Since I couldn't resist including that song at the end, I'm not making any money from this upload... so uhhh sign up for Nebula! 40% off with my link! go.nebula.tv/lilyalexandre
Wait: you *actually expected* that floating ideas out in media would change anything? Everyone Here has watched multiple movies & TV shows showing that those who call out the people in charge get taken away & that those who passively allow it to happen are cowards. & here we all are shouting away & expecting that to work while we passively allow doctors who speak out against medical malpractice by government policy & Julian Assange to be taken away by those we can legally charge, prosecute & arrest for doing so. So if ideas presented in media *actually affected things,* we'd all have acted to stop this decades ago, the way media *_SHOWS_** us* we should have. What a Truly Flawed premise. It's almost as if someone invented *_to_** excuse* why everyone _is_ doing nothing to stop anything...
Hello Lily. Enjoyed this video greatly. However a question. No disrespect, but,... I can't stand the advertising anywhere, for all the reasons and more covered in this vid. So, the question is why? Why the disgusting capitalist advertising here. Ex. Nordstrom Rack. 🤢 ✌💞💪🍉🌈🎵🎤🎶💃🎵 Fellow earthlings.. Lots of 💞✌💪
@@publicutility”why the disgusting capitalist advertising here “ it’s almost like she lives in a capitalist country and needs to make a living … the same reason other anti capitalists work jobs … we need to survive ?!
@@publicutilitythis is her job like 😅she has a reason for advertising . I get it Can be annoying tho. As the other commenter pointed out too Nebula has less capitalist incentive than other streaming companies ie. Netflix, Disney +, etc. Not to say there’s any ethical consumption under capitalism (there isn’t) but it’s one of the MORE ethical options in comparison to other streaming alternatives
In order for me to write poetry that isn't political, I must listen to the birds and in order to hear the birds the warplanes must be silent -Marwan Makhoul
@@alexmendenhall5416 it's a painful thing. Like that quote about democracy, it's the best of the options we as a species have attempted so far. Still sucks tho - having every piece of our souls repurposed to make money. None of us who gave this comment a thumbs up would probably LIKE being sent back to the stone age and we WOULD want to go home. But it'd be nice to have some space to Just Exist, ya know?
@@86fifty well yeah leisure time is good, but the economy (specifically free market economies) does not diminish the amount of leisure time you have, in fact, leisure time has only ever increased as a result of liberal economies. And also the quality of leisurely activities has also increased. Yeah you still have to work under liberal economies, but this isn’t the fault of the economy, this is just a fact of reality. You have to work to survive, no economic system solves this “work to survive” problem.
I was emotionally abused by my mother as a child, and she used to take away everything me and my siblings enjoyed because she considered it "escapism", and said that we should live in "harsh reality". Your point about escapism being freedom from the things that hide truth from us was really powerful and I almost teared up ngl
My mother hated me because my life's passion reminded her of her ex-husband's alcoholism. The truth was, he was an alcoholic because of people like her. Aesthetics aren't a carnal vice. Aesthetics involve innovation, engineering, and studying because you'd run out of enjoyable stuff if you don't experiment and make your own. Saying comfort isn't good enough on its own is wrong. In a hopeless situation, comfort is the only thing that can truly help. Giving up is spoken of in hushed tones as if it's universally shameful, as if flailing in the dark is always the right thing to do. I survived years of torture because I could make and view art to distract myself. Art is an unpopular painkiller. "Real" medicinal painkillers aren't infinite. We're just lucky the resource is abundant. Under the right circumstances, music would be the only way we could improve a person's life.
@@iseetheendisnear2416 : All great things start with a dream. It wasn't long ago that flying was considered just a flight of fancy (I wonder if that's where the saying comes from), thought by most an impossibility. But it wasn't really you she hated, or your father. Like all of us, she inherited and was exposed to those things that made her turn out that way. A healthy society breeds healthy individuals.❤🌍🌎🌏🌐
I thing everyone has there own toxic trauma from life. The armor that's built by the experience can both help and hurt. Learn from bad and good and choose to be the best you. Remember your not alone and life is precious, short, risky and pure luck. Live love laugh every moment and practice mind body exercise ✌💞💪🎵🎤🎶💃🎵😍
The only way to check for real truth is to simulate a reality with and a reality without that truth, and see which one actually works and which one only works if you X. (And often, the X is something evil)
I made my art so I wouldn't commit suicide because my art is the only way I can be heard. I share it because when I've shared it in closed groups I've gotten reactions I never expected. I do things for the sake of doing them. I live in spite of others who would kill me including myself. Art is an outlet and what you let out is important, if not to the world, then yourself. Art won't save the world, but it can save people, and people will save the world.
@@lily_lxndr : The ripples we create through the examples we set spread out from us. Depending on the examples themselves, and too often imo just how they're framed, it can spread across the world, becoming impetus for great change if it catches on. We need to not let desire to be "the" cause for change as an individual get in our way, but accept being part of that change, supporting a diversity of tactics for a common goal.❤🌍🌎🌏🌐
_"it can save people, and people will save the world."_ Yea! Cooperation > competition. I believe great change starts within each of us becoming an anti-bigot on our own. ❤🌍🌎🌏🌐 Not saying introspection is easy,🤣 but not much else is so personally rewarding. 🙂
This is a quote from someone I've found in the past year and been very attracted to the ideas of: "the role of the artist is to load the gun." Which I believe is another way of saying what Toni Cade Bambara said, "As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible."
I want to agree but can’t see reality aligning. The firing of said gun hasn’t worked since before the Vietnam protests… they didn’t achieve a withdrawal, protests against SA didn’t end apartheid, Seattle, Occupy, BDS, BLM and the current Gaza protests. It may be loaded or close to loading but it’s never been closer to being fired as there’s not enough people to start the marathon towards socialism yet. Interesting way of wording it though.
@@ogpandamoniumthat would technically be better as long as it’s not “shorts.” Because you aren’t exposed to a litany of useless, disparate shit like on Twitter. At least on TH-cam you usually watch longer videos by a smaller number of voices
Ive spent the last 4 years shaping my twitter algo to be nothing but fanart and cosplays. Last week, i engaged with more political / videogame discussion posts over an afternoon, my feed is nothing but racism, sexism and engagement farms now... Twitter is dead to me.
in topic of stuff mentioned here, there was a fanartist for the popular series jujutsu kaisen named noury, a palestinian woman who was experiencing the siege and documenting her thoughts on twitter. the most heartbreaking thing i've ever seen was seeing the news from her close friends that she had lost her eye to an israeli tank shell in the middle of class, and while i was already an advocate for palestinan freedom prior to this, the moment this was brought out, my opinion solidified drasticially, especially as an artist myself. she had evacuated from gaza, but the scars still remain. i think the idea that people just simply live their lives, do stuff, talk about their feelings, is what pretty much made me feel strongly about the subject - whether they're laughing at a funny meme, sad because of what happened during that infamous chapter, angry because of other people dying to an oppressive establishment, horny cause idfk, they are all still human beings, and its the mere fact that they're human that makes revolution irresistable, as bambara had stated. a friend of mine currently lives in lebanon, and every day my feed is filled with him talking about honkai and other manga and anime he enjoys. the utter shock and worry i was filled with when he said he saw an idf missile from the bus was undescribable.
With respect, that Kurt Vonnegut quote is cherry-picked, ignores the context of what he was saying during the interview, and also ignores that the article stated that he laughed after making the comment. This is what he said directly before the quote: "History is happening to us now. George Bush has hydrogen bombs if he needs them. It really matters who's around and who's holding attention. I don't think television will let anybody else hold attention. NUVO: Why is that?" Regardless, his point was not only about Vietnam lasting 2 decades despite artists in America united against it, but about America going to war in the Middle East and George Bush. The interview was in 2003, and his point was that the war machine has waged on for decades despite the best intentions of artists and others. He was saying similar things to what Hunter S. Thompson was after 9-11. "Here we go again, this is never going to stop." And it hasn't. So, to say within the context of that interview he was wrong is completely inaccurate because his entire point was art hasn't collectively ended the war machine. If his point was wrong, your video essay wouldn't need to exist. It wasn't art has no influence. It was art isn't solely enough in the face of the war machine, and it was coming from someone with decades of experience. You're talking about a man in his 80's who fought in World War 2 and continuously wrote fiction and non-fiction about his anti-war stance while America waged in war after war until the day he died. Heck, he wrote A Man Without A Country in response to 9-11, well after that interview. Your comment about war journalists is also disingenuous at best, as while photography and writing are art, they weren't going over there to create art, but to document what was going on. I know you don't mean it that way, but it's relatively insulting to look at photos of people suffering in war and even imply "oh, that artist had a good eye for composition while taking that shot". Many journalists didn't learn composition and framing for the art of their photos or their writing, but to document the truth. There's a reason journalism isn't solely considered art, and when it turns out that journalists have faked their writing or photography to instead create the "best" art they're normally widely denounced for destroying what it means to be a journalist. Or at least they were before the world went crazy. But even if it were a 100 percent fair argument, it still ignores what Vonnegut was actually saying, which is that despite the best intentions of artists, journalists, photographers, and protestors, the overall war machine across the world continues to wage on. This quote is from the same interview: "I don't want to belong to a country that attacks little countries. I don't want to belong to that kind of a country. I wrote a piece for 7 Stories Press here in New York. They're about to publish a book of anti-war posters by a guy nobody's heard of before - he's a pretty good artist and so I was asked to write a piece for it. Would you like me to read it?" Pretty obvious he still believed art had meaning and power. I do genuinely mean with all respect, because everything else you said was solid.
I find Vonnegut is often taken out of context or simply misunderstood in his meaning. At least the next generation is finally catching on to our Father who art in Tralfamador.
@@PutkisenSetä don't you think that statement is a bit cynical? I think that it's cool to believe in something, especially the power of art. What's that thingy about the pen and like, the sword or whatever?
PBS Philosophy Channel was my gateway, talk about packaging genius. Talking about something random in pop-culture and then going deep from there. I'll never forget you Mike.
As a black kid who listens to Kendrick Lamar, a lot of people dismissed his feud with Drake as nothing but meaningless drama but what a lot of people undermine is why it was so important. Kendrick isn't just calling out another rapper for being a bad person, from what I and a lot of other black people saw was Kendrick calling out another black artist for benefiting from black culture while doing nothing for the people who made it. Sure, Kendrick isn't ending racism for making the world a better place from making an album like To Pimp A Butterfly but he is uniting black people through art and making them feel safer to be themselves.
