transcript
“Pretty shitty how baseline human activities like singing, dancing, and making art got turned into skills instead of being seen as behaviors, so now it’s like ‘the point of doing them is to get good at them’ and not ‘this is a thing humans do, the way birds sing and bees make hives.’”
…if you want to just make art or sing, no one is stopping you. You don’t need to treat it like a mountain you’re required to summit. You know what? This post is pretty shitty, too.
As someone who loves to sing and make music, as someone who loves to dance and to be crafty, and as someone who inherently sucks at it - especially the music part, I can’t tell or hold a rhythm, let alone a note - this post really got me. I often feel like I am not allowed to sing or join or like I have to hide that I used to play guitar and write songs for hours when I was a teen and young adult. Because I was never good at it. Because the chords were just strummed. The chords didn’t fit the melody in my head and I could not sing the melody as it was in my head. And I just suck at it. And still, it brought me so much joy. It was such a big part of my life. I loved it.
I now sing songs to my daughter when we are in public. I pretend it is because she wants to hear them. It’s a great alibi. (She often doesn’t like my singing.) Sometimes she joins in. This is the best. There is no better sound in the world.
I’m ok at writing. But even this - I am a biomedic, not a writer. I didn’t study linguistics or literature or politics or journalism, I am absolutely not in the writing world. I can’t write professionally, so why should I even write. There are tons of more talented people who actually learned how to write out there. I leaned out of the window and got a side gig while I was on mat leave and wrote for a blog 2-4 times a month for a year. It was the best. I was paid peanuts but these were the tastiest lil’ peanuts I’ve ever devoured.
I think I get the point they’re making, but eeehhh? I don’t think “art is something inherently human” and “you can (and maybe even should!) be improving your abilities in art” are in conflict with each other. Humans have been able to make art for as long as we’ve been human, but we’ve also had an implicit understanding of seeing two pieces of art and picking which ones we preferred in the moment. Capitalism didn’t really change that, we’ve had masters and apprentices since antiquity.
Couldn’t we say that the desire to make better art and the anxiety that comes with examining your own progress just as easily be called a behaviour unique to humans?
(Edit: writing that last part made me come up with the image of bees that have imposter syndrome about how they build their hives and I don’t know how to feel about that)
Also just as an observation: monotony is boring and I think aversion to boredom is a big reason people seek different things (maybe even things that require more skill to perform). Who wants to dance the same dance their whole life?
I feel like people in the past were as susceptible to being bored that we are – maybe even more because there were a lot fewer things to actually do back then.
It’s commodification. These things have been turned into marketable commodities for sale.
A huge part of capitalism is commodifying core parts of the human experience.
I don’t think that’s right. What portion of these activities actually is for sale, though?
I sing songs with my kids, and maybe to pass the time alone in a car, but nobody would ever be able to pay me enough to want to do that in public. Nor should anyone want to pay to see my mediocrity on display.
I played different sports when I was younger, mostly playing in unorganized pickup games with no formal teams or uniforms or referees or schedules. I still run and bike, and I still lift weights, but have no desire to enter any formal competitions with any of those activities. But I still work on the skills and the progressions on those activities, and track my performance in my notes/logs.
None of this is commodified. It’s not for sale, and someone else’s experience doing these things can’t be traded for what I get out of doing them myself. Even if there are people who do all of these things professionally, full time, the “commoditized” product has basically nothing to do with what I’m doing. Nor does the fact that people do those things professionally somehow detract from the enjoyment I get out of doing those things myself.
One of the most fundamental human experiences, of cooking food for people to eat, is actually a full time job I’ve had in the past. But the fact that I have cooked many meals for strangers for money doesn’t actually detract from my ability to still cook meals at home for my family, or host dinner parties where I cook for my friends. The value of that activity is more than what can simply be purchased with money, even if I personally have done it for money in the past.
Human experience is for experiencing, and nobody can take that away from me.
It’s commodified in terms of social media. Either “for sale” literally, if indirectly, through monetization (which is increasingly the goal for many people) or not-quite-literally in the sense of likes/social media attention. The act of dancing in this context, for instance, is no longer done as an expression of genuine emotion or to connect with people or express oneself, but instead being traded for clicks, monetized or not.
In that regard, even if not personally affected, I think that consumer culture can and has taken the purpose of human experience away from many and twisted it from experience as experience to experience as performance.
Edit: to expand on a dance being commodified: a TikTok dance has to be learned by consuming TikTok. That is the product: the content around the dance. Then the user further contributes to the commodification by entering their own content into the marketplace (TikTok). Whether the user makes money or not does not change the fact that this content is for sale by TikTok. TikTok gets more viewers and trades viewership for advertising revenue.
Commodification is part of it. But the idea of patronage of the arts goes back to antiquity. It isn’t a capitalist innovation so much as Pop Art, which is a pure manifestation of commodity fetishism.
What’s really changed in the art world over the last twenty years is the obfuscation of Master Artists as a productive force. You no longer have this popular understanding of Van Gogh as a guy who does paintings or Stan Lee as a guy who writes comic books or Hayao Miyazaki as a guy who makes movies. Now you just have these commercial juggernauts that simply churn out generic slop. When you see a drawing of Mickey Mouse we no longer really ask who drew it. When we see some CGI-'d Marvel eye-ball gouger, we barely even recognize the studio that did the graphical designs. Netflix releases anime and we barely know if its Trigger or Madhouse or MAPPA that’s produced it (nevermind the actual individual artists who made the original images), because those credits are cut short to push you into the next episode.
