Cowards, Frauds, Apologists,

THE NEED for the critic

Now I wrote this on an airplane two summers ago during one of the most important weeks of my life, I believe the moon was full in Aquarius, so certainly I feel it belongs coming into the foreground as an offering to the topics I'm throwing around. Now the tough part of reading this writing is not just the amount of experience I've gained in the last 18 months but it's that I truly had not wrapped my head around "art school"... from my situation I had not come to understand just how obstructive and truly demoralizing an institutional education in the arts has been for cities and youth culture in the United States. I studied at a public college in Manhattan and received a general foray of history and letters of the world. That's a really generous way of summing up my time at the City University system of New York. I did not realize while I had this experience which protracted over 6 years that other people were learning in art schools the disciplines of cultural bankruptcy, and how to be an instrument of degeneration in the mental pathways of their peers and groups for years to come. At present I am friends with people who have trained to be artists, who make a living as artists, and as a collector and researcher I have come to learn about many modern "scenes", "schools", and styles, really, in an array of trades. I can't help but feel it is extremely dangerous the system these once students have been entrusted to carry out, and I realise that a lot of what I comment on below - all that seems to be socially acceptable or even Cool - is a result of the enforcement of this system. 

I feel I was upset by witnessing something that in reality is so small. Art makers, people who consider themselves "creatives", I have completely shut out these terms - dangerous language is being invoked. What is happening in New York with respect to the people falling into these categories is only that- it is a category. It's not just about the money. The real criminal activity of the neoliberal conquest of an institutional-education-to-career-in-the-arts is the twisted semiosis, the road is bombed out with all sorts of trees and rocks in the way, scheming, convincing those involved and those looking in, and it is the impression it has left on others about what it might take to be an artist, the new frame of possibility of becoming an artist at all. I don't like these terms, I'm afraid of talking about it at all!  If we look back at my writing from 4, and 6 years ago we see similar near exact complaints about school in general. The problem I'm identifying here today is how the study of the arts has impacted the art that is available to us locally on a day to day basis, and in plainest terms what we see on instagram. When I say locally I am not just referring to a spatial coordinate but I mean something "common". Everyone on instagram who seems Cool or that we know of in our cities in a variety of trades, has more or less been trained - and paid to train!- to act and to deliver in this way, through their arts school education... or the arts school education of others. 

Check out what I said back then down below. Luckily there is so much else going on besides all this boring, ugly stuff.

08/11/2022

The concept of Being Cool can be thought of as both continuation and evolution of  being in fashion, being modern, To be with the times (even if that is realized by posing against the times). 

Being cool is an impression we get of ourselves and of others based on ideological, cultural, and temporal phenomena.  It describes a personal affect, behavior, and atmosphere that, at other points of history, could have once been described as being tasteful, stylish, knowledgable or interesting; now some or all of those things and more are encompassed in being cool, depending on usage. Observably It is a concept orbited primarily by youth; I would argue being cool is the ethos of youth culture.  

Anyway modern youth (expanded to include people below age 40) are driven by cool concept. Cool sells like no tomorrow.  Cool is synonymous with time, so cool is digital. Digital world reaffirms cool. Cool is frappuccino but its also psychedelic .  There are generalized concepts of what is cool that are (a) Mechanized to herd socialization, (b) to sell a product or brand or create and maintain consumer base , and (c) to differentiate groups of people through what they identify with. There are also niche concepts of what is cool that are evidenced through clothes, music, scenes, online subcultures, etc. Many vaporwave years ago one of my tinder photos was me holding a fiji water and I was sent a message "I see you with the fiji water" -- To my mind, indicating your affiliation with a coolness, Flashing. 

Anyway this type of niche concept of cool is really interesting to me, born in New York its how a lot of people get ahead in life, and sometimes make an entire empire from sociality of a niche coolness. I think at other times such a thing was done more thoughtlessly, for example relatively unknown musicians working together and inadvertently generating a new genre or scene, the repercussions of which were only felt and observed long after the situation had been dust..