Mr. Morale did more for the black community than anything Drake conjured up in his whole career. Listening to that album was like a much-needed therapy session
I literally just started the video, so this is my related shower thought: when we romanticize the past, we’re almost never romanticizing the *reality* of the past, but the idea of it that was captured by its artists. When Millennials do “mid-century modern design,” it’s taking cues from art and architecture that was remarkable enough to make it into magazines, not my grandma’s burnt orange recliners and Sears flower couch.
Burnt orange recliner and floral couch is firmly AFTER mid-century modern. 😂 The past is not interchangeable either, just as the romanticized version isn’t.
@@namedrop721 They got those recliners in 1974, and the 70s seem to have a lot of influence in what we call MCM, even if mid-century is more properly the post-WWII era.
Gurl, you deserve mega-kudos for the sheer athletic FEAT of being able to TALK and even DELIVER SCRIPTED LINES, WHILE getting a tattoo!!! (I mean, I choose to believe it was in-situ. Perhaps he didn't actually have the machine ON, but he did a great job acting if that was the case!) PS - You got me to laugh with the "and even the choices of where to cut.....(turns to cough)" and the COUGH being cut-off too!
Paulo Freire mentioned! As a Brazilian, it's extremely cool to see our philosophers being appreciated by people outside the motherland. Thank you Lily.
Freire's work has significant influence on the way educators are currently being trained, at least in the US. His critique of the "banking model" caused a dramatic shift in the way education views the relationship between educator and student.
Brazil mentioned 🥳🎉 When I was getting my degree on game design, in são paulo, we used the Freire concept of ensino-aprendizagem, and while it was before Bolsonaro, some people turned their faces, then he brought some Gringo's studies using the concept, to prove how important Freire is to brazil (and vídeo jogos)
I'm from Ukraine. Every day my life could end because of a stray Russian missile and there's nothing I can do about it but apply to military (which I won't do) and donate to the army (which I already do). Art can't change my situation. That one documentary about Mariupol which won an Oscar this year won't repay anything to the victims of Russian war crimes. No amount of soulful ballads will revive my cousin from the dead and bring him back to his widow and three-year old son. No amount of political discourse can meaningfully improve our lives at the moment. However, I don't think art is meaningless. Because when I hear missiles falling in my city, reading fanfic about "Owl House" characters helps me keep my composure. Because listening to all the good music that came out recently makes me proud of my people's resilience and lets me get through another day. That matters.
Perhaps you should have stayed neutral and doesn't brake the minsk treaty? And not followed this NATO muppet? It would have spared you the missiles. Greetings from a land which is safe thanks to the oh so obsolete neutrality as your muppet claimed that he is the evidence for that neutrality is obsolete.
Your 'slush' being genuine art was an inspired artistic choice in itself, and I loved how it complimented your point about art being a part of life, not something separate to 'escape' from life. Beautiful video, beautiful guests, beautiful art, beautiful creators and creations, all of you!
I don't want to spoil Part 3 of this video but I have to say, it's one of the gutsiest things I've ever seen on this platform, or in video essays generally. Bravo my friend ❤
I know of a Jacob Geller essay section on a certain boldly titled book that, while being an analysis of the themes of a book, when taken at face value could seem real fighting words.
@@zUJ7EjVD why not both? Lily and Jacob are both wonderful individuals who've gone great lengths for their work! I'd never disparage one to praise the other.
The bike lanes example you give is depressing... yes, we can get bike lanes, but they'll be implemented in such a fragmented and broken way that it somehow leaves the roads worse for everyone rather than better for anyone. It's like some kind of perverse punishment for gathering political momentum.
Whyyyy does every video you make happen to be INCREDIBLY topical to where my mental and emotional journey is at the moment, I’m not even on any non-TH-cam social media to be tracking the same conversations. Like, I love it, but it’s also a little bizarre 😅 Another absolute BANGER of a video. Thank you for making this!
@@lily_lxndr Same here lol I was having mixed feelings about my place in the world, my art and how I can help in the landscape we have today As someone coming from the rural side of a country from Latam is hard to have a voice nowadays But your video inspired me to find my voice and ways to help and be conscious about it So thanks!
I think my fav art piece(I can't remember the name or artist) buy she mopped the floor of an empty corridor with diluted blood of teens killed in gang violence in Mexico. Your shoes would stick to the ground, every step you feel the impact of the war on drugs and the environment this kids where forced to grow up in. I love how visceral it was, idk what impact it had, tbh I never thought about it lol.. I'm bad at modern art, I'll have to look it up, and find the name of the artist....
The artist I believe you’re talking about is Teresa Margolles! It’s a very power contemporary piece. As someone who’s studying art, people commonly mix up modern and contemporary art. Contemporary is generally anything made from around the 1980s until present day just so you know. Art Lust is a great channel to check out to learn more about art and analyzing it
a thing that i've realized through reading a bunch of theory is that marx and lenin, beyond just having useful ideas, are good writers!! they're artful writers, and it's specifically their ability to explain things in an artful way that motivates me so much to learn and do more. great video as always, i genuinely think these videos are the best on youtube. concise and impeccably written, and i'm always left with a lot to think about!
This is exactly the glorification of art that needs to be avoided. The nature of something is of course always changing, and today the nature of art has become alienation, commodity. *This is not to say this essence is absolute, but that this essence is the general reality
growing up i thought that everything was solve through strict math and science. this was what i was good at and like another plato or an average teenager i thought that only someone like me has the answers to the worlds problems. art let me express and understand and most importantly accept all those feelings i had and i couldn't process. for anything more than that i guess i will watch the video :p
People justify beauty as a way to market positive change because they don't respect it. It has a reputation of escapism. But that's blaming the victim. Saying comfort in a hopeless situation isn't good enough is wrong. Giving up is spoken of in hushed tones as if it's universally shameful, as if flailing in the dark is ALWAYS the right thing to do. But I survived years of torture because I could make and view others's art to distract myself, and I don't regret it. Art is just an unpopular painkiller. "Real" medicinal painkillers aren't infinite. We're merely lucky the resource is abundant. Aesthetics involve innovation, engineering, and studying because you'd run out of enjoyable stuff if you don't experiment and make your own. Under the right circumstances, aesthetics would be the only way we could improve a person's life.
@@loadishstoneI wouldn't say 'giving up' it more seems like painkillers are a method of someone trying to heal their pain. Just like someone using art to distract themselves. Some people genuinely need painkillers to get by just like someone needing art
I love this video. Lots of reasons why, but I'll just say I loved the immersive experience of watching the mural be painted, hearing the sounds of the pottery wheel and the tattoo gun. I loved what you said about the playful bait and switch that video essayists so often pull. I loved everything else. This is one that I'll probably revisit multiple times.
This was so beautiful and profound! This profoundly shifted my perspective and inspired me to think about art differently. I just know I'm going to come back this video again and again to get more out of it.
I do regularly listen to your videos while cooking or washing dishes! Honestly I probably should think more about your ideas but sometimes it's just nice to have a pleasant voice in my ear.
That one Kurt Vonnegut quote about how "respectable" artists made no impact at ending the war in Vietnam always seemed weird and anachronistic to me. It's easy to look at a history book and confirm that the war did indeed end, first of all (with a North Vietnamese win no less). But also - all that pressure which was aimed towards the establishment both ended the draft AND gave voting rights to the 18-20s. It was significant! Yeah maybe it didn't singlehandedly end American imperialism but it was more than that of a custard pie dropped off a ladder. What was he even getting at?
18-20 y/os didn't have voting rights before the Vietnam War? I'm going to look into this after posting this comment but I just want to emphasize my surprise here. It sounds absolutely horrid getting drafted into a war that you had no voting power in. Thank you for writing your comment!
@@Dudex11a Yeah! There was a big hit song back in '65 called "Eve of Destruction" which mentions this very point. "You're old enough to kill but not for votin' You don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin'?'"
Only watched 15 minutes, but I need to go to bed and I wanted to comment on this before I forgot: The argument that art didn't help end any wars is moot, not because art' is not at "fault" because there are so many other variables at play, but because we don't know what would have happened had art _not_ focused like a laser on it. For all we know, if art turned a blind eye, we'd still be embroiled in the Vietnam War.
While we're not poor in natural resources, we have a LOT of poor people. I don't think it's necessarily wrong to use the word "poor". I prefer the imperial core/periphery terminology, though.
i love how art is happening in every chapter its so hypnotizing your creativity is insane and so so comforting. thank you for existing and spreading your feelings
This is one of the huge catalogue of videos I’ve watched while working on my first fursuit head! It made me aware of the art I was creating while listening to art while art was ongoing in the shoot. It made me think of the personal aspect of my art, this large amount of physical labor I’ve been doing for weeks to have a head I can wear that looks cool to me and my friends. It made me think about the political aspect of my art, the main inspiration of this head being a deeply queer and trans band that helped me come into my identity, and the fact that wearing this head in public will immediately mark me as some slew of identities that still face discrimination and ridicule- the potential risk I could be placed in but also the potential furthering of my connections and the sheer joy of inspiring my friends to create as well. Most of all, this video made me think of around this time three or four years ago, me as a highschooler spending my time doomscrolling and putting off art, my passion, to focus entirely on being aware of everything happening that could kill me and the people I love. Thank you for your art, it helps me make mine, and I’ve seen that mine helps others make theirs. We are all connected in a web of politics and love and community and humanity im so glad to have finally delved into!
I didn’t like the path of conversation this video took. I think that it came from a very Western perspective and misunderstood, focused too much on more modern forms of art that are less accessible to people around the world (social media, online content), and the overall purpose of art in activism. I believe that art should be less about changing minds or raising awareness but rather about self-definition. I have been to Guatemala, where there are murals in public places depicting the massacres and genocides on the Guatemalan people by their own government, only 40 years ago. I saw this people collection of more than 50 murals that showed the history of the town, from the mayas, the Spanish conquest, the civil war, and hopes for the future. The murals showed environmental damage and poverty, death and destruction. But they depicted hopes to overcome that. One mural said that they are “weaving their own future” with weaving being an extremely important and expressive form of art in Guatemala. For example, in the city of Nebaj, many women wear bright red traditional clothing called huipiles in remembrance of all the innocent blood spilt in the 30 year civil war. This is the kind of art that truly struggles against oppression. Even if it doesn’t create immediate change, this is what art can do. Guatemalan death squads would specifically target and kill artists, musicians, and poets because they knew the power that they held.
The thing with art is that it's entertainment. A lot of people see that pejoratively, but 1- entertainment is never apolitical and 2- entertainment is a vital part of the human experience. Art is older than agriculture. We can live without access to a steady supply of food, but we can't live without creating art or consuming the art of those who do. That doesn't mean it can or should fix everything that is wrong with the world, but we need it regardless.
