The Wizard of Oswald, Chapter IV: The Devolution of Art
Popular Art Undergoes Serious Deconstruction for the Past Century
Brandon Dean
WizardofOswald.com
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
Johann Sebastian Bach, father of modern music
From Johann Sebastian Bach to "Sebastian Bach" of the ridiculously fake 80's band Skid Row, and from Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn to the pretentious crap that passes for "abstract art" nowadays, one can start to see a pattern from complicated art, requiring not only talent but the drive to accomplish, to artificial, commercial art, which requires nothing more than a look or an attitude--in other words, a profit motive.
Edgar Allen Poe, 19th century American writer
From the writings of Edgar Allen Poe, a writer whom one needed at least half a brain and a decent education to follow, to the sophomoric "novels" of Dean Koontz, we see a degeneration of the English language. And one may successfully argue that the more words we understand, the higher our capacity for discerning external manipulations.
Self Portrait by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 17th century Dutch painter
Taken all together--thanks to the emergence of legions of artificial pre-fab artists in the music, fine arts and literature fields--we can observe the devolution of art in living color and real time, right in front of us.
I've watched it my whole life: the degeneration of morals, the destruction of family values through use of commercials aimed at young kids to convince them their parents aren't cool, indoctrination into brain-sizzling video games, the praise of violence and sex on television, and endless other signs of a society's deconstruction. It only seems to get worse, and I'm not paying much more attention than I did fifteen years ago. I do believe it's time to pronounce the stranglehold of popular art as at least equal in malevolence to any other attack by the international banking elite.
Why do I see a conspiracy in this? Don't I see a conspiracy in everything? Sure, any crime involving two or more people.... Let's just make it easy and not mention things like Payola, or Bryan Adams, or how Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy missed the entire point of the books, simply to make it more profitable to the producers, or the fact that Hollywood can't seem to come up with half of a good idea any more, so they remake films that were actually great, but which now will be inexcusably bastardized and sensationalized. And ALL the major studios do it. Conspiracy?
If you're truly interested in discovering just a portion of how corrupt and collusive the Hollywood elite can be, read this (warning: that link leads to what essentially is an online book, so you may want to dig up your spectacles and make some Jiffypop).
B movies have gone from laughable, campy affairs, to big budget studio nightmares of
repetitive, idiotic diatribes and shock imagery meant to startle more than stimulate.
Popular music has devolved from the maestros, who studied music for decades before achieving their well-deserved success, or were virtuosos who couldn't be held back by studying, to the modern day, where any schmo can walk into a music shop, spend a week's pay on a guitar, and annoy his neighbors till the stars fall and hell hosts the winter Olympics.
I can't even fathom how some of these authors manage to publish their toilet paper, but all you have to do is sit down, read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and then really try to compare that to any book written in the last thirty years, with a few exceptions. We're speaking a different language today, although we still call it English.
The driving force behind the human being, from where I stand, is creation. Man creates ideas, which shape realities. Without creation, the individual lacks luster. All of us create on different levels, whether it is a great work of art, a cabinet for a kitchen, or an amazing equation. Maybe you know how to create a mood. It could be anything. Art, in all forms, is the one creation of the human race which has no literal, pragmatic reason for existing. It is created and experienced for purely aesthetic purposes, from infinite individual perspectives. Art is the one abstract relaxation of the human race. The carpenter finds comfort and satisfaction in his creation, just as the painter finds comfort and satisfaction in his creation. Without this comfort and satisfaction, very bad things happen. Shall we talk about the Soviet Union, Red China, or Cambodia? In all three countries, anyone with a creative force was rounded up and slaughtered, in a so-called attempt to cull the "bourgeoisie" from society. When the creative force was gone, you had "sewers of seeds and hewers of wood," (read the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion to understand fully what that meant) who could create nothing but food and fuel. And regardless of these diabolical attempts to stifle the human spirit, artists are still doing what they do, in all three of those countries ...
Creation shapes the future of humanity, on both the broadest and narrowest scales. Without it, we have no hope of fighting off the intellectual assault we are under, whether it be through lack of writers to inform us, musicians to scream it at us, or visual artists to put it right in front of our faces.
