i don’t know how to tell people that deriving pleasure - sexual pleasure included! - from art* is good actually, and that creating specific kind of art “just” because you find it hot or whatever is just as good a reason as any, and you don’t actually need some “deep and meaningful” reason to create art about things. pleasure - sexual pleasure included - is not the devil, it is not Bad and shameful, and it’s not any less valid of a reason to create something than because you want to, idk, explore the depths of the human consciousness or something
Hey, so I’d like to say thank you to all who are accepting us Reddit refugees. As someone who’s always wanted to get into Tumblr, I guess I never officially did, until the Reddit blackout. I mean I created an account a while back to lurk at awesome and lovely fanart but this recent controversy made me flee here.
Been kinda sad, disappointed, but not surprised that Reddit is heading towards the direction thanks to spez.
So, I’d like to say thank you once more for accepting us :)
Oh and I absolutely love how you’re all just unapologetically outspoken on your burning and fierce hatred of capitalism lol please never stop the momentum
Being nice to someone you don’t like is not manipulation btw it’s being civil
Mmm no, this is like seeking validation. Ofc it’s best to be nice but if I don’t like you or we both dislike eachother, then there’s no reason for us to communicate or be around eachother. It’s not about being immature, I would much rather not put myself in such a situation.
how old must we be before we are allowed to think about sex, i can never remember, they keep moving the goal posts.
Weâre never allowed to think ab sex sorry. Teen years are hormonal but being horny before 18 is a sin. When youâre horny and 18-25 its cringe. When youâre horny 25-35 âyou should get a partner and stop being openly horny.â When youâre horny 35-45 thatâs weird because youâre âkinda old.â When youâre horny 45-55 youâre a creep. And when youâre horny 55+ youâre an old person who canât and shouldnât be horny. This is how they think. Sex bad, basically. Thinking about sex is bad. Wanting sex is bad. Anything even mildly related to sex or sexuality is bad.
Pretend, for a moment, that you’re an 18-year-old teenager from a family living below the poverty line.
One day, you make a silly mistake and get a ticket for it. Nothing major - maybe you rode the subway without a ticket or smoked too close to the entrance of a building. Maybe you were loitering. Either way, one thing is for sure: you definitely don’t have the money to pay the ticket.
So you don’t.
Eventually, you miss the deadline to pay your ticket, and you get a letter in the mail that says you have to go to court. But your life is chaotic, and a court date for a missed ticket is the least of your concerns. Your family moves constantly, which disrupts your life and puts you behind in school. You have one disabled parent and one parent who is always working, leaving you to raise your younger siblings by yourself. You have no means of transportation. There is rarely any food in the cupboards. The utilities are constantly getting shut off. The week that you were supposed to go to court, your family gets another eviction notice, your cousin ends up in the hospital, and your parent finds out that their disability payments are being reduced.
So you miss your court date.
Since you missed the court date, you automatically lose your case - now you have no hope of arguing your way out of the ticket, which you still can’t afford to pay. You can do community service hours instead of paying, but you don’t have time to do that, now that you have to work part-time and odd jobs on top of everything else to keep your parents off the streets and your siblings out of foster care. You know that you probably won’t finish high school on time, let alone fulfill your hours. You might be able to explain your circumstances to the judge, but you have no idea how to go about doing that now that you’ve missed your court date, your literacy skills are years behind thanks to your constant game of school roulette, and even though legal help is available to you, you don’t know how to access it or if you can afford to do so. But that’s still the least of your concerns - since you missed your court date, the judge has also charged you with failure to appear.
Which means you now have an active warrant out for your arrest.
And just like that, you’re now a part of the criminal justice system. A silly mistake that a middle-class teenager could have solved with Mommy and Daddy’s chequebook in a single afternoon has caused you weeks or months of stress and headaches over a process you don’t fully understand, and has ended in criminal charges. Instead of having a funny story to tell over dinner when you come home from college next Thanksgiving, you are now facing additional fines (that you still can’t pay), the possibility of a couple of nights in jail, the possible suspension of your driver’s license, and the possibility of being taken into custody any time you interact with the police. The next time your parent comes home drunk and violent, or someone breaks into the house, you think twice about calling the cops - you now have to decide if every emergency is “worth” the possibility of being hauled off to jail. And in the meantime, the circumstances that caused that first mistake haven’t gone away - you still don’t have the money to pay for the subway, you are still more likely to live in a house filled with smokers, you still can’t afford quit-smoking aids, you still live in a chaotic household that deeply affects your mental health, and you still don’t understand the legal system or who you’re supposed to talk to for information and resources.
So while those other teenagers get to go through life believing that they were “good kids who sometimes made silly mistakes”, you now get to go through life thinking of yourself as a criminal. And that might be the most damaging thing of all.
When I worked with homeless teenagers and young adults, I saw this process play out again and again and again and again. The kids often considered themselves “criminals” or “bad kids” because they had arrest warrants and criminal records, but few of them had ever actually committed a serious or violent crime - the vast majority were simply unlucky kids who did something stupid and didn’t have the skills or resources (or wealthy parents) required to get them off the hook. I had classmates in my upper-middle-class high school who did far worse things with far fewer consequences, because Mommy was a lawyer or Daddy was an RCMP officer, and some of those kids grew up to be lawyers or police officers themselves. The kids I worked with never got that opportunity. Second chances cost money, and the difference between a “crime” and a “mistake” has less to do with the offense, and more to do with the circumstances you were born into.
So when we’re talking about crime, punishment and who is “worthy” of being helped, maybe keep that in mind.