The "art" that is older than agriculture wasn't meant as entertainment (it is debated within academic circles whether art is an appropriate term). Art is not entertainment: art is communication. It is often also entertainment, which is, as you say, very important, but it is, at its core, communication. I don't think art is vital to survival, and I say this as an artist: it's super important, and can keep you going through awful things, but it cannot be compared to basic needs like food, drink, and shelter. I would say companionship ranks above it, too, but it's almost inevitable for art (like songs, for example) to arise when people interact.
@@kwarra-an Even if it had religious or ritual significance, that doesn't stop it from being art. So did (some of the) art in the Renaissance or in Greek and Roman sculptures. But I think calling it communication is fine - there's a lot of overlap. (Although not all art is communication, since a lot of it isn't meant to be shared or seen. But that's a whole other rabbit role that's probably not relevant right now.) But if, like you say, art inevitably arises when people interact - how is that not a vital part of the human experience? You can lock a human alone in a box with a straw for water, another for food and a hole in the floor for excrements, and they'll survive, but is that living? Is that how a human is meant to live, or how they would live if given the choice? Unless you physically stop them from doing so, people will seek out some form of art, much like a beaver will seek out a body of water. A beaver can survive on land alone, but that's not how they're meant to live. I'm not saying art is literally keeping people alive, or that it isn't. But it's an innate part of us, and without it, we're not us.
May I just say, good f**kin' job getting tattooed and also delivering your lines in that chapter of the video. The couple of times I've gotten tattooed were super difficult for me, and it took a lot for me to NOT just focus on the pain I was in. You're pain tolerance is commendable.
would it be sound to say: make art because you need to express something, not because you need to change something? like if you saw something was wrong and you needed it fixed would it be apt to say making art about it is successful if it conveys the notion you had to others even if it doesn't effectuate the fix you needed?
I'm in a little art discussion and coffee group that meets on Friday mornings at a community art center. I'm typically the youngest one there by about 30 years, so I'm not sure if any of them watch video essays, but I'll be recommending this to them tomorrow. Last week a gal brought up this topic exactly. She was only a little nihilistic about it but my counter to that was the bio-acoustician Roger Payne who recorded Songs of the Humpback Whale. Before that, few people gave a shit about whales. The album became a huge success (100k copies) and proceeds benefitted the Wildlife Conservation Society. Then the 'Save the Whales' campaign started, and he testified in front of Congress to end commercial whaling. This is really just to echo the video and comments - nobody single-handedly saves the world, but one person can get stuff started. And we can never predict the impact our work. It benefits both ourselves and society at large to never stop creating ❤️
You caught me at 35:08 doing the dishes while listening and passivly watching this video. What I find interesting about this is how has made me more consciously identify with being a person being invested in the struggle. Before, while if asked, I would say that I'm invested in the struggle. The point I want to make here is that the comment has brought this aspect of myself into active thought where I wouldn't have been put into this position before and I think that's neat
It's not surprising that the causes championed by artists tend not to do too well, at least in the short run. It's not because art is useless, much less counterproductive; it's because it's the causes where the struggle is still very much uphill, and where victory seems unlikely at best and illusory at worst, that inspire artists to get involved in the first place.
I opened this video in a new tab yesterday to remind myself to watch it later n I sorta forgot about it. I was clicking through my tabs today to clean up stuff I'd already watched/read and clicking on this tab I was flash-banged by how pretty you were, since I forgot it was your video I'd opened up. Hope the complement reaches you well n isn't weird c:
I wish I could apply these thoughts to my art practice in a productive and consise way. I wish I had your mind. I am sad that my time here feels wasted, but thank you, Lily, for giving things to chew on
I'm a visual artist and a writer and i feel like art is intertwined in most aspects of life, more than many might realize i imagine, and is intrinsically linked to being human, seeming to be basically a human universal - this basic desire to create things and decorate even some of the most mundane and utilitarian objects through much of human history. I also think much of modern western society , at least, has an unhealthy and probably unconscious obsession with things being primarily practical, pragmatic or productive, esp in the realm of capitalism, which is likely where that comes from - and for sure there are legitimate things outside the driving whips of industry that also need done - issues of justice and equity and revolution - and it is good to be driven and focused on getting them done - but art is for me the smoking gun proving that humans simply need to have some things that are just decoration, just expression, just aesthetic, just to be creative, just for looking at touching smelling or listening to. Just because we like it. But art also has some very powerful tools in its arsenal that can serve practical functions that shouldn't be overlooked - a direct line to emotions and expression, as well as the powers of imagination and creativity which are the most equipped to deal with novel problems, imo. Much of which is similar to what you said in the video at certain points. And that's why i would similarly argue that though art cannot save the world by itself it is a necessary and powerful companion to any actions that have a better chance of it
I watched "I Saw The Tv Glow" alone in a small theater at an art museum and it took me days to fully process it, and even then I still couldn't put what I had realized after watching the movie into words. When you say "Do I want permission to live, or do I just want to live?" that's exactly what I had realized when I was walking laps around the museum, still digesting the movie. I've struggled so hard socially, mentally, and physically to be accepted by others, to live my life the correct way. But that's not living. Watching the last scene of ISTTG (which I will not spoil everyone PLEASE go see it I beg) left me with this pit in my stomach because I was watching myself on that screen. Art has never really affected me much because I've never known myself enough to recognize myself in media. And yet, a piece of art breached that wall of ignorance and grabbed me and said "Look. Look at your life. Look at what is and will happen." ISTTG quite literally drop kicked me into an existential fit that I am still recovering from but that I desperately needed. Thanks to the internet, the commercialized art has become far more widespread and unavoidable, but the internet has also given every person a platform, for better or for worse. There's so much art out there that can impact anyone and I think it's incredible (I originally had a point with this but I forgot and started rambling forgive me)
I am an artist. I try to post on ig but it's so hard, most artist now look like brands. I know this idea grew because nobody wants to be a "starving artist" but I really don't want to look like a brand, I just want to do art.
In the words of Ernst Fischer: In a decaying society art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it Art may embody the spirit of action, but it must push our muscles and fingers to enact it.
Got here through Jacob Geller, really happy to stumble upon you. Amazing essay here, great points and lovely style. Subscribed and looking forward to more! Thank you for bringing a bit of hope to my life. Truth and beauty.
Speaking online is like voting in a “democratic system”, it’s only goal is to satiate you in feeling like you’re doing something, while also making you feel helpless in the face of so much larger than yourself.
I’ve only watched the first minute and a half, but I want to say that I’m so glad you made this video because I’ve been thinking about this topic for the past year
This reminds me of my religious upbringing/past, when I felt like the religious art that was hellbent on converting people or teaching something specific was very bad at being art. "Secular" art always felt so much more spiritually nourishing.
"To focus too much on the structure of oppression would be to neglect the very humanity that renders that structure unjust." I had to stop working on my art and pause the video just so I could listen to that quote again. It's constructed so well. Every day I listen to videos like yours while working for hours on my 5+ year old webcomic/book series, wondering... what's the point of it all? It seems so frivolous sometimes compared to all the awful stuff going on in the world. As an autistic person, I feel often that I'd be more useful being an activist on the front lines, but I also acknowledge that my autism makes me struggle to put myself on the front lines of activism. Meanwhile, this webcomic I've been working on... as well as being self-therapy for myself, in helping me to process the unique struggles and oppression I face as someone who's neurodivergent, I also have a readerbase of other autistic people who often say they feel "seen" by my work. My neurodivergent characters struggle, especially with those societal expectations, but they also find friendship and community in their own unique way. And it's made me feel often that even though my webcomic isn't overtly political, it definitely sends messages, gives a visibility to other marginalized folk, and makes life feel more bearable for both me and my readers in our current economical and political climate. This was probably one of my favorite videos of yours, because it helped recenter me again after having a pretty bad brain week. Capitalism ties so much of art's intrinsic value to its monetary value, and it makes it feel like the art we spend so much time making is inherently less valuable because it would generally be perceived as such. But it continues to bring solace to people struggling in these times, both in the past and present. And it probably will in the future too. I'm putting my voice and my experiences out there, and even after I die, it will remain - hopefully to continue to provide comfort for others like me. I also have to say that the buzzer or whatever tool the tattoo artist was using... legit added some relaxing ASMR ambience to the vid. I love that you kept that in there.
The way every shot has some people or other person performing art and just being solely focused on that really does something to my body. Especially the one where the other person did pottery, it just hits me. I'm personally not a big fan of the super long essays (1hr+), I thoroughly enjoyed this, thank you for showing us your inner world.
I'm sorry but I do have to ask if the moment around 22:26, about discussions around Palestine always have necessary context provided (in large, online conversations) or how there's rarely a shot in the dark, is genuine. I'm a pro-Palestinian Jewish American and to be honest, I am *constantly* frustrated by the floods of misinformation by well-meaning people who are, quite frankly, clueless. I'm used to a dearth of historical awareness from the pro-Israel people in my life, but conversations about Palestine online often devolve into outright antisemitism because of people who haven't bothered to do two seconds of research on the history of the situation. People are still not grasping the basics of BDS or targeted boycotts/action, and some are still vocally choosing targets rejected by the BDS movement and lessening the credibility and effectiveness of the movement overall. It might just be that we see different things on our feeds, but the lack of basic research on both the past and on present action is just.... mind-boggling. This isn't unique to the Palestinian movement, obviously. This is the universal experience of online "activism" (as your video points to - posting isn't activism, but people feel like it is, so they throw all their energy into it). I'm just surprised that we have had such drastically different experiences. Keeping up with the news from posts means being subjected to the half-baked opinions of USAmerican teenagers being treated like credible reporters; no one even bothers to check who *posted* what they're sharing, let alone whether it's accurate or not. Like you said, this online interconnectedness cuts both ways - a pipeline to solidarity, and to conspiracy. Hearing people I know talk in deeply othering ways about Jewish people (not about Israel or its government, but about Jews generally) has been soul-crushing. The lack of a pause to evaluate makes this moment ripe for opportunists to jump in and get people onto the antisemitic bandwagon, similar to the phenomenon you described in a previous video of feminists being roped into TERF-dom by opportunistic conservatives.
There's another side to this, art doesn't just change the world for the better it can absolutely change it for the worse. For an easy example 'The Birth of a Nation' directly lead to the resurgence of the KKK. And I don't say this to be a downer but to add to the conversation about education. I didn't properly understand what could've let the holocaust happen until looking at german anti-semitic propaganda from the time. I'm not saying that was the direct cause of the holocaust, but just being told in school that Germany was left strapped after WW1 and decided to use Jewish people as a scapegoat for the Nation's problems, didn't make emotional sense to me. I don't think it made sense to a lot a people because these days Nazi's are mythologized as "pure evil" even as the same anti-semitic attitudes that begat them persist in our modern culture today. It's doing a disservice to history to not show the emotional and artistic influences that start movement's, both good and bad. We can know our history, but if we don't understand it we're doomed to repeat it.
