EDIT: Infact what people today would consider "high culture" is basically the tastes of the cultural, literary and academic cultural "elite". The construct today is very present as with certain arts are tastes of intellectuals (and therefore valid) while certain arts are tastes of the masses (and therefore valid too) - the point being that what legitimizes art as art is a framework of tastes recognizing it as such. Art has for a long time been about political or economical power - what has happened today is that art has all sorts of aesthetic applications, from political to intellectual to consumerist to 'artistic', etc. It was not so when art was more of a craft, and it was not so when art was basically the upper class bloating itself.

EDITEDIT: The above formulation has a number of errs in regards to unclarity: I do not think there is a meaningful distinction between "high" and "mass" culture, in regards to its aesthetic appeals that is, as both are fluid and way too hard to universalize or objectivify. My point is that that something being "high" culture does not inherently legitimize it as "good" art in modern academia, and something being "mass" culture does not inherently legitimize it as "good" art in modern academia; rather what legitimizes it as art or "good" art is a whole other number of things way more complex than trivial categories of "profitability" or "intellectualism".

Am I even making sense here?

 

[Traitorfish]

I don't disagree?

 

[Angst]

I never said you did! I just wanted to extrapolate (is that the right word?) what I've learned of culture and arts from my studies so far... It merely fascinates me and I love to discuss it. I'm sorry if you feel I made you look dumb or something I have no idea what you think or know after all.

 

[Tahuti]

Although largely in response to the shortcomings of establishment liberalism, it must be noted, rather than as a consequence of its glories. Establishment liberalism itself has all the cultural vitality of a half-eaten potato, it's just willing to go along with pretty much anything that can be monetised, which gives it a respectable lead over equally beige but less open-minded ideological systems.

I'd imagine that not having to make culture profitable to be viable would be a positive thing, yes.

I don't really see it that way. I'm willing to say I'm quite culturally involved AND hold economically liberal views - which is some may find a strange combination, I bet - but culture doesn't need to be monetized to be viable and I believe its quality cannot be judged by its profitability either. In fact, it can hardly be judged objectively.

Culture can't really be monetized either: It's the process of dissemination that is monetized, not the culture itself. If monetizing the dissemination is possible, it's definitely a good thing which allows people to make a living from things they love to do. Cultural expression designed for profitable dissemination can often be of lesser quality, I agree, but then again, pretty much every meme is a product of its circumstances. The problem is that artistically inclined tend to not be economically inclined, and vice versa, which is a pity really.

 

[Traitorfish]

Charlie Brooker sums up my feelings quite well:


Link to video.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Claiming culture as a victory for the liberal state seems a bit paradoxical to me, because the idea of the liberal state is based on the idea that cultural matters are unimportant.