transcript
“Pretty shitty how baseline human activities like singing, dancing, and making art got turned into skills instead of being seen as behaviors, so now it’s like ‘the point of doing them is to get good at them’ and not ‘this is a thing humans do, the way birds sing and bees make hives.’”
My baby niece started bobbing up and down when a song came on, happily waving her little fists and shaking her little diaper butt.
I was like “that’s terrible, you’ll never be a star, keep your day job you untalented hack!”
thought i was on linkedin for a sec
Lemmy is LinkedIn for NEETs
Honestly I’d bet the average lemmy user is more likely to be employed than the average LinkedIn user. My experience on LinkedIn was a bunch questionably effective recruiters who rarely even understood the words in the job requirements they were trying to fill, where my lemmy experience so far has been “all of the people working in tech who hate silicon valley technofeudalism”
It was just a half baked joke, NEETs are based anyway
My partner made up a word - Dysfunctionlust: the pleasure you get from doing something that you feel no pressure to be good at.
She’s quite a good writer but super hard on herself about it, whereas drawing is a dysfunctionlust for her and so quite relaxing.
It’s based on the German word funktionslust: the joy of an organism doing what it’s meant to do, like a dog running.
Capitalism causes us to commodotize everything. I saw this switch as well during the 2000s in Internet culture. It went from people making websites about their cats and stuff to people chirping out “but how will that be profitable?!” in response to most ideas.
I remember 11 year old me trying to monentise a crappy weebly site I made.
Be the change you want to see, no one will stop you. I certainly won’t.
…
She does realize birds are literally in a clmpetition trying to find a mate, right? Right?
The birds singing is basically the same as some lads pumped full of testosterone yelling “hey sweetie, wanna hang out?” In high street…
I believe it’s more like yelling “YO WOULD YOU NOT LIKE THIS FABULOUS SPECIMEN THAT IS ME TO COME INSIDE YOU?”
I’ve been playing music for over 14~ years and I personally love that it is difficult and I always have something to work on
I want to be good at it. I will be good at it. I don’t feel bad because I’m not a gifted musician. I play for myself and improvement is an amazing feeling as a musician.
This post has had me thinking for most of a day. I kind of love the phrase that these are things that humans just do.
But I think that learning and improving and sharing ideas and methods are perhaps even more a thing that people do. So, practicing and studying e.g. music or dance should be peak human activity.
Making it a business is… let’s say an opportunistic option. Definitely should not be a necessity or a default, but possibly an option.
(40+ years of music practice for me, too. I’ll never be professional, but I also won’t voluntarily ever stop.)
It’s commodification. These things have been turned into marketable commodities for sale.
A huge part of capitalism is commodifying core parts of the human experience.
Commodification is part of it. But the idea of patronage of the arts goes back to antiquity. It isn’t a capitalist innovation so much as Pop Art, which is a pure manifestation of commodity fetishism.
What’s really changed in the art world over the last twenty years is the obfuscation of Master Artists as a productive force. You no longer have this popular understanding of Van Gogh as a guy who does paintings or Stan Lee as a guy who writes comic books or Hayao Miyazaki as a guy who makes movies. Now you just have these commercial juggernauts that simply churn out generic slop. When you see a drawing of Mickey Mouse we no longer really ask who drew it. When we see some CGI-'d Marvel eye-ball gouger, we barely even recognize the studio that did the graphical designs. Netflix releases anime and we barely know if its Trigger or Madhouse or MAPPA that’s produced it (nevermind the actual individual artists who made the original images), because those credits are cut short to push you into the next episode.
I think OP’s image misses the essential desire for a hobbyist to chase improvement and distinction from peers. Making Art has historically been a cultivated skill with a real lineage of professionals, schools, and mediums. This isn’t just birds singing, on instinct or bees hiving for survival. It is humans attempting to influence one another through passionate expression and collaborating to create works that will outlive them. That’s necessarily going to require skill.
But the people who make the art are fundamental to the art’s creation. The modern capitalist drive is to remove the art from the artist and turn the medium into a fungible unit of exchange rather than a tool of communication.
Professionalization binds the artists to their works by making it exceptional and distinct from peer works. Capital moves us in the other direction, homogenizing and anonymizing the labor to make it easier to price and more saleable in distribution.
I would argue that Capitalism wants us to be bees. To be these mindless workers who do the same job reflexively, over and over, until we die. All so the capitalists can obtain cheap uniform honey.
I like your point a lot better because the dehumanization of the worker is more the attribute than the commodity
Damn. Yeah really good points all around
I don’t think that’s right. What portion of these activities actually is for sale, though?
I sing songs with my kids, and maybe to pass the time alone in a car, but nobody would ever be able to pay me enough to want to do that in public. Nor should anyone want to pay to see my mediocrity on display.