Was that a shot at Steven Universe? I'd actually appreciate an analysis of SU's real flaws from a trans person named Lily who actually knows what she's doing, i.e. you.
@@lily_lxndr Danger And Eggs? High Guardian Spice? Maybe I'm looking into this too much. I'd love to see Lily Simpson's take on SU as well, but she swore it off because it gets too much hate. That was shortly before everyone collectively realized that most of SU's major critics were either actual Nazis or so far left that they were accusing a leftist Jewish woman of being a Nazi for the crime of advocating pacifism and forgiving your mentally ill asshole relatives.
I could say a gazillion things about this video--it's great btw--but instead of crapping up your comments with every thought in my head... I'm beyond delighted to see you mention Tim's Boku No Natsuyasumi video, probably my favorite piece of media on this website.
i love neolithic cave paintings so much and i think about them a lot for things like this. it just takes all of this importance out of proving why our time is justified making art and whether or not it "raises awareness" or invokes change ... it just kind of is. it matters to us because it does. we do it because we want to. it just matters and we do it and always have. i feel like we've tricked ourselves into arguing the line of people who are dismissive of art... like trying to argue why art matters because of the utilitarian value it has to create political change. but you can see it the other way, artists who made art about the vietnam war were against the vietnam war and so the art they made expressed that. the connect with their community about it. they did it because that was something they cared about. they did it because they wanted to and needed to, as humans tend to do. whether or not there are tangible changes you can see from political art movements, using this as a metre for the value of art i think is used to disenfranchise artists. but actually political art can do a lot to help people find like minded people, hold onto hope, feel agency, etc. it's like seeing it as the difference between what you produce and how it sustains you.
Genuinely inspiring and hopeful. I feel like I've grown accustomed to the imperialist language like saying "poor" and "disadvantaged" because I both was conditioned by it, and came to associate it with the realities behind them without bothering to question if the context deserves accurate, more humanistic language. I think your ideas about art tie well with the way capitalism neutralizes discourse such as making objectivity seem more important than expressing how we feel. Even though the "objectivity" we consume in history books and news is intentionally shaped between the way things are worded and manufactured consent. But art is powerful, it can make you feel strong things, pull you into learning the reasons behind them, and having your mind radically challenged in the process.
So many thoughts. Let me position myself here and own my own blind spots. Middle aged, white, closeted genderfluid, perceived male, exvangelical, anarchist folk punk. The world is always changing. It's never not been changing, but change is slow. Change is always too slow for the new generations that are just starting to get involved. That's true of the current generation, it was true of me in my younger days, and it was true for those that came before me. It will be true for the generation that comes next as well. This is right and good. "The Movement" should never be content with the current situation. It should always be angry and screaming for more. But change is slow. Vonnegut was disappointed that a novel or a protest song didn't put the breaks on an entire war industry within a year. Those on social media right now are disappointed that their art isn't bringing an immediate end to foreign policy relationships that have been set in stone since the end of WW2. These things have inertia. In the immediate all of this art does have the stopping power of a custard pie dropped from a step ladder. But art can have inertia too. When I was a very young person the art of the 60's helped inspire my eventual radicalization. I know teens who make me blush by telling me that the art I made in my 20s inspired them and their current action. And the art that's being made now will add to that momentum, will further push the zeitgeist, and will create the starting point for the next angry generation. I don't want to downplay the suffering and atrocities that are currently happening. None of this makes any difference to a dead child. But belive me when I tell you that I've never known a time when the general western public was so aware of the plight of Palistine. Despite the bombs that are going off as a type this, this conflict is closer to a lasting peace than it ever has been before. That is a good thing. The systems of power and wealth we must be opposed to have been building inertia in some cases since feudal Europe. Our actions today aren't going to grind them to a halt within an immediate timeline. But those actions, including our art, are an important part of building the inertia that will eventually win. Or, rather, not win but create the next status quo that will be intolerable to the next generation of radicals. In the meantime, whether you see it or not we are throwing sand in the gears of the machine and we are forcing the powerful to make concessions. Sometimes those concessions are just bike lanes. Sometimes they're Obergefell. Sometimes they're foot dragging on offensive aid shipments that are required by treaty. They're not always huge but they are happening. I would love it if we could win tomorrow. Barring that I will work to win sometime in my descendent's lives. TL;DR: Dont give up and especially dont give up hope. Even if you dont win today your actions and your art right now matter
It feels like a lot of these comments are people's isolated knee-jerk responses to the title of the video, rather than any discourse about the content of the video
I've always thought that art should have a primary focus on aesthetics. As in Oscar Wilde's idea of "art for art's sake". I distinctly remember being 5 years old in school and my teacher was playing classical music which I really enjoyed but she was trying to get us to interpret the different instruments as being different animals or like waterfalls and wind. That really pissed me off because I always strongly believed that you should get lost in the soundscape and the act of attaching certain instruments or motifs to animals and things from the physical world is an act of restriction. You're taking an otherworldly thing and tethering it to the physical. Obviously, I didn't have the vocabulary to express my frustration to my teacher at the time but as time has gone on and as I've collected more methods of expressing this, I've only become stronger and more vigilant in that belief. I think art is something that transcends the natural world and approaching art with the idea that it's only trying to recreate the natural world is self-centered. If a chromatic scale on the piano is a buzzing bee, nothing more and nothing less then you never truly lose yourself in the music. I think this is an issue that's often conflated with other issues people have around art. For example a lot of people want all art to be apolitical, they insist that there's no deeper message and some people think their English teacher is dumb for suggesting that the author made the curtains blue to reflect sadness. They insist that the curtain is blue because the author liked the colour blue not because they value aestheticism but because they don't want to do their English homework. In some way the those people are right that the author probably liked the colour blue and wanted it to be blue for aesthetic reasons and sometimes authors aren't always thinking about politics. An English teacher's job is to get their students to think more deeply and critically about art. To understand concepts like checkhov's gun and to question "why did he make the curtains blue". But I think with this obsession over the function and "hidden meaning" behind art we do fall out of touch with the beauty of it. We read Shakespeare because it's easier to understand that way but Shakespeare is supposed to be experienced through theater. I see people with tattoos and I think "wow they look really cool" but I've never gotten one myself because I want it to have a meaning but in my obsession over function, I've denied myself the ability to achieve that cool appearance that other people have. I think this same issue has prevented me from transitioning in the past. I felt like I needed a reason to want to be a woman. But after soul searching I came up short. I don't have a reason. I just want to be a woman because I think women look cool and I want to look cool. With regard to my gender, the curtain genuinely is just blue because I like the colour blue. I think in a lot of ways this is what separates children from adults. Children will do things because they want to do things and adults feel a need to assign a function to everything. Gaining media literacy and critically analyzing things is a sign of maturity. But when you critically analyze everything you lose all sense of wonder. Yes a flower can be even more beautiful when you understand exactly how it works but just because you understand something doesn't mean you're incapable of losing yourself in its beauty. I don't know how to explain this any more than I already have. I feel like its one of those things where some people just get it and some people don't and I don't know how to get people to get it.
![[Full Episode] The Restaurant War Thailand ศึกพ่อค้าซ่าแม่ค้าแซ่บ Episode 2 | 29 ก.ย. 67](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/r3lfLNH6Ke4/mqdefault.jpg)
Since I couldn't resist including that song at the end, I'm not making any money from this upload... so uhhh sign up for Nebula! 40% off with my link! go.nebula.tv/lilyalexandre
Wait: you *actually expected* that floating ideas out in media would change anything? Everyone Here has watched multiple movies & TV shows showing that those who call out the people in charge get taken away & that those who passively allow it to happen are cowards.
& here we all are shouting away & expecting that to work while we passively allow doctors who speak out against medical malpractice by government policy & Julian Assange to be taken away by those we can legally charge, prosecute & arrest for doing so.
So if ideas presented in media *actually affected things,* we'd all have acted to stop this decades ago, the way media *_SHOWS_** us* we should have.
What a Truly Flawed premise. It's almost as if someone invented *_to_** excuse* why everyone _is_ doing nothing to stop anything...
Hello Lily. Enjoyed this video greatly.
However a question. No disrespect, but,...
I can't stand the advertising anywhere, for all the reasons and more covered in this vid. So, the question is why? Why the disgusting capitalist advertising here.
Ex. Nordstrom Rack. 🤢
✌💞💪🍉🌈🎵🎤🎶💃🎵
Fellow earthlings.. Lots of 💞✌💪
@@publicutility nebula has less capitalist incentives than a usual company, since its equitably owned by the artists.
@@publicutility”why the disgusting capitalist advertising here “ it’s almost like she lives in a capitalist country and needs to make a living … the same reason other anti capitalists work jobs … we need to survive ?!
@@publicutilitythis is her job like 😅she has a reason for advertising . I get it Can be annoying tho. As the other commenter pointed out too Nebula has less capitalist incentive than other streaming companies ie. Netflix, Disney +, etc.
Not to say there’s any ethical consumption under capitalism (there isn’t) but it’s one of the MORE ethical options in comparison to other streaming alternatives
In order for me to write poetry that isn't political,
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent
-Marwan Makhoul
What war have you been in?
@@Amy-gf7je the quote is from marwan makhoul
@@Amy-gf7je warplanes can also be symbolic for any tragedy/pressing issue
Soyest quote of all time
@@klibe yea no shit I’m saying why quote something on a subject you have no knowledge on
"A punk rock song might never change the world, but I can tell you about a couple that changed me." - Pat the Bunny
You're a real one for leaving this here
So tonight we're gonna fuck shit up so sing with me
@@leifolsen7320 wananana wananana wnananananana
Seeing Pat The Bunny quoted under a video is like seeing a supposedly extinct species in the wild. Like, culture is healing :_)
"Since we'll all return to dirt, let's bring some stories for the worms"
-also Pat the Bunny
"We live in an economy" is such a brutal line and you delivered it so nonchalantly
100% agree, I'm gonna start using that IRL because it's more specific than "a society" ya know?
Born into. Ugh!
you're actually suggesting that living in an economy is a bad thing right?
@@alexmendenhall5416 it's a painful thing. Like that quote about democracy, it's the best of the options we as a species have attempted so far. Still sucks tho - having every piece of our souls repurposed to make money. None of us who gave this comment a thumbs up would probably LIKE being sent back to the stone age and we WOULD want to go home. But it'd be nice to have some space to Just Exist, ya know?
