I recently published The Rory Marinich Experience and it's available in Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Would it be okay if I posted about this incredible novel on the blue? I know it's a self-link but I feel this one might be different. Plus, rave reviews from Stephen King and Nietzsche's great-granddaughter! Let me know mods.posted by Rory Marinich at 10:02 AM on January 5, 2011 [4 favorites]
Agreed. And further I have to say I'm bothered by the in-club our-team-kicked-ass chest-thumping of many comments in this thread.A writer with a flair for ironic self-promotion created a sockpuppet account on a high-traffic web site, posted about a new project while pretending to be a neutral observer, commented about how much he loved his own work, and was caught. Then banned.
Some people have been claiming this incident made it a banner day for MeFi and they've never been prouder, etc., but honestly the reactions here have saddened me. And before the usual wags chime in, I'm NOT a Tao Lin sockpuppet either, nor do I know him - though I have myself written and published unusual and experimental writing.
I'm a little surprised to see very little pushback against the notion that Metafilter is a slightly hostile place to postmodern and comtemporary art ideas.I don't think it's particularly hostile to those ideas in and of themselves, but the collective vibe here on MeFi is "wankers gonna wank," and it's easy to mistake a lot of postmodernism and contemporary art as self indulgent wanking.
It sounds to me like you're completely on board with what is so awesome about contemporary art.Well... I'd call it what is unique about contemporary art. I wouldn't necessarily call it awesome. ;-)
Cage, as an artist, sees the artist's job as providing some sort of structure to what already exists in the world, whether it's arranging pigments on a canvas or varying pressure densities in the air around you.I suppose that if you fully embrace the idea that "art is intention" that's true. Twilight is art, and a blank white sheet of paper tacked to the job board is art, and Paint It Black is art, and so on. There's no such thing as good or bad art, simply "art that people don't respond to" and "art that generates a reaction that can be observed."
Somebody on MetaFilter (I think) said it very well and I'm going to plagiarize them: What matters today isn't whether or not something is art. Because everything is. So all that matters is whether something is GOOD art, where by "good" I can mean a number of things from "interesting" to "fun" to "made me have a conversation I wouldn't otherwise have" to "made me hug my friends".Right, and I'm not making the argument that, say, Tao Lin's work isn't "art" -- rather I'm arguing that if someone wants to argue that art is everywhere and everything, that the act of living is art, and so on... well, there's no reason to defend "The Artist" as a class worthy of special consideration. It's just a person doing what everyone else does who happens to have successfully marketed his or her ripple-effects as desirable.
The idea of postmodernism (in my mind) is that we stop asking what's art and what's not.That's fine as long as we stop funding, promoting, or educating about it as well. That's the "wanting it both ways" thing that I was talking about. Friends of mine who went to art school and love the idea that everything is art also get outraged by funding cuts for The Arts. I'm not sure how they can resolve the two, honestly.
I like the idea that a part of why he's an annoying pest on the Internet is to examine why we get so easily worked up over some relatively unannoying things; we've got 350 comments now in response to one guy posting a self-link. It suggests that we're taking him more seriously than probably we should.Well, if you chart the trajectory of the thread, most of the traffic early on consisted of people who thought it was hilarious, or were amused to see a personality they didn't care for get smacked down in public. The second wave of this thread (at least as I see it) kicked in when people said that this reaction was a symptom of MetaFilter's hatred of postmodern art.
There's no reason for you to let yourself waste a minute on him unless you're convinced that he's somehow worth the time.The Twilight Novels have prompted a lot of discussion about what constitutes good YA literature, but that doesn't mean the people having those discussions automatically think Twilight is in and of itself worth the time.
I resort to it because I don't really hang my hat on the importance of being able to say the word "art" and have everybody agree with me on whatever that word means.Yeah, that's true, but one of the interesting things for me is the fact that this discussion bubbled out of that very issue. Tao Lin was taking knocks from people who don't think much of his work, and consider him something of a wanker. Others said that this was a consequence of MeFi somehow not "getting" or not appreciating Postmodern art.
In 1942, at age 19, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. Two years later he was sent to Italian Front, where he flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier. His Unit was the 488th Bomb Squadron, 340th Bomb Group, 12th Air Force. Heller later remembered the war as "fun in the beginning... You got the feeling that there was something glorious about it." On his return home he "felt like a hero... People think it quite remarkable that I was in combat in an airplane and I flew sixty missions even though I tell them that the missions were largely milk runs."posted by nfg at 9:44 AM on January 9, 2011 [1 favorite]
— Wikipedia
I feel like I am not sufficiently hip for this assignment, but there you go.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:02 AM on January 5, 2011 [26 favorites]