Post by estelle on Nov 23, 2005 1:18:03 GMT -7
Disneyfication: by Estelle Boelsma (Arnhem, the Netherlands)
Nota Bene: this is NOT about polish culture as I am a cretin about that, I am more a specialist of western, american culture in particular. this is my thesis.....
Disneyfication.
“ She was saying that most of us have only two of three genuinely interesting moments in our lives, the rest is filler, and that is the end of our lives, most of us will be lucky if any of these moments connects together to form a story that anyone would find remotely interesting”
Douglas Coupland, Generation X.
Fake heroism
We lost our stories. The ability to tell a story other than representing chronicles of real life. It is 8 PM, it is “Big Brother” watching – who is watching whom? Is it the audience that watch the life of a group dull, boring persons that forge their identities by recalling their earlier existences, realizing that many within the collective mass routinely and monotonously continue to live similar lives, but due to the nature of society are powerless to escape. Participants complete their personae in a too small house in too little time and too much focussed on the other participants and the media-spectacle outside, in order to become a millionaire and a dressed-up hero. They sit on couches, drink coffee, pacing nervously through the corridors – day in, day out: gossip-queens of reality drama, they drink coffee again, pace the rooms, they sleep, they wake up and wash themselves they have breakfast and coffee and day number 35 starts. Or is it perhaps the media controlling the fatigued millions households at prime-time by showing a simulacrum of life: a life as much ordinary as their owns? We ought to identify with participants in those shows. House Surveillance: no one escapes the slow, merciless and continuing movements of the registering camera. It seems all so objective and inevitably gestured truthfully after Real Life. We are satisfied with a residue as long as further questioning isn’t expected or desired. This is Life. This is what you want. This is what you get. Take it, Fake it. This is how we reflect. But it are however the editors of the show who shape and built the characters of this real life quest. The editors are productive intermediaries that make this fakery-puppet-show realistic, and of course entertaining. The general perception of Reality-TV is just another mediated acceptance of western society. The subsequent success of Reality-shows both in Europe as well as in America indicate that the audience greedy abandons its responsibility towards the wallpapers of successful pretending.
“you've been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life”
Television gave us a *could-be* world, an ornamental castle; built on dreams, wishes, endeavour and longing. A Romantic Movement caught/captured in celluloid and decennia later broadcasted via the ether. With heroes on horses and heroes in far away parallel galaxies and men on moons. Television nowadays gives us an * it-is * [moderism vs postmoderism] world. Real life is shown in all its dullness and shallowness. Jaded world founded on the “been there/done that” glorification. Reality-shows as though we are our own heroes, but no one exceeds and has the wings powerful enough to fly beyond this so-called authenticity (and we even don’t dare to have Ikarus’ Urges) We are lamenting the losses of authentic reflecting that became part of a self-indulging media-circus, that will proceed without further questioning as long as the consumer get what he belongs, or assumes to identify with. . Commonness is the magic word. It is a recipe wherein the absence of irony as main ingredient. Everyone is a character in the coincidence of so-called Reality TV, we are all stand-by for the Show of Our Lives.
The emperor’s new clothes
When urge, genuineness and romantic endeavour once were a quality, there is now nothing more than the sum of losses, dull confessions and out righteous lamenting kvetch. The sum of meaningless dialogues and whiny self-pitying confessions. Self-justification is mediated in sentiment. TV became a medium of fake democracy, and banality is the keyword. There IS and we are ALL heroes. The girl next door is a hero, the obese bulimic car seller is one; our masturbating grandmother is a hero and the Jewish pagan with 4 nipple-rings. We are heroic in the underlying aspects of mediocrite intentions that would have been banal ten years ago. And television gives the description of random ennui and all-days-life escapism. The new heroes walk on the catwalks of public tragedies and obscurism, proud in their new solipsistic and ignorant consciousness, and dressed in the “Emperor’s new clothes.”
Reality imitates television
And art? Oscar Wilde said: “ life imitates art” his vision is now developed into the media-circus: “ reality imitates television” * Art as medium of confession, self-legitimating in ego documents. Art that is due in the glorification triumphed over utter self-estimation and chronic self-indulging narcissism. Obscure thoughts are written on walls. The artist as son shows his Oedipal longing by making his mother centre of his art, publishing his parents’ divorce and battlefield. The artist as postmodern whiner shows her used tampons, the bed she laid in hour after hour, the psychofarmica she uses, she consumes her own history and gives it away to the audience as a pink pastry strip-tease show with a glossy cherry on top. Nothing is private. Neo-neo-Expressivism. We are allowed to see all personal drama from the artist: his questioning, his depression and suicidal urges, his love and losses: his personal history. The only restriction are the borders of the imaginable world from the artist, therefore he re-builds his world by the grace of the tolerant and consuming audience. The audience awkwardly laughs and shrugs: ‘’yeah…whatever….’and walks on. The sequence of private experience, thoughts and ideas are echoed into the world of continuing registration. There is no authenticity, only banality. And by showing the private layers of this obscenity, we are no longer surprised. This entrepreneurial, selfish and individualistic attitude merely made us puppets of the media hyped world. In that television is profound solipsistic boredom. Broadcasted ennui. In that bourgeois decadency is a new iconoclasm. And in that we are weak plagiarism of our former television heroes.