@@86fifty well yeah leisure time is good, but the economy (specifically free market economies) does not diminish the amount of leisure time you have, in fact, leisure time has only ever increased as a result of liberal economies. And also the quality of leisurely activities has also increased. Yeah you still have to work under liberal economies, but this isn’t the fault of the economy, this is just a fact of reality. You have to work to survive, no economic system solves this “work to survive” problem.
I was emotionally abused by my mother as a child, and she used to take away everything me and my siblings enjoyed because she considered it "escapism", and said that we should live in "harsh reality". Your point about escapism being freedom from the things that hide truth from us was really powerful and I almost teared up ngl
My mother hated me because my life's passion reminded her of her ex-husband's alcoholism. The truth was, he was an alcoholic because of people like her.
Aesthetics aren't a carnal vice. Aesthetics involve innovation, engineering, and studying because you'd run out of enjoyable stuff if you don't experiment and make your own.
Saying comfort isn't good enough on its own is wrong. In a hopeless situation, comfort is the only thing that can truly help. Giving up is spoken of in hushed tones as if it's universally shameful, as if flailing in the dark is always the right thing to do. I survived years of torture because I could make and view art to distract myself. Art is an unpopular painkiller. "Real" medicinal painkillers aren't infinite. We're just lucky the resource is abundant. Under the right circumstances, music would be the only way we could improve a person's life.
@@iseetheendisnear2416 : All great things start with a dream. It wasn't long ago that flying was considered just a flight of fancy (I wonder if that's where the saying comes from), thought by most an impossibility.
But it wasn't really you she hated, or your father. Like all of us, she inherited and was exposed to those things that made her turn out that way. A healthy society breeds healthy individuals.❤🌍🌎🌏🌐
Me TOO I saw bansky and went to art school with my fellow neglected brothers
I thing everyone has there own toxic trauma from life. The armor that's built by the experience can both help and hurt. Learn from bad and good and choose to be the best you. Remember your not alone and life is precious, short, risky and pure luck. Live love laugh every moment and practice mind body exercise
✌💞💪🎵🎤🎶💃🎵😍
The only way to check for real truth is to simulate a reality with and a reality without that truth, and see which one actually works and which one only works if you X. (And often, the X is something evil)
I made my art so I wouldn't commit suicide because my art is the only way I can be heard. I share it because when I've shared it in closed groups I've gotten reactions I never expected. I do things for the sake of doing them. I live in spite of others who would kill me including myself. Art is an outlet and what you let out is important, if not to the world, then yourself. Art won't save the world, but it can save people, and people will save the world.
very well said
@@lily_lxndr : The ripples we create through the examples we set spread out from us. Depending on the examples themselves, and too often imo just how they're framed, it can spread across the world, becoming impetus for great change if it catches on. We need to not let desire to be "the" cause for change as an individual get in our way, but accept being part of that change, supporting a diversity of tactics for a common goal.❤🌍🌎🌏🌐
_"it can save people, and people will save the world."_ Yea!
Cooperation > competition.
I believe great change starts within each of us becoming an anti-bigot on our own. ❤🌍🌎🌏🌐
Not saying introspection is easy,🤣 but not much else is so personally rewarding. 🙂
art can't change the world, but it can change peoples mind, who may end up changing the world.
"I live in spite of others who would kill me INCLUDING MYSELF" that is such a metal line, gawdddamn.
This is a quote from someone I've found in the past year and been very attracted to the ideas of: "the role of the artist is to load the gun." Which I believe is another way of saying what Toni Cade Bambara said, "As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible."
I want to agree but can’t see reality aligning.
The firing of said gun hasn’t worked since before the Vietnam protests… they didn’t achieve a withdrawal, protests against SA didn’t end apartheid, Seattle, Occupy, BDS, BLM and the current Gaza protests.
It may be loaded or close to loading but it’s never been closer to being fired as there’s not enough people to start the marathon towards socialism yet.
Interesting way of wording it though.
Nice! Who's that?
Diversity of tactics is what works. Art is one of those tactics.
We have to accept that we alone are not the cure.
I beg every person who sees this to _not wake up and open Twitter._ It's like starting your day by sticking your face in a toilet.
LMAO, I never thought about it that way 😂 I wanna start using that for other unhealthy habits
Instead I wake up and immediately watch shit on youtube.
I’d argue a blender
@@ogpandamoniumthat would technically be better as long as it’s not “shorts.” Because you aren’t exposed to a litany of useless, disparate shit like on Twitter. At least on TH-cam you usually watch longer videos by a smaller number of voices
Ive spent the last 4 years shaping my twitter algo to be nothing but fanart and cosplays.
Last week, i engaged with more political / videogame discussion posts over an afternoon, my feed is nothing but racism, sexism and engagement farms now... Twitter is dead to me.
in topic of stuff mentioned here, there was a fanartist for the popular series jujutsu kaisen named noury, a palestinian woman who was experiencing the siege and documenting her thoughts on twitter. the most heartbreaking thing i've ever seen was seeing the news from her close friends that she had lost her eye to an israeli tank shell in the middle of class, and while i was already an advocate for palestinan freedom prior to this, the moment this was brought out, my opinion solidified drasticially, especially as an artist myself. she had evacuated from gaza, but the scars still remain.
i think the idea that people just simply live their lives, do stuff, talk about their feelings, is what pretty much made me feel strongly about the subject - whether they're laughing at a funny meme, sad because of what happened during that infamous chapter, angry because of other people dying to an oppressive establishment, horny cause idfk, they are all still human beings, and its the mere fact that they're human that makes revolution irresistable, as bambara had stated.
a friend of mine currently lives in lebanon, and every day my feed is filled with him talking about honkai and other manga and anime he enjoys. the utter shock and worry i was filled with when he said he saw an idf missile from the bus was undescribable.
With respect, that Kurt Vonnegut quote is cherry-picked, ignores the context of what he was saying during the interview, and also ignores that the article stated that he laughed after making the comment. This is what he said directly before the quote:
"History is happening to us now. George Bush has hydrogen bombs if he needs them. It really matters who's around and who's holding attention. I don't think television will let anybody else hold attention.
NUVO: Why is that?"
Regardless, his point was not only about Vietnam lasting 2 decades despite artists in America united against it, but about America going to war in the Middle East and George Bush. The interview was in 2003, and his point was that the war machine has waged on for decades despite the best intentions of artists and others. He was saying similar things to what Hunter S. Thompson was after 9-11. "Here we go again, this is never going to stop." And it hasn't. So, to say within the context of that interview he was wrong is completely inaccurate because his entire point was art hasn't collectively ended the war machine. If his point was wrong, your video essay wouldn't need to exist.
It wasn't art has no influence. It was art isn't solely enough in the face of the war machine, and it was coming from someone with decades of experience.
You're talking about a man in his 80's who fought in World War 2 and continuously wrote fiction and non-fiction about his anti-war stance while America waged in war after war until the day he died. Heck, he wrote A Man Without A Country in response to 9-11, well after that interview.
Your comment about war journalists is also disingenuous at best, as while photography and writing are art, they weren't going over there to create art, but to document what was going on. I know you don't mean it that way, but it's relatively insulting to look at photos of people suffering in war and even imply "oh, that artist had a good eye for composition while taking that shot". Many journalists didn't learn composition and framing for the art of their photos or their writing, but to document the truth. There's a reason journalism isn't solely considered art, and when it turns out that journalists have faked their writing or photography to instead create the "best" art they're normally widely denounced for destroying what it means to be a journalist. Or at least they were before the world went crazy.
But even if it were a 100 percent fair argument, it still ignores what Vonnegut was actually saying, which is that despite the best intentions of artists, journalists, photographers, and protestors, the overall war machine across the world continues to wage on.
This quote is from the same interview:
"I don't want to belong to a country that attacks little countries. I don't want to belong to that kind of a country. I wrote a piece for 7 Stories Press here in New York. They're about to publish a book of anti-war posters by a guy nobody's heard of before - he's a pretty good artist and so I was asked to write a piece for it. Would you like me to read it?"
Pretty obvious he still believed art had meaning and power.
I do genuinely mean with all respect, because everything else you said was solid.
I find Vonnegut is often taken out of context or simply misunderstood in his meaning. At least the next generation is finally catching on to our Father who art in Tralfamador.
Boosting. _"Challenge the argument, not the person"._
Yours is exactly the type of comment she has in mind, I hope she replies.
Hear. Thanks for making that comment.
If he still believed art mattered after leading a pointless life of failure, don't you think he was just a bit dumb?
@@PutkisenSetä don't you think that statement is a bit cynical? I think that it's cool to believe in something, especially the power of art. What's that thingy about the pen and like, the sword or whatever?
PBS Philosophy Channel was my gateway, talk about packaging genius. Talking about something random in pop-culture and then going deep from there. I'll never forget you Mike.
Mike has a new podcast and it's excellent!! It's called Never Post :)
As a black kid who listens to Kendrick Lamar, a lot of people dismissed his feud with Drake as nothing but meaningless drama but what a lot of people undermine is why it was so important. Kendrick isn't just calling out another rapper for being a bad person, from what I and a lot of other black people saw was Kendrick calling out another black artist for benefiting from black culture while doing nothing for the people who made it. Sure, Kendrick isn't ending racism for making the world a better place from making an album like To Pimp A Butterfly but he is uniting black people through art and making them feel safer to be themselves.
kenny is a faux-revolutionary
a larper
@@drachenfeIs Dude the random concert he held a few days ago had crips and bloods holding hands and dancing together. That’s fucking huge.
@@drachenfeIseven if that were true, compare that to Drake who is nothing but a menace to society and good music.
Mr. Morale did more for the black community than anything Drake conjured up in his whole career. Listening to that album was like a much-needed therapy session
Thank you for putting this out there. People get so caught up in drama and the entertainment of it that they miss the message.
I think more videos should have footage of art creation alongside. It's the classier alternative to using Subway Surfers gameplay
So true
a lot of art commentary channels put speedpaints over their commentary
I literally just started the video, so this is my related shower thought: when we romanticize the past, we’re almost never romanticizing the *reality* of the past, but the idea of it that was captured by its artists. When Millennials do “mid-century modern design,” it’s taking cues from art and architecture that was remarkable enough to make it into magazines, not my grandma’s burnt orange recliners and Sears flower couch.
Burnt orange recliner and floral couch is firmly AFTER mid-century modern. 😂
The past is not interchangeable either, just as the romanticized version isn’t.
@@namedrop721 They got those recliners in 1974, and the 70s seem to have a lot of influence in what we call MCM, even if mid-century is more properly the post-WWII era.
Gurl, you deserve mega-kudos for the sheer athletic FEAT of being able to TALK and even DELIVER SCRIPTED LINES, WHILE getting a tattoo!!! (I mean, I choose to believe it was in-situ. Perhaps he didn't actually have the machine ON, but he did a great job acting if that was the case!)