The most horrifying aspect of parents saying âmy kid could do thatâ about art is that they never ever ever mean âwow my kid is good enough to be in a museumâ and they always always always mean âI want to disrespect you so much Iâll do it by implying that this thing is just as worthless as the things my child makes with their handsâ and right in front of them too. Your kids can hear you u know, and the things they make with their hands are the least worthless and most precious aspects of human life Iâll kill u
Listen my three year old child handed me a picture of a âweird bugâ they had drawn this morning, and the explanation about the intention for it was as deep a journey into the universe as I could ask for. I instantly wanted to send it to everybody, not even to show it off, but just to explain things a bit. Look at this way of looking at the world, before one is taught differently; before one is shaped forcibly. Look at the purity and clarity of intention (something that my favourite artists and makers strive for, and which is what I am most attracted to: clarity of intention. The ability to communicate from brain to brain across the gulf of time, death, language, background, common ground. Knowing where youâre going! Knowing what you want to achieve - and doing it! The form does not matter!)
(Also, horrible things with legs. Iâll always give them attention too.)
(This was also a horrible thing with legs.)
So much of what we search for is here, all along. So much of what we chase after is already in this bug. The child scribbles it, hands it to the baby, who obediently folds it up and puts it in their mouth; the child answers a few questions, then runs off to get sticky; you are left holding the wonder, going: somewhere in here is something we are missing, something weâve lost track of, and I could spend quite a lot of time trying to pin it down (anthropologically, psychologically, poetically, in a very special episode of a childrenâs cartoon, in a degree, as an instagram account)
What the hell else is art for, if not to send you on a little journey. If an artist can do that with a scribble then you should give them your attention. You should show other people, explain it a bit. Keep it forever as evidence of something - maybe a building, a collection that makes sense. You could call it a life or even a museum.
Show us the bug!!! Or describe it at least. I want to see it so bad.
- I love it! What is it?
- this is a weird silly bug. Itâs weird!
- I love the smile.
- Yes, heâs very silly.
- I love the legs. So many!
- Yes; I drewed them like that.
- What does he do?
- Heâs a present for the baby. He is a tummy bug (EDITORâS NOTE: gastrovirus) and he loves sick (Ed: vomit) HAHAHAHAHA.
- Oh wow.
- HE LOVES TO EAT THE SICK! HAHAHA
- Oh wow. Did ⌠did you know we use the word âbugâ for two things - we can use it to mean a little animals, like a woodlouse, that lives outside? But also, when we say tummy bug, we mean a germ - the little tiny things we canât see - theyâre different. Which one is he?
- Oh this is a ninvisible bug.
- A germ?
(Image: a furry bug with lots of legs, wide staring eyes, and a slightly deranged grin from eye to eye.)
- Heâs the BUG that makes you sick. Thatâs why he has so many legs. (Ed: here I thought this was possibly influenced by the educational book they have called âsee inside germs,â depicting various microorganisms with flagella and mycelium and so on.) when itâs time to be sick, he uses his legs to tickle the back of your throat to make you be sick. And then he! eats! the! sick! HAHAHA
- (Ed: at this point I helplessly let go of my attempt to teach germ theory in the face of such superior theology) oh ⌠wow.
- He lives inside you all the time but doesnât tickle you all the time because it isnât always time to be sick. Heâs ninvisible. Heâs not an outside bug. Heâs the tummy bug. thatâs why him make you be sick to come up to your throat and eat the sick. See, the baby loves that bug.
- does the baby⌠like germs?
- he is NOT a GERM!!
LATER
- what made you choose to draw a tummy bug, to give to the baby?
- The crying was annoying to me.
- UmâŚ. I mean, why did you draw the bug?
- I choose a bug because theyâre my favourite to draw to give to the baby to help them calm down. because the crying is annoying to me.
- What makes you choose to draw a bug?
- The baby loves bugs.
- How do you know that?
- The baby always calms down and stops crying when Iâm give them my bugs.
- Oh, I see.
- Iâm also best at drawing bugs.
- How are you so good?
- Iâm just know.
LATER
- I see that you have cut the paper?
- Yes! Iâm snipped him out carefully with the white (Ed: child-safe babyâs nail cutting) scissors.
- are you happy with it?
- Yes, Iâm really pleased that I m draw him all by myself. Heâs all wiggly biggly. I drewed him to be wiggly and biggly.
END
Some things that interested me: the way that the knowledge you put into them is synthesized and recreated: the very Greek-philosophy-of-medicine idea of the Tummy Bug as large soft benign prawn that triggers vomiting by tickling you. We are all fascinated by AI right now, the way it spits our own things back at us; here is a juvenile human intelligence, which does the same thing, but less predictably. The way the artist is already self-proclaiming their awareness of the audience: using the babyâs nail scissors, which are Allowed Blades, and stating in advance that they did so carefully, therefore dodging the expected reflexive criticism of âplease donât use scissors without me!â Or the tiresome parental âWHERE DID YOU GET SCISSORS?â The gentle reproach that the baby, fussing mildly for five minutes while I prepared breakfast, was so ANNOYING that the poor toddler had to create an art piece to meet this unmet need.
But also: a piece of work with thoughtfulness and attention given to medium, execution, and topic. Did it do its job? Yes. Did it communicate? Yes. Did it provoke reactions? Multiple ones. Was there intentionality? Yes. Was an emotion captured? Surely. Was the mark-making technically skilled and the result admirable? Of course. What about mastery? Mastery of some topics is clearly shown here. There was a clear trajectory from the artistâs brain to the audienceâs, with evidence showing that the bridge was good.
And do you know that it is good? Yes, it is good. How do you know? Iâm just do.
Often you have to re-enter education to get this much to grips with art, so itâs just cool to me. What we are seeking is so often found.
