How Art Can Suck The Soul Out Of You
Against those who would steal it...
Joy is an ecstatic experience that comes as the result of living consciously and virtuously. You put in the work and, allowing for relaxation, the joy bubbles up spontaneously.
Hedonism quite often is the attempt to force the joyful experience. People attempt to tap into the well by using comforting substances or by going to events or places that promise fun. This may even work in the short-term.
I think of those awful Terminator movies where people traded in on the excitement of robots and machine guns and a hero in Arnold Schwarzenegger in exchange for barren wastelands and nil birthrates. Maximize and universalize the values of the Terminator series and what do you get? Such behavior cannot be sustained. These films were an assault upon Western Civilization. Trade away your remaining consciousness for oblivion. They did their work.
One should not aspire to be so easy to please. Cheap tricks obliviate our ability to have higher sensibilities. The higher the sensibilities, the more resplendent and lasting the joy when it comes.
The most clever way to rob people of their joy is to hollow them out with charisma. People will develop a bad intent, the more they are exposed to cheap thrills.
A beautiful notion should be delivered with sincerity and left at that. There is no need to add a “sell”. Let a piece stand on its own two feet.
When you see things this way, you see just how inartful the modern world has become. Everything is either commentary or, if “art” enters the picture, it is meta-commentary. A “should” is the driving purpose behind a person’s art. Some will even admit it themselves. Art becomes a vehicle for social engineering. It is not honest self-expression on the part of a virtuous person. Rather, it is dripping with engineering and manipulation, all meant to drive a person toward certain ends. In this way, modern art cannot be trusted, what little of it is even endeavored anymore.
Imagine being yours truly and residing in that place of virtue, being spurred on to virtue I already possess by a person who needs me to be a certain way. This is not art. This is meta-commentary. This is not the spontaneous self-expression of the past where people simply lived in a free society and expressed the depths of their souls. I do not need to be driven toward virtue. I already am virtuous. This should be the starting point for any artist but unfortunately it is not. Far from it.
There is also a tendency of the modern artist to dissent. That is, to “counter” the art they see out in the world. The most honest form of this kind of art is the spoof, which is to take the propaganda and throw it in the face of the propagandist. Why put on airs that something stands apart when you, as an artist, are reacting to the milieu that is being offered? Relax and have fun with your work! If you are reacting to something, it is not timeless. Why let something have that kind of power over you?
The theft of joy is deeply interwoven into art. You bump into all sorts of self-conscious drivel and fantasy indulgence. You are reduced by the artist to “social messaging”. You are infected by people who imbibed the bigotries of this age and the previous one (pre-9/11) and you’re just supposed to accept their suppositions. All features in art have implications. Every artistic choice is laden with motives and the less self-knowledge, the more retarded the motives. There remain only two paths left to a true artist to reach “the big screen”: to be massively self-funded a la Mel Gibson or to dip your toes into the burgeoning AI filmmaking tech that is availing itself to us as I write. Music and visual art will follow along the same lines because, after all, everyone has it in their minds that production value is legitimizing. Time for AI to level the playing field.
Art was so close to being snuffed out and with it, joy. All paths to joy were being strangled mercilessly by an enemy that knows only death. All that would have been left would have been empty charisma and an everlasting emphasis on the socialistic banal.
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