PS - You got me to laugh with the "and even the choices of where to cut.....(turns to cough)" and the COUGH being cut-off too!
"If I can be a voice in someone's ear.... as they do the dishes or whatever"
Laundry actually, dishes is for the new Geller video
Paulo Freire mentioned!
As a Brazilian, it's extremely cool to see our philosophers being appreciated by people outside the motherland.
Thank you Lily.
I really enjoyed the book! Have to shoutout Eliot Sang who’s a huge fan and convinced me to read it
@@lily_lxndr I will check their channel!
Freire's work has significant influence on the way educators are currently being trained, at least in the US. His critique of the "banking model" caused a dramatic shift in the way education views the relationship between educator and student.
@@jackm3143 nice to know.
Brazil mentioned 🥳🎉
When I was getting my degree on game design, in são paulo, we used the Freire concept of ensino-aprendizagem, and while it was before Bolsonaro, some people turned their faces, then he brought some Gringo's studies using the concept, to prove how important Freire is to brazil (and vídeo jogos)
I'm from Ukraine. Every day my life could end because of a stray Russian missile and there's nothing I can do about it but apply to military (which I won't do) and donate to the army (which I already do).
Art can't change my situation. That one documentary about Mariupol which won an Oscar this year won't repay anything to the victims of Russian war crimes. No amount of soulful ballads will revive my cousin from the dead and bring him back to his widow and three-year old son. No amount of political discourse can meaningfully improve our lives at the moment.
However, I don't think art is meaningless. Because when I hear missiles falling in my city, reading fanfic about "Owl House" characters helps me keep my composure. Because listening to all the good music that came out recently makes me proud of my people's resilience and lets me get through another day. That matters.
💙💛
Perhaps you should have stayed neutral and doesn't brake the minsk treaty?
And not followed this NATO muppet?
It would have spared you the missiles.
Greetings from a land which is safe thanks to the oh so obsolete neutrality as your muppet claimed that he is the evidence for that neutrality is obsolete.
Owl House fanfictions are crucial for moralle.
I hope you and the people you care about make it through this.
@@hatientacetlen4246 Thanks!
✌💞💪 fellow earthling ✌✌✌✌💞💞💞💞💞💪💪💪💪💪
Your 'slush' being genuine art was an inspired artistic choice in itself, and I loved how it complimented your point about art being a part of life, not something separate to 'escape' from life. Beautiful video, beautiful guests, beautiful art, beautiful creators and creations, all of you!
I don't want to spoil Part 3 of this video but I have to say, it's one of the gutsiest things I've ever seen on this platform, or in video essays generally. Bravo my friend ❤
I know of a Jacob Geller essay section on a certain boldly titled book that, while being an analysis of the themes of a book, when taken at face value could seem real fighting words.
Pls enlighten the audience (including me) :0
@@zUJ7EjVD why not both? Lily and Jacob are both wonderful individuals who've gone great lengths for their work! I'd never disparage one to praise the other.
The bike lanes example you give is depressing... yes, we can get bike lanes, but they'll be implemented in such a fragmented and broken way that it somehow leaves the roads worse for everyone rather than better for anyone. It's like some kind of perverse punishment for gathering political momentum.
Just gotta keep the momentum going on a community level
Whyyyy does every video you make happen to be INCREDIBLY topical to where my mental and emotional journey is at the moment, I’m not even on any non-TH-cam social media to be tracking the same conversations. Like, I love it, but it’s also a little bizarre 😅
Another absolute BANGER of a video. Thank you for making this!
Thank you!! :)
@@lily_lxndr Same here lol
I was having mixed feelings about my place in the world, my art and how I can help in the landscape we have today
As someone coming from the rural side of a country from Latam is hard to have a voice nowadays
But your video inspired me to find my voice and ways to help and be conscious about it
So thanks!
I think my fav art piece(I can't remember the name or artist) buy she mopped the floor of an empty corridor with diluted blood of teens killed in gang violence in Mexico. Your shoes would stick to the ground, every step you feel the impact of the war on drugs and the environment this kids where forced to grow up in. I love how visceral it was, idk what impact it had, tbh I never thought about it lol.. I'm bad at modern art, I'll have to look it up, and find the name of the artist....
The artist I believe you’re talking about is Teresa Margolles! It’s a very power contemporary piece. As someone who’s studying art, people commonly mix up modern and contemporary art. Contemporary is generally anything made from around the 1980s until present day just so you know. Art Lust is a great channel to check out to learn more about art and analyzing it
a thing that i've realized through reading a bunch of theory is that marx and lenin, beyond just having useful ideas, are good writers!! they're artful writers, and it's specifically their ability to explain things in an artful way that motivates me so much to learn and do more. great video as always, i genuinely think these videos are the best on youtube. concise and impeccably written, and i'm always left with a lot to think about!
Hell yeah!! Purely in terms of prose, my favourite theory writers I've come across are Mao and Angela Davis. Both impossibly gifted at the craft.
@@lily_lxndr I would put Frantz Fanon at the same level of those two. His writing style is simply beautiful
Art is pog and an inherently human thing.
I can’t do this anymore mozzarellapumpkin
This is exactly the glorification of art that needs to be avoided. The nature of something is of course always changing, and today the nature of art has become alienation, commodity. *This is not to say this essence is absolute, but that this essence is the general reality
@@beangobernadorart is a cool thing people do even when its been commodified :)
@@beangobernador
It boggles my mind that anyone could have such a flat, colorless worldview as you.
growing up i thought that everything was solve through strict math and science. this was what i was good at and like another plato or an average teenager i thought that only someone like me has the answers to the worlds problems.
art let me express and understand and most importantly accept all those feelings i had and i couldn't process.
for anything more than that i guess i will watch the video :p
the people making art throughout the video were so unique that I will never forget what you SAID in this video.
"make it make sense" is a phrase that unironically fills me with determination
Art has saved me a few times, so maybe that's something :)
People justify beauty as a way to market positive change because they don't respect it. It has a reputation of escapism. But that's blaming the victim. Saying comfort in a hopeless situation isn't good enough is wrong. Giving up is spoken of in hushed tones as if it's universally shameful, as if flailing in the dark is ALWAYS the right thing to do. But I survived years of torture because I could make and view others's art to distract myself, and I don't regret it.
Art is just an unpopular painkiller. "Real" medicinal painkillers aren't infinite. We're merely lucky the resource is abundant. Aesthetics involve innovation, engineering, and studying because you'd run out of enjoyable stuff if you don't experiment and make your own. Under the right circumstances, aesthetics would be the only way we could improve a person's life.
Using painkillers is the giving up. Your using it to push through something.
@@loadishstoneI wouldn't say 'giving up' it more seems like painkillers are a method of someone trying to heal their pain. Just like someone using art to distract themselves. Some people genuinely need painkillers to get by just like someone needing art
@@loadishstone
You can’t be serious.
I love you trans people. You’re the craziest family I could have ever fallen in with but I’m deeply connected to you all.
I am patiently waiting for the tattoo reveal
I love this video. Lots of reasons why, but I'll just say I loved the immersive experience of watching the mural be painted, hearing the sounds of the pottery wheel and the tattoo gun. I loved what you said about the playful bait and switch that video essayists so often pull. I loved everything else. This is one that I'll probably revisit multiple times.
love the jacob geller voiceover !!! you guys have very similar video styles and this makes me happy
This was so beautiful and profound! This profoundly shifted my perspective and inspired me to think about art differently. I just know I'm going to come back this video again and again to get more out of it.
I do regularly listen to your videos while cooking or washing dishes! Honestly I probably should think more about your ideas but sometimes it's just nice to have a pleasant voice in my ear.
alexander avila mentioned yuppp
That one Kurt Vonnegut quote about how "respectable" artists made no impact at ending the war in Vietnam always seemed weird and anachronistic to me.
It's easy to look at a history book and confirm that the war did indeed end, first of all (with a North Vietnamese win no less). But also - all that pressure which was aimed towards the establishment both ended the draft AND gave voting rights to the 18-20s. It was significant! Yeah maybe it didn't singlehandedly end American imperialism but it was more than that of a custard pie dropped off a ladder.
What was he even getting at?
18-20 y/os didn't have voting rights before the Vietnam War? I'm going to look into this after posting this comment but I just want to emphasize my surprise here. It sounds absolutely horrid getting drafted into a war that you had no voting power in. Thank you for writing your comment!
@@Dudex11a Yeah! There was a big hit song back in '65 called "Eve of Destruction" which mentions this very point.
"You're old enough to kill but not for votin'
You don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin'?'"
In fact I am doing the dishes, how did you guess?
We still have the draft.
@mikeymullins5305 No we don't, the military has been entirely voluntary since 1973.
oooo excited for new video!!!
Only watched 15 minutes, but I need to go to bed and I wanted to comment on this before I forgot:
The argument that art didn't help end any wars is moot, not because art' is not at "fault" because there are so many other variables at play, but because we don't know what would have happened had art _not_ focused like a laser on it. For all we know, if art turned a blind eye, we'd still be embroiled in the Vietnam War.
Pleaasseee can it?? 🥺 I realllyyt want it toooooo.. ☹️
Of course art can't save the world. Only Captain Planet can do that. Art is pretty cool, though.
Regarding calling countries “poor”, I’ll always remember Michael Parenti’s phrase “these countries are not underdeveloped, they are over exploited”
While we're not poor in natural resources, we have a LOT of poor people. I don't think it's necessarily wrong to use the word "poor". I prefer the imperial core/periphery terminology, though.
Surprise Jacob Gellar cameo made my day... which was already peaking because, you know, new Lily Alexandre video on art.
i love how art is happening in every chapter its so hypnotizing your creativity is insane and so so comforting. thank you for existing and spreading your feelings
This is seriously one of the best examples of video essays out there ❤
This is one of the huge catalogue of videos I’ve watched while working on my first fursuit head! It made me aware of the art I was creating while listening to art while art was ongoing in the shoot. It made me think of the personal aspect of my art, this large amount of physical labor I’ve been doing for weeks to have a head I can wear that looks cool to me and my friends. It made me think about the political aspect of my art, the main inspiration of this head being a deeply queer and trans band that helped me come into my identity, and the fact that wearing this head in public will immediately mark me as some slew of identities that still face discrimination and ridicule- the potential risk I could be placed in but also the potential furthering of my connections and the sheer joy of inspiring my friends to create as well. Most of all, this video made me think of around this time three or four years ago, me as a highschooler spending my time doomscrolling and putting off art, my passion, to focus entirely on being aware of everything happening that could kill me and the people I love.
