Listening To Jazz Reading Horse Crazy
a book about the downtown culture industry that’s unfortunately relatable, a bitter writer writing about the shit they’re bitter about, a hypersexual collage artist who wants to power, hates its existence, and hates their need for it.
“the post is prestigious; he greets it with dread. chained to his column, he will now be a minor celebrity and a downtown figure, ‘an object of envy, malice, and all the other base emotions that drive the majority of people at all times in every conceivable place and circumstance. risible, then, that he wants to be loved.”
i’ve been making fun / critiquing / expressing bitterness toward the performativity and self-absorption of The Scene (as if i myself am not In The Scene / in a groupchat / writing for a sceney magazine). and i’ve been laughing at the people asking to be considered ‘downtown figures’ - the whole thing is very high school - ‘please tell me you think of me as this thing that i want to curate and present myself as, i am so genuine and therefore you ought to think of me in this way.’ it’s laughable, it’s insufferable. it’s gauche, to say the least.
the term culture industry is super apt because we have people engaging in self-commodification while also using the idea of art as masturbatory. a figurative dildo. a conceptual vibrator. parts of downtown are characterized by the use of art to satisfy the need to be memorialized and the desire to be seen as an artist. we have people making shit and vapid art and knowing they’re making shit and vapid art, but doing it not because they want to make it, but because they want to be seen as an artist. this is where art becomes masturbatory - its creation serves the purpose of jacking off someones ego / individuality complex, instead of art for art’s sake. or maybe i sound really pretentious here too. i think the identity of ‘the artist’ - the seemingly unreachable and intangible and omnipotent and almost deified artist - has become a commodity itself. i’m not saying you’re not allowed to want to be seen and using art as a conduit for that, but i think there’s something very sinister about the fact that everyone wants to be an artist but no one wants to make art, because ‘artist’ has some weird clout to it that implies that you’re cultured and better than everyone else
i’m gonna get a little marxy here, but labor alienation is this idea that laborers not only become estranged from the product they make, but that they themselves are the product. for example, when we think of t shirts, we don’t think of the hours in the sweatshop or the designer or the seamstress, we think ‘fuck yeah t shirt.’ that’s an example of labor alienation - the separating of labor from the product, and the ignoring of the exploitation that’s inherent to literally everything we consume. but also, there's labor alienation at work in the way that the laborer is objectified - in the fact that their value doesn’t lie in their humanity or their morals, but in their potential to produce a product that we desire. i think people are doing that preemptively and to themselves. a self-inflicted labor alienation, self-inflicted commodification. (that’s a type of commodity fetishism, also a marx thing). i don’t know.
my disdain for obvious performative self-curation - undoubtedly its an annoyance at the constant state of disingenuousness, the fact that everything is trite and contrived. im torn between thinking that either: a) most painfully mediocre people are also so painfully self-absorbed that they consider themselves revolutionaries, or b) people are self-absorbed and achingly self-aware of their mediocrity, so they overcompensate by neurotically engaging in self-curation and the downtown circle jerk. it’s laughable, it’s insufferable, and it’s too close to home. what if i haven’t discerned attention from love? (i haven’t) what if i want to be loved as much as they do and i’m just too proud to ask for it? the thought of asking for anything floors me. it feels so frivolous to ask for care. in highschool i got the superlative of class rebel and was simultaneously annoyed at the whole thing, but also glad that people thought of me. very not ‘class rebel’ of me, to want to be on peoples minds. but what if, deep in that annoyance, some of it comes from the fact that sometimes id like to be seen and considered just like everyone else, but i just don't have the stature to ask people for that.