This person needs some humbling.
I too am absolutely pumped to live in a world where human artistry is all but confined to the wealthy, and we all get AI generated pseudo-art instead! Woot woot!
Isnβt that how it was for the majority of history? Minus the AI crap anyway.
Still, the average person has incredible opportunity to see some of the very best art, as long as they live in or near a big city. Admission to most galleries or museums is not expensive at all.
The problem is that the average working class person doesnβt have a lot of time where they also have energy and donβt have to do chores. In that state, most people arenβt receptive for learning and enjoying culture. And itβs very understandable.
I think that has more to do with technology and the attention economy than anything else. Working class people used to read books a lot more than they do now. Then along came TV (aka the idiot box) to soak up those free hours. Now itβs all Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Netflix.
No, (though depends on your definition of art) but thereβs a reason that public buildings (Churches, for instance) were often the best decorated with murals, frescoes, and statues.
Also within local communities there would be musicians and artisans who were known for their work.
That said, art did become more privatised once the 17th century rolled around. Obviously varied by geographic regions, etc. (e.g. Artist items (amongst other items of worth) were deliberately shared out by many American Indian groups in potlatches as acts of redistribution.)
Can someone explain the fries part ? I understand this is in reference to an order someone would make at a fast food restaurant, but what is the link ? what does it suggest ?
it suggests that art majors are not employable in their field of study and thus end up working in fast food
As a retired cold and mean hearted Toolmaker and ME, there is a need for Art Majors in this world. Just not as many of them as we produce perhaps. Kind of like Astrophysicists, we do need them, but truthfully there are only a handful of jobs available for those degrees. So the majority often need to figure out what they can do besides their degree training.
If you want to be an Art Major, you will most likely need to figure on finding a job that can tangentially make use of your artistic training. Because you probably wonβt become a famous painter or professor teaching art in a collage or work in an art museum.
But you can become an art teacher in a high school or perhaps work in web design or some kind of advertising. Not what the average art major might wish to be, but rather careers that can use those skills.
The comedy is created by subversion of your expectation that college degreed people would not be working at a fast food place. The interaction is meant to be read initially as a neutral status interaction and then slides into a upper to lower status interaction as the post reveals that the answer to the implied question from the customer is that the cashier has an art degree. The initial humor is at the expense of the cashier. The next part of the joke reveals that the customer is, in fact, of true lower status of the two because they donβt understand the horror of a world that will result from devaluing those with art knowledge, exemplified in the joke as those with art degrees. The art degree here is a stand in for our capacity for human empathy and connection. What fools we would be without it. What greater fools could we become if we actively refused to cultivate it. We could become evil, and that fact, that true evil that can exist and we could have blindness to it or even become it, is the comedy here. The banality of the customer here, the interaction, the shittiness of it all, that is the comedy. How this helps, it was not generated in any way by AI and itβs fuckin sad that I have to say that.
If post modernism hadnβt eaten its own tail id have more sympathy.
Art is subjective, but for me being in a museum and going from Impressionism and post impressionism, and into a modern and post modern gallery is like a slap in the face.
In my experience, all I feel is it goes from beautiful paintings with high skill level used by artists to visually manipulate form and shape to create coherent but stylized images, to βcheck out this crushed oil drum, really makes you think huh?β
I think what you dislike is bad or low effort art, not post modernism. Just because piece of art denies the canon, or the classics, doesnβt necessarily mean it must eschew beauty, or be made without technical skill.
Apologies to anyone who knows their art history - Iβm speaking in broad strokes here.
I was in a museum last week that held some of the βgreatsβ of modern and post modern movements, and I much preferred the other galleries.
Mark Rothkoβs abstract expressionism:
Vs
Van Gogh.
For me, itβs not even close.
Personally, my beef is not only the low skill/effort a lot of the post modernism sculptures have, but also that their whole point, of making fun of βhigh artβ, of museums and whatnot, was subverted. The subversion of art was subverted. Not even Banksy could fully escape the elitist assholes and even though that picture was shredded after the auction, itβs still βvaluableβ
When Iβm hungry, fuck them art majors. When Iβm bored though, also fuck them art majors.