Thank you for your art, it helps me make mine, and I’ve seen that mine helps others make theirs. We are all connected in a web of politics and love and community and humanity im so glad to have finally delved into!
I didn’t like the path of conversation this video took. I think that it came from a very Western perspective and misunderstood, focused too much on more modern forms of art that are less accessible to people around the world (social media, online content), and the overall purpose of art in activism. I believe that art should be less about changing minds or raising awareness but rather about self-definition. I have been to Guatemala, where there are murals in public places depicting the massacres and genocides on the Guatemalan people by their own government, only 40 years ago. I saw this people collection of more than 50 murals that showed the history of the town, from the mayas, the Spanish conquest, the civil war, and hopes for the future. The murals showed environmental damage and poverty, death and destruction. But they depicted hopes to overcome that. One mural said that they are “weaving their own future” with weaving being an extremely important and expressive form of art in Guatemala. For example, in the city of Nebaj, many women wear bright red traditional clothing called huipiles in remembrance of all the innocent blood spilt in the 30 year civil war. This is the kind of art that truly struggles against oppression. Even if it doesn’t create immediate change, this is what art can do. Guatemalan death squads would specifically target and kill artists, musicians, and poets because they knew the power that they held.
Art does not, and never has, "changed the world". What it can ( sometimes ) do is change PEOPLE. People change the world.
The thing with art is that it's entertainment. A lot of people see that pejoratively, but 1- entertainment is never apolitical and 2- entertainment is a vital part of the human experience. Art is older than agriculture. We can live without access to a steady supply of food, but we can't live without creating art or consuming the art of those who do. That doesn't mean it can or should fix everything that is wrong with the world, but we need it regardless.
The "art" that is older than agriculture wasn't meant as entertainment (it is debated within academic circles whether art is an appropriate term). Art is not entertainment: art is communication. It is often also entertainment, which is, as you say, very important, but it is, at its core, communication.
I don't think art is vital to survival, and I say this as an artist: it's super important, and can keep you going through awful things, but it cannot be compared to basic needs like food, drink, and shelter. I would say companionship ranks above it, too, but it's almost inevitable for art (like songs, for example) to arise when people interact.
@@kwarra-an Even if it had religious or ritual significance, that doesn't stop it from being art. So did (some of the) art in the Renaissance or in Greek and Roman sculptures. But I think calling it communication is fine - there's a lot of overlap. (Although not all art is communication, since a lot of it isn't meant to be shared or seen. But that's a whole other rabbit role that's probably not relevant right now.)
But if, like you say, art inevitably arises when people interact - how is that not a vital part of the human experience? You can lock a human alone in a box with a straw for water, another for food and a hole in the floor for excrements, and they'll survive, but is that living? Is that how a human is meant to live, or how they would live if given the choice?
Unless you physically stop them from doing so, people will seek out some form of art, much like a beaver will seek out a body of water. A beaver can survive on land alone, but that's not how they're meant to live.
I'm not saying art is literally keeping people alive, or that it isn't. But it's an innate part of us, and without it, we're not us.
@@ellie.irineu hello 🌹🌹
glad to see a every frame a painting reference, that guy changed youtube and i feel he's often overlooked
May I just say, good f**kin' job getting tattooed and also delivering your lines in that chapter of the video. The couple of times I've gotten tattooed were super difficult for me, and it took a lot for me to NOT just focus on the pain I was in. You're pain tolerance is commendable.
would it be sound to say: make art because you need to express something, not because you need to change something? like if you saw something was wrong and you needed it fixed would it be apt to say making art about it is successful if it conveys the notion you had to others even if it doesn't effectuate the fix you needed?
I'm in a little art discussion and coffee group that meets on Friday mornings at a community art center. I'm typically the youngest one there by about 30 years, so I'm not sure if any of them watch video essays, but I'll be recommending this to them tomorrow. Last week a gal brought up this topic exactly. She was only a little nihilistic about it but my counter to that was the bio-acoustician Roger Payne who recorded Songs of the Humpback Whale. Before that, few people gave a shit about whales. The album became a huge success (100k copies) and proceeds benefitted the Wildlife Conservation Society. Then the 'Save the Whales' campaign started, and he testified in front of Congress to end commercial whaling. This is really just to echo the video and comments - nobody single-handedly saves the world, but one person can get stuff started. And we can never predict the impact our work. It benefits both ourselves and society at large to never stop creating ❤️
You caught me at 35:08 doing the dishes while listening and passivly watching this video. What I find interesting about this is how has made me more consciously identify with being a person being invested in the struggle. Before, while if asked, I would say that I'm invested in the struggle. The point I want to make here is that the comment has brought this aspect of myself into active thought where I wouldn't have been put into this position before and I think that's neat
Now I need to get back to dishes, lol
this video might be your magnum opus. from the topic to the way it’s presented, everything is perfect. easily one of my favorite videos on the site.
Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable! Amazing points and great video :D
Happy pride ❤🧡💛💚💙💜🏳️🌈
Ily gays, thems and bi yourselves😅🎉❤
It's not surprising that the causes championed by artists tend not to do too well, at least in the short run. It's not because art is useless, much less counterproductive; it's because it's the causes where the struggle is still very much uphill, and where victory seems unlikely at best and illusory at worst, that inspire artists to get involved in the first place.
I opened this video in a new tab yesterday to remind myself to watch it later n I sorta forgot about it. I was clicking through my tabs today to clean up stuff I'd already watched/read and clicking on this tab I was flash-banged by how pretty you were, since I forgot it was your video I'd opened up.
Hope the complement reaches you well n isn't weird c:
I wish I could apply these thoughts to my art practice in a productive and consise way. I wish I had your mind. I am sad that my time here feels wasted, but thank you, Lily, for giving things to chew on
The creative processes going on in parallel is keeping my attention similar to subway surfers tiktok😭😭💜💪
I'm a visual artist and a writer and i feel like art is intertwined in most aspects of life, more than many might realize i imagine, and is intrinsically linked to being human, seeming to be basically a human universal - this basic desire to create things and decorate even some of the most mundane and utilitarian objects through much of human history. I also think much of modern western society , at least, has an unhealthy and probably unconscious obsession with things being primarily practical, pragmatic or productive, esp in the realm of capitalism, which is likely where that comes from - and for sure there are legitimate things outside the driving whips of industry that also need done - issues of justice and equity and revolution - and it is good to be driven and focused on getting them done - but art is for me the smoking gun proving that humans simply need to have some things that are just decoration, just expression, just aesthetic, just to be creative, just for looking at touching smelling or listening to. Just because we like it. But art also has some very powerful tools in its arsenal that can serve practical functions that shouldn't be overlooked - a direct line to emotions and expression, as well as the powers of imagination and creativity which are the most equipped to deal with novel problems, imo. Much of which is similar to what you said in the video at certain points. And that's why i would similarly argue that though art cannot save the world by itself it is a necessary and powerful companion to any actions that have a better chance of it
I watched "I Saw The Tv Glow" alone in a small theater at an art museum and it took me days to fully process it, and even then I still couldn't put what I had realized after watching the movie into words. When you say "Do I want permission to live, or do I just want to live?" that's exactly what I had realized when I was walking laps around the museum, still digesting the movie.
I've struggled so hard socially, mentally, and physically to be accepted by others, to live my life the correct way. But that's not living. Watching the last scene of ISTTG (which I will not spoil everyone PLEASE go see it I beg) left me with this pit in my stomach because I was watching myself on that screen. Art has never really affected me much because I've never known myself enough to recognize myself in media. And yet, a piece of art breached that wall of ignorance and grabbed me and said "Look. Look at your life. Look at what is and will happen." ISTTG quite literally drop kicked me into an existential fit that I am still recovering from but that I desperately needed. Thanks to the internet, the commercialized art has become far more widespread and unavoidable, but the internet has also given every person a platform, for better or for worse. There's so much art out there that can impact anyone and I think it's incredible
(I originally had a point with this but I forgot and started rambling forgive me)
Unrelated but your look in this is so good.
watched this on nebula, great job as always 💛
No one seeing the Bojack Horseman reference in the start of that cold open, I saw it though, I love JD and his pen, bravo🤣🤣
Omg did you really open this video with a quote from JD Salinger in BoJack Horseman?
35:10 I was actually doing the dishes, and you did a great job keeping me invested in the struggle lmao
Love your work, Lily!
I am an artist. I try to post on ig but it's so hard, most artist now look like brands. I know this idea grew because nobody wants to be a "starving artist" but I really don't want to look like a brand, I just want to do art.
In the words of Ernst Fischer: In a decaying society art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it
Art may embody the spirit of action, but it must push our muscles and fingers to enact it.
18:38 hellooo, the contrapoints video was by far THE best video i've ever seen on twilight!!!
Got here through Jacob Geller, really happy to stumble upon you. Amazing essay here, great points and lovely style. Subscribed and looking forward to more!
Thank you for bringing a bit of hope to my life. Truth and beauty.
Jacob Geller jumpscare?! A surprise for sure, but a welcome one
Was not expecting to hear Jacob Geller very pleasantly surprised
Liking and commenting because i watched it a while back and more people need to see it! Go team excellent production great script very thoughtful ❤
I love watching ppl make art. This video has me hypnotized more than usual lol
Speaking online is like voting in a “democratic system”, it’s only goal is to satiate you in feeling like you’re doing something, while also making you feel helpless in the face of so much larger than yourself.
I’ve only watched the first minute and a half, but I want to say that I’m so glad you made this video because I’ve been thinking about this topic for the past year
Awesome video, so many good points and it's written so well, bringing so many topics together
So wild... I'm doing my dishes and you definitely inspired me to start making art again
Hopefully, I will now shift from receiving encouragement to do work to actually doing work. Thanks for the timeout.
This reminds me of my religious upbringing/past, when I felt like the religious art that was hellbent on converting people or teaching something specific was very bad at being art. "Secular" art always felt so much more spiritually nourishing.
Lily Alexander is so cool, I wish Canada was a real place😢
Is mayonnaise art?
"To focus too much on the structure of oppression would be to neglect the very humanity that renders that structure unjust."
I had to stop working on my art and pause the video just so I could listen to that quote again. It's constructed so well. Every day I listen to videos like yours while working for hours on my 5+ year old webcomic/book series, wondering... what's the point of it all? It seems so frivolous sometimes compared to all the awful stuff going on in the world.
As an autistic person, I feel often that I'd be more useful being an activist on the front lines, but I also acknowledge that my autism makes me struggle to put myself on the front lines of activism. Meanwhile, this webcomic I've been working on... as well as being self-therapy for myself, in helping me to process the unique struggles and oppression I face as someone who's neurodivergent, I also have a readerbase of other autistic people who often say they feel "seen" by my work. My neurodivergent characters struggle, especially with those societal expectations, but they also find friendship and community in their own unique way. And it's made me feel often that even though my webcomic isn't overtly political, it definitely sends messages, gives a visibility to other marginalized folk, and makes life feel more bearable for both me and my readers in our current economical and political climate.