I played different sports when I was younger, mostly playing in unorganized pickup games with no formal teams or uniforms or referees or schedules. I still run and bike, and I still lift weights, but have no desire to enter any formal competitions with any of those activities. But I still work on the skills and the progressions on those activities, and track my performance in my notes/logs.
None of this is commodified. It’s not for sale, and someone else’s experience doing these things can’t be traded for what I get out of doing them myself. Even if there are people who do all of these things professionally, full time, the “commoditized” product has basically nothing to do with what I’m doing. Nor does the fact that people do those things professionally somehow detract from the enjoyment I get out of doing those things myself.
One of the most fundamental human experiences, of cooking food for people to eat, is actually a full time job I’ve had in the past. But the fact that I have cooked many meals for strangers for money doesn’t actually detract from my ability to still cook meals at home for my family, or host dinner parties where I cook for my friends. The value of that activity is more than what can simply be purchased with money, even if I personally have done it for money in the past.
Human experience is for experiencing, and nobody can take that away from me.
It’s commodified in terms of social media. Either “for sale” literally, if indirectly, through monetization (which is increasingly the goal for many people) or not-quite-literally in the sense of likes/social media attention. The act of dancing in this context, for instance, is no longer done as an expression of genuine emotion or to connect with people or express oneself, but instead being traded for clicks, monetized or not.
In that regard, even if not personally affected, I think that consumer culture can and has taken the purpose of human experience away from many and twisted it from experience as experience to experience as performance.
Edit: to expand on a dance being commodified: a TikTok dance has to be learned by consuming TikTok. That is the product: the content around the dance. Then the user further contributes to the commodification by entering their own content into the marketplace (TikTok). Whether the user makes money or not does not change the fact that this content is for sale by TikTok. TikTok gets more viewers and trades viewership for advertising revenue.
I guess I’m not seeing a reduction in the number of people doing these things for themselves: drawing because they like to draw, taking photographs because they like the craft, lifting weights because they want to get stronger, baking sourdough because they want to reconnect with old traditions, foraging mushrooms because they find it interesting. Yes, some of these things happen on social media, which also may influence what hobbies or pastimes or projects people take on, but if that’s what you mean by commodification, then that has been part of the human condition for as long as people have been social and have had free time.
That may be true, I’m really not sure - and idk if it’s really knowable. But it is definitely a motivation that exists. I just think we’d be better off without those motives and only with the good ones you outlined. As long as the profit motive, consumer culture, and media exist, I think we’ll not be free of that sort of thing.
The main thing, I think, is that being conscious of those forces and of the degree to which business and other bourgeois interests shape our behaviors helps us to avoid their influence. I think most folks on Lemmy probably avoid more of that motivation than most.
And, to your point, i think the better, more wholesome motives will always exist - and it’s important we let them thrive and don’t overlook them.
Real I’m 14 and this is deep vibes.
Nobody’s gonna stop you from doing any of that. Well, maybe from singing in public but that’s less about skill and more about not disturbing others by being loud and obnoxious.
And making art in public is vandalism, dance and maybe someone will think you’re on drugs and call the police. Spend your time doing human things alone for no profit and maybe society won’t let you have shelter or medicine. People are absolutely going to stop you unless you’re really good at fighting for it.
I mean… Those things are all skills. They are skills anyone can develop barring some kind of disability (you’re probably not gonna be singing if you don’t have a larynx, for example).
maybe they could learn to whistle? Does that require a larynx? For that matter, does whistle count as singing? Now I have so many questions.
That’s a good question. Personally, I think it should but I am pretty sure I’ve seen it classified as playing an instrument once.
I guess it’s really no different than a flute… I also can’t play a flute worth a shit as well as whistling so yeah. Makes sense as an instrument.
Whistling has a lot in common with other wind instruments as well. Oral cavity control, resonance, air use and ear training etc. Just the vibrating element changes and you’ll have a tool that provides a resonating air column and projection and other things. And music is music, of course. That’s overlap in itself.
Only if you let them. I do all these things without regard to skill. Maybe surround yourself with more laid back people?
It’s even worse when the point isn’t even to get good at them, but rather to make money off of them.
Counterpoint, modern art has desperately tried to move into the territory of “things people just do” and its terrible.
Fine arts and the old arts are pretty goddamn spectacular in comparison.
Skill and effort should be celebrated, and people should also be able to just do.
Sometimes I imagine how human life could be like if we weren’t trained to live within such narrow uncomfortable lines and it’s kind of sad
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Sounds like a job for AI! That way we’ll have more time for washing dishes and folding clothes.
i write because i hate myself and writing is pain.