People now confuse and infuse their passions with an ultimately subjective concept that has objective consequences. People love what they think is cool. Some people are actually totally unconcerned with being cool but are into what is current and in trend (Decidedly the antagonistic driving force of other versions of cool) Some people are in closer proximity to effecting what is cool than others, and they want to be in this position. This is what I am concerned with. I noticed fans of niche music, high fashion, or internet subcultures feel a sense of protection through an inferred elitism granted by their Flashing. Those preoccupied with being cool definitely get off on the fact that other people Are not as cool as them, or even paradoxically someone's cool is that they are proud they don't feel such a way. By definition cool is hierarchical and begets competition - it is almost a wonder how any coolness has staying power because it can be easily trivialized or outruled by a greater force.. One day you are the coolest, Another you are made arbitrary.

I got to thinking of all this, a lot of people in New York and in American cities are hiding behind their cool , "scenes", and I don't think this precludes hood scenes or intellectual circles. Some are Profiting off this and calling it art I guess. I don't know if it's worth it to give people a lot of attention just because they are filling a role that will always require an actor. Yea, death of cool in place of something more imaginative. There are aspects of being cool that have always been and will always be socially advantageous, and I think it's ok to go forward with those things-  we will regardless. I personally find it really uncool and in poor taste how cool some people find themselves, yea?  Looking cool, is often the worst look. Few people seem to wear what is actually suitable to them, let alone expressive. Cool wants to be simple , but never can be. Where simple and organic; that is highest. Cool must be invented and well maintained to Serve people. When departing from the cool cult I think the fascination (for those practicing culture - again some people are indifferent to this) is then concentrated upon the longevity and grace in what is elegant. Growing out of cool Because Cool is Glamour Now- a Flash. I don't want everyone to be cool, it is wretched. It expires quickly and then Working corporate in New York is being on a team of iced coffees who speak internet lingo from 2018-- Cool , the digital, the curated, the agreeable, is corporate casual. Yea, address your scene , is it in line with your real tastes and passions, or is it protective? Are you interested and find yourself moving along spatially, or just repeating the same dimensions?.

Funkadelic made the distinction between being so cool , but having no groove. I noticed a lot of people around me delighting in their coolness (what they consume, how they present, practical identity) but I find them horribly uncool. I know people who don't fit into a cool space but to me they are exactly cool. Then, I thought some stuff was cool but I realize it is getting in the way of our culture moving forward, and making art and sex bad. 

I know people get up on Instagram and there is a pressure to be cool by presenting yourself as being yourself but in an awkward way, and to this i say, just log off until you really dont give a damn. And if youre chatting or flashing at least make sure its going along with who you are. As a lover of what I believe to be the coolest shit , I am surrounded by people who have no interest in those things and actually can't understand the unprecedented amount of affection I have for my fascinations. Even cool people i've been around have let me down because they are "draped in a learned sociopathy.. but their cloak drags" (Jasminne Morataya). Their coolness can be too precious, and I am actually a nerd. 

 The digital era, the era of the camera, has all but rendered aesthetic understanding to be common and flat, now I think people have buried the idea of good taste. Not everyone will care about this subject matter, but some people who think they are upholding art or are in a position to uphold art- which is symbiotic with the personality of cool - need to address what has been made permissibly cool up until this point in time--The fact that cool has been made so excusable at all. It's a topic that concerns instagram users and people whose lives are different because of online communities. The window of social media gives way to a multidimensional refraction of the psyche - and a lot of what is demonstrated is cowardice, framed. Not everyone was meant to be an artist.  

Ultimately I realize that my particular disposition is that of one where my identity and my passions are tied up in one another. As i said Some people are not passionate about art or culture and even less people are obsessed with becoming.. their passions. For many people the internet is a silly place yet not without incredible ramifications, Instagram being a place where culture unfolds and I am not indifferent to that. We could agree that instagram and the like injures elegance, and whatever else lies beyond cool, but it doesn't have to be that way. I am in love with certain kinds of music, clothes , literature, forms of culture, and although this serves a natural hierarchical function, this is not the main thing for me; I'm not just cool, I happened to be cool. And the coolest to me are like that - no dogma, just essential passion, imagination, unpredictability. 

I can say all this many more ways. Art is tied up with the cheap glamour of being cool online, the final concept of being cool that has emerged from online culture. I think being cool is like wanting to be skinny- widely desired but cheap result. Being cool or being skinny are incomplete ideals.