The ingredients of postmodern art pie
While the artist might recognize that there are contradictions and inconsistencies in his beliefs he is afraid to dig into his belief structure to reconcile the differences in case there is no answer. He turns out as much ordinary as his audience. He laments the grief en uncomfortably as though simulacra are enough legitimating to show authenticity via the diverse angles of personal perception. Art about this process, about the role of artist. The fashionable art has turned in on itself, had some therapy sessions, and put its analysis in a glass case. In this notion Art is a Glass House. The worse the analysis, the better: secret narrative or direct personal confession? Eternal repetition or blatant refusal of the past? The only engagement with the outside world is the engagement of self-promotion, publicity and attention-seeking. This is the art of confession: putting the private life in the public sphere and making a statement of doing so. But this, like any other subject in art, can range from the sublime to the pathetic. By showing his solipsistic world the artist is nothing more than the new TV hero here, and by giving away his history he is anonymous again, his confessions and self-perception are on the whole as common as the audience’s. The best explanation of culture today takes its very life from looking reflection of tv and other consumerism that is even echoed via the essence of art. It can affirm that much of life is full of phoney gestures. Oddly enough, they all sound just like art. Art concerns each of them, in one cliché or another. Art shattered the old consensus pretended to be almost pathetic sincerity. Why the drive to be shocking? It is easy: because there is nothing new to say. Culture has become so utterly sterile that the outrage route is the only one remaining to the attention-seeker. After modernism shallowness is a pale left-over. And fermented shallowness eventually leads to confessions. Therefore resembles broadcasted fakery.
lamenting kvetch idiologics
There are no stories. The outside world goes through our personal perception in staccato movements; it is as though we are tide up in a non-stop merry-go-round bombardment of frequent imagery. The borders of personal experience and anonymity are changing, the preying and publishing of emotions and sentiments now haunt what once was clearly enclosed. New Media makes the availability and accessibility to interact easier; it passively invites more people to show themselves in a public space. The Web, in this way, is the habitat for lots of people with a few bytes of webspace and a story to tell. While there is a certain amount of hype about the anonymity of the Internet, most personal webpages are clearly authored by someone who is quite happy to be identified in a public space. But only a few persons have a story worthy for telling. In this non-stop open community the world never has been this escalating. At the same time we become more anonymous, as though we are echoes from our own existence. We are just icons. Icons in redundancy. The urge for “Higher”, exclusive and more excessive experiences are expanding. Our world is never-ending. Yet fading
Nota Bene: this is NOT about polish culture as I am a cretin about that, I am more a specialist of western, american culture in particular. this is my thesis.....
Disneyfication.
“ She was saying that most of us have only two of three genuinely interesting moments in our lives, the rest is filler, and that is the end of our lives, most of us will be lucky if any of these moments connects together to form a story that anyone would find remotely interesting”
Douglas Coupland, Generation X.
Fake heroism
We lost our stories. The ability to tell a story other than representing chronicles of real life. It is 8 PM, it is “Big Brother” watching – who is watching whom? Is it the audience that watch the life of a group dull, boring persons that forge their identities by recalling their earlier existences, realizing that many within the collective mass routinely and monotonously continue to live similar lives, but due to the nature of society are powerless to escape. Participants complete their personae in a too small house in too little time and too much focussed on the other participants and the media-spectacle outside, in order to become a millionaire and a dressed-up hero. They sit on couches, drink coffee, pacing nervously through the corridors – day in, day out: gossip-queens of reality drama, they drink coffee again, pace the rooms, they sleep, they wake up and wash themselves they have breakfast and coffee and day number 35 starts. Or is it perhaps the media controlling the fatigued millions households at prime-time by showing a simulacrum of life: a life as much ordinary as their owns? We ought to identify with participants in those shows. House Surveillance: no one escapes the slow, merciless and continuing movements of the registering camera. It seems all so objective and inevitably gestured truthfully after Real Life. We are satisfied with a residue as long as further questioning isn’t expected or desired. This is Life. This is what you want. This is what you get. Take it, Fake it. This is how we reflect. But it are however the editors of the show who shape and built the characters of this real life quest. The editors are productive intermediaries that make this fakery-puppet-show realistic, and of course entertaining. The general perception of Reality-TV is just another mediated acceptance of western society. The subsequent success of Reality-shows both in Europe as well as in America indicate that the audience