This was probably one of my favorite videos of yours, because it helped recenter me again after having a pretty bad brain week. Capitalism ties so much of art's intrinsic value to its monetary value, and it makes it feel like the art we spend so much time making is inherently less valuable because it would generally be perceived as such. But it continues to bring solace to people struggling in these times, both in the past and present. And it probably will in the future too. I'm putting my voice and my experiences out there, and even after I die, it will remain - hopefully to continue to provide comfort for others like me.
I also have to say that the buzzer or whatever tool the tattoo artist was using... legit added some relaxing ASMR ambience to the vid. I love that you kept that in there.
The way every shot has some people or other person performing art and just being solely focused on that really does something to my body. Especially the one where the other person did pottery, it just hits me. I'm personally not a big fan of the super long essays (1hr+), I thoroughly enjoyed this, thank you for showing us your inner world.
I'm sorry but I do have to ask if the moment around 22:26, about discussions around Palestine always have necessary context provided (in large, online conversations) or how there's rarely a shot in the dark, is genuine. I'm a pro-Palestinian Jewish American and to be honest, I am *constantly* frustrated by the floods of misinformation by well-meaning people who are, quite frankly, clueless. I'm used to a dearth of historical awareness from the pro-Israel people in my life, but conversations about Palestine online often devolve into outright antisemitism because of people who haven't bothered to do two seconds of research on the history of the situation. People are still not grasping the basics of BDS or targeted boycotts/action, and some are still vocally choosing targets rejected by the BDS movement and lessening the credibility and effectiveness of the movement overall. It might just be that we see different things on our feeds, but the lack of basic research on both the past and on present action is just.... mind-boggling.
This isn't unique to the Palestinian movement, obviously. This is the universal experience of online "activism" (as your video points to - posting isn't activism, but people feel like it is, so they throw all their energy into it). I'm just surprised that we have had such drastically different experiences. Keeping up with the news from posts means being subjected to the half-baked opinions of USAmerican teenagers being treated like credible reporters; no one even bothers to check who *posted* what they're sharing, let alone whether it's accurate or not.
Like you said, this online interconnectedness cuts both ways - a pipeline to solidarity, and to conspiracy. Hearing people I know talk in deeply othering ways about Jewish people (not about Israel or its government, but about Jews generally) has been soul-crushing. The lack of a pause to evaluate makes this moment ripe for opportunists to jump in and get people onto the antisemitic bandwagon, similar to the phenomenon you described in a previous video of feminists being roped into TERF-dom by opportunistic conservatives.
There's another side to this, art doesn't just change the world for the better it can absolutely change it for the worse. For an easy example 'The Birth of a Nation' directly lead to the resurgence of the KKK. And I don't say this to be a downer but to add to the conversation about education.
I didn't properly understand what could've let the holocaust happen until looking at german anti-semitic propaganda from the time. I'm not saying that was the direct cause of the holocaust, but just being told in school that Germany was left strapped after WW1 and decided to use Jewish people as a scapegoat for the Nation's problems, didn't make emotional sense to me. I don't think it made sense to a lot a people because these days Nazi's are mythologized as "pure evil" even as the same anti-semitic attitudes that begat them persist in our modern culture today.
It's doing a disservice to history to not show the emotional and artistic influences that start movement's, both good and bad. We can know our history, but if we don't understand it we're doomed to repeat it.
despite all my rage
i'm still just a rat in a cage
Was that a shot at Steven Universe? I'd actually appreciate an analysis of SU's real flaws from a trans person named Lily who actually knows what she's doing, i.e. you.
it wasn't!
@@lily_lxndr Danger And Eggs? High Guardian Spice? Maybe I'm looking into this too much. I'd love to see Lily Simpson's take on SU as well, but she swore it off because it gets too much hate. That was shortly before everyone collectively realized that most of SU's major critics were either actual Nazis or so far left that they were accusing a leftist Jewish woman of being a Nazi for the crime of advocating pacifism and forgiving your mentally ill asshole relatives.
This video is art, vastly more so than other video essays.
I could say a gazillion things about this video--it's great btw--but instead of crapping up your comments with every thought in my head... I'm beyond delighted to see you mention Tim's Boku No Natsuyasumi video, probably my favorite piece of media on this website.
i love neolithic cave paintings so much and i think about them a lot for things like this. it just takes all of this importance out of proving why our time is justified making art and whether or not it "raises awareness" or invokes change ... it just kind of is. it matters to us because it does. we do it because we want to. it just matters and we do it and always have. i feel like we've tricked ourselves into arguing the line of people who are dismissive of art... like trying to argue why art matters because of the utilitarian value it has to create political change. but you can see it the other way, artists who made art about the vietnam war were against the vietnam war and so the art they made expressed that. the connect with their community about it. they did it because that was something they cared about. they did it because they wanted to and needed to, as humans tend to do. whether or not there are tangible changes you can see from political art movements, using this as a metre for the value of art i think is used to disenfranchise artists. but actually political art can do a lot to help people find like minded people, hold onto hope, feel agency, etc. it's like seeing it as the difference between what you produce and how it sustains you.
Genuinely inspiring and hopeful. I feel like I've grown accustomed to the imperialist language like saying "poor" and "disadvantaged" because I both was conditioned by it, and came to associate it with the realities behind them without bothering to question if the context deserves accurate, more humanistic language. I think your ideas about art tie well with the way capitalism neutralizes discourse such as making objectivity seem more important than expressing how we feel. Even though the "objectivity" we consume in history books and news is intentionally shaped between the way things are worded and manufactured consent. But art is powerful, it can make you feel strong things, pull you into learning the reasons behind them, and having your mind radically challenged in the process.
So many thoughts.
Let me position myself here and own my own blind spots. Middle aged, white, closeted genderfluid, perceived male, exvangelical, anarchist folk punk.
The world is always changing. It's never not been changing, but change is slow. Change is always too slow for the new generations that are just starting to get involved. That's true of the current generation, it was true of me in my younger days, and it was true for those that came before me. It will be true for the generation that comes next as well. This is right and good. "The Movement" should never be content with the current situation. It should always be angry and screaming for more.
But change is slow. Vonnegut was disappointed that a novel or a protest song didn't put the breaks on an entire war industry within a year. Those on social media right now are disappointed that their art isn't bringing an immediate end to foreign policy relationships that have been set in stone since the end of WW2.
These things have inertia. In the immediate all of this art does have the stopping power of a custard pie dropped from a step ladder. But art can have inertia too. When I was a very young person the art of the 60's helped inspire my eventual radicalization. I know teens who make me blush by telling me that the art I made in my 20s inspired them and their current action. And the art that's being made now will add to that momentum, will further push the zeitgeist, and will create the starting point for the next angry generation.
I don't want to downplay the suffering and atrocities that are currently happening. None of this makes any difference to a dead child. But belive me when I tell you that I've never known a time when the general western public was so aware of the plight of Palistine. Despite the bombs that are going off as a type this, this conflict is closer to a lasting peace than it ever has been before. That is a good thing.
The systems of power and wealth we must be opposed to have been building inertia in some cases since feudal Europe. Our actions today aren't going to grind them to a halt within an immediate timeline. But those actions, including our art, are an important part of building the inertia that will eventually win. Or, rather, not win but create the next status quo that will be intolerable to the next generation of radicals.
In the meantime, whether you see it or not we are throwing sand in the gears of the machine and we are forcing the powerful to make concessions. Sometimes those concessions are just bike lanes. Sometimes they're Obergefell. Sometimes they're foot dragging on offensive aid shipments that are required by treaty. They're not always huge but they are happening.
I would love it if we could win tomorrow. Barring that I will work to win sometime in my descendent's lives.
TL;DR: Dont give up and especially dont give up hope. Even if you dont win today your actions and your art right now matter
It feels like a lot of these comments are people's isolated knee-jerk responses to the title of the video, rather than any discourse about the content of the video
I've always thought that art should have a primary focus on aesthetics. As in Oscar Wilde's idea of "art for art's sake". I distinctly remember being 5 years old in school and my teacher was playing classical music which I really enjoyed but she was trying to get us to interpret the different instruments as being different animals or like waterfalls and wind. That really pissed me off because I always strongly believed that you should get lost in the soundscape and the act of attaching certain instruments or motifs to animals and things from the physical world is an act of restriction. You're taking an otherworldly thing and tethering it to the physical.
Obviously, I didn't have the vocabulary to express my frustration to my teacher at the time but as time has gone on and as I've collected more methods of expressing this, I've only become stronger and more vigilant in that belief. I think art is something that transcends the natural world and approaching art with the idea that it's only trying to recreate the natural world is self-centered. If a chromatic scale on the piano is a buzzing bee, nothing more and nothing less then you never truly lose yourself in the music.
I think this is an issue that's often conflated with other issues people have around art. For example a lot of people want all art to be apolitical, they insist that there's no deeper message and some people think their English teacher is dumb for suggesting that the author made the curtains blue to reflect sadness. They insist that the curtain is blue because the author liked the colour blue not because they value aestheticism but because they don't want to do their English homework. In some way the those people are right that the author probably liked the colour blue and wanted it to be blue for aesthetic reasons and sometimes authors aren't always thinking about politics. An English teacher's job is to get their students to think more deeply and critically about art. To understand concepts like checkhov's gun and to question "why did he make the curtains blue". But I think with this obsession over the function and "hidden meaning" behind art we do fall out of touch with the beauty of it. We read Shakespeare because it's easier to understand that way but Shakespeare is supposed to be experienced through theater.
I see people with tattoos and I think "wow they look really cool" but I've never gotten one myself because I want it to have a meaning but in my obsession over function, I've denied myself the ability to achieve that cool appearance that other people have. I think this same issue has prevented me from transitioning in the past. I felt like I needed a reason to want to be a woman. But after soul searching I came up short. I don't have a reason. I just want to be a woman because I think women look cool and I want to look cool. With regard to my gender, the curtain genuinely is just blue because I like the colour blue.
I think in a lot of ways this is what separates children from adults. Children will do things because they want to do things and adults feel a need to assign a function to everything. Gaining media literacy and critically analyzing things is a sign of maturity. But when you critically analyze everything you lose all sense of wonder. Yes a flower can be even more beautiful when you understand exactly how it works but just because you understand something doesn't mean you're incapable of losing yourself in its beauty.
I don't know how to explain this any more than I already have. I feel like its one of those things where some people just get it and some people don't and I don't know how to get people to get it.