re: #69 uriel

I know at this point I’m just the grizzled stranger in a goat hair cassock shrieking “Doom” while I point one crooked finger at nothing in particular in the middle of the town square and wave about a staff topped with a crucified pigeon in the other….

…but I swear it’s because they don’t have imaginations, and thus don’t understand lyrics, and thus only engage with media on an incredibly shallow “what is the hook what is the repeatable lyric that can be glossed as supporting my unexamined worldview.”

Like, bad, trite art and bad, trite reads of art just form a stink cloud around reactionaries, and I think it’s because they lack the ability to acknowledge things that don’t even indirectly critique their worldview. As such, all challenged art is threatening and offensive, and “good art” cleaves to convention not because conventions are established by the patina of skilled effort, but because what is familiar and established in the status quo does not make them threatened.

So when they like good art it’s because they’ve been told it’s good, and look no deeper into what an piece means (musical, visual, dramatic)…because the only value of art is as a mirror. Hence why so often they conjure with older art and artists (and genres, like classical music) as signs of their own taste and intelligence, but never engage deeply with one painter versus another, or a later period (once considered revolutionary and vulger) and an earlier one.