The point of creating art is not to create beauty, but to draw the person experiencing it into the mind and soul of the artist. The gardener creates a piece of art (if he wishes) simply by trimming plants, just as the housewife creates a work of art for supper, and together with her spouse, creates the most amazing of all human creations: the human being...
copyright Brandon Dean, 2009
Popular Art Undergoes Serious Deconstruction for the Past Century
Brandon Dean
WizardofOswald.com
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
Johann Sebastian Bach, father of modern music
From Johann Sebastian Bach to "Sebastian Bach" of the ridiculously fake 80's band Skid Row, and from Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn to the pretentious crap that passes for "abstract art" nowadays, one can start to see a pattern from complicated art, requiring not only talent but the drive to accomplish, to artificial, commercial art, which requires nothing more than a look or an attitude--in other words, a profit motive.
Edgar Allen Poe, 19th century American writer
From the writings of Edgar Allen Poe, a writer whom one needed at least half a brain and a decent education to follow, to the sophomoric "novels" of Dean Koontz, we see a degeneration of the English language. And one may successfully argue that the more words we understand, the higher our capacity for discerning external manipulations.
Self Portrait by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 17th century Dutch painter
Taken all together--thanks to the emergence of legions of artificial pre-fab artists in the music, fine arts and literature fields--we can observe the devolution of art in living color and real time, right in front of us.
I've watched it my whole life: the degeneration of morals, the destruction of family values through use of commercials aimed at young kids to convince them their parents aren't cool, indoctrination into brain-sizzling video games, the praise of violence and sex on television, and endless other signs of a society's deconstruction. It only seems to get worse, and I'm not paying much more attention than I did fifteen years ago. I do believe it's time to pronounce the stranglehold of popular art as at least equal in malevolence to any other attack by the international banking elite.
Why do I see a conspiracy in this? Don't I see a conspiracy in everything? Sure, any crime involving two or more people.... Let's just make it easy and not mention things like Payola, or Bryan Adams, or how Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy missed the entire point of the books, simply to make it more profitable to the producers, or the fact that Hollywood can't seem to come up with half of a good idea any more, so they remake films that were actually great, but which now will be inexcusably bastardized and sensationalized. And ALL the major studios do it. Conspiracy?
If you're truly interested in discovering just a portion of how corrupt and collusive the Hollywood elite can be, read this (warning: that link leads to what essentially is an online book, so you may want to dig up your spectacles and make some Jiffypop).
B movies have gone from laughable, campy affairs, to big budget studio nightmares of
repetitive, idiotic diatribes and shock imagery meant to startle more than stimulate.
Popular music has devolved from the maestros, who studied music for decades before achieving their well-deserved success, or were virtuosos who couldn't be held back by studying, to the modern day, where any schmo can walk into a music shop, spend a week's pay on a guitar, and annoy his neighbors till the stars fall and hell hosts the winter Olympics.
I can't even fathom how some of these authors manage to publish their toilet paper, but all you have to do is sit down, read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and then really try to compare that to any book written in the last thirty years, with a few exceptions. We're speaking a different language today, although we still call it English.
The driving force behind the human being, from where I stand, is creation. Man creates ideas, which shape realities. Without creation, the individual lacks luster. All of us create on different levels, whether it is a great work of art, a cabinet for a kitchen, or an amazing equation. Maybe you know how to create a mood. It could be anything. Art, in all forms, is the one creation of the human race which has no literal, pragmatic reason for existing. It is created and experienced for purely aesthetic purposes, from infinite individual perspectives. Art is the one abstract relaxation of the human race. The carpenter finds comfort and satisfaction in his creation, just as the painter finds comfort and satisfaction in his creation. Without this comfort and satisfaction, very bad things happen. Shall we talk about the Soviet Union, Red China, or Cambodia? In all three countries, anyone with a creative force was rounded up and slaughtered, in a so-called attempt to cull the "bourgeoisie" from society. When the creative force was gone, you had "sewers of seeds and hewers of wood," (read the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion to understand fully what that meant) who could create nothing but food and fuel. And regardless of these diabolical attempts to stifle the human spirit, artists are still doing what they do, in all three of those countries ...
Creation shapes the future of humanity, on both the broadest and narrowest scales. Without it, we have no hope of fighting off the intellectual assault we are under, whether it be through lack of writers to inform us, musicians to scream it at us, or visual artists to put it right in front of our faces.
The point of creating art is not to create beauty, but to draw the person experiencing it into the mind and soul of the artist. The gardener creates a piece of art (if he wishes) simply by trimming plants, just as the housewife creates a work of art for supper, and together with her spouse, creates the most amazing of all human creations: the human being...
copyright Brandon Dean, 2009
No comments:
Post a Comment