I think OP’s image misses the essential desire for a hobbyist to chase improvement and distinction from peers. Making Art has historically been a cultivated skill with a real lineage of professionals, schools, and mediums. This isn’t just birds singing, on instinct or bees hiving for survival. It is humans attempting to influence one another through passionate expression and collaborating to create works that will outlive them. That’s necessarily going to require skill.
But the people who make the art are fundamental to the art’s creation. The modern capitalist drive is to remove the art from the artist and turn the medium into a fungible unit of exchange rather than a tool of communication.
Professionalization binds the artists to their works by making it exceptional and distinct from peer works. Capital moves us in the other direction, homogenizing and anonymizing the labor to make it easier to price and more saleable in distribution.
I would argue that Capitalism wants us to be bees. To be these mindless workers who do the same job reflexively, over and over, until we die. All so the capitalists can obtain cheap uniform honey.
I like your point a lot better because the dehumanization of the worker is more the attribute than the commodity
Damn. Yeah really good points all around
Birds sing and make hives literally with purpose, what a stupid example to use.
If you wanna sing out, sing out. If you wanna be free be free. There’s a million things to be, …. Look this song up, stop complaining and start wffing singing in public! Others will join you.
…
She does realize birds are literally in a clmpetition trying to find a mate, right? Right?
Then why do birds sing quietly to themselves?
The birds singing is basically the same as some lads pumped full of testosterone yelling “hey sweetie, wanna hang out?” In high street…
I believe it’s more like yelling “YO WOULD YOU NOT LIKE THIS FABULOUS SPECIMEN THAT IS ME TO COME INSIDE YOU?”
i write because i hate myself and writing is pain.
I’ve been playing music for over 14~ years and I personally love that it is difficult and I always have something to work on
I want to be good at it. I will be good at it. I don’t feel bad because I’m not a gifted musician. I play for myself and improvement is an amazing feeling as a musician.
This post has had me thinking for most of a day. I kind of love the phrase that these are things that humans just do.
But I think that learning and improving and sharing ideas and methods are perhaps even more a thing that people do. So, practicing and studying e.g. music or dance should be peak human activity.
Making it a business is… let’s say an opportunistic option. Definitely should not be a necessity or a default, but possibly an option.
(40+ years of music practice for me, too. I’ll never be professional, but I also won’t voluntarily ever stop.)
As long as it’s not your sole source of income why would you give a shit about being good at it as long as you enjoy it?
I think you missed the point. It’s not about income at all, it’s about expression. Not speech, expression. It’s about how today most forms of human expression are viewed as only valid if that activity can support a person by making money. Rather than expression being valid because a person expressed it.
Now there has always been people who were particularly talented at expressing themselves and were valued because of it. OP’s point is that as today society says that no one should bother expressing themselves unless they’re one of the talented people who were fortunate enough to turn it into a career. Which is bullshit, express yourself.
People need to have enough time and be calm enough to be able to do things for the sake of doing them instead of for money.
My baby niece started bobbing up and down when a song came on, happily waving her little fists and shaking her little diaper butt.
I was like “that’s terrible, you’ll never be a star, keep your day job you untalented hack!”
thought i was on linkedin for a sec
LinkedInLunaticks (no idea how to link that)
Lemmy is LinkedIn for NEETs
Honestly I’d bet the average lemmy user is more likely to be employed than the average LinkedIn user. My experience on LinkedIn was a bunch questionably effective recruiters who rarely even understood the words in the job requirements they were trying to fill, where my lemmy experience so far has been “all of the people working in tech who hate silicon valley technofeudalism”
It was just a half baked joke, NEETs are based anyway
This only applies if you give a shit what other people think of you doing innocuous things.
Paint a terrible picture and have fun doing it. Dance your way down the sidewalk when the mood strikes you. Sing whenever you want. Sometimes I’m in the grocery store and they start playing a banger on the speakers, damn right I’m gonna sing along to it while I’m evaluating the pros and cons of competing spaghetti packages.
Capitalism causes us to commodotize everything. I saw this switch as well during the 2000s in Internet culture. It went from people making websites about their cats and stuff to people chirping out “but how will that be profitable?!” in response to most ideas.
I remember 11 year old me trying to monentise a crappy weebly site I made.
Sometimes I imagine how human life could be like if we weren’t trained to live within such narrow uncomfortable lines and it’s kind of sad
What are the lines you’d like to step out of? Conversely could you imagine what life would be like if we all lived unrestricted by social norms, let alone legal ones?
My partner made up a word - Dysfunctionlust: the pleasure you get from doing something that you feel no pressure to be good at.
She’s quite a good writer but super hard on herself about it, whereas drawing is a dysfunctionlust for her and so quite relaxing.
It’s based on the German word funktionslust: the joy of an organism doing what it’s meant to do, like a dog running.
I’m German and I never heard of Funktionslust, neither has my Autokorrektur. Still, that makes sense.
Can’t not see the “Dysfunctionslut” in there, though. 🤷🏽♂️😅
That’s also great! Dysfunctionslut is much cooler than just saying “I have really bad ADD”
I was envisioning those select few who, born with genes that make them sexually attractive to most others, seem to apply just as much effort and skill to the act itself — often to the ironic disappointment of fellow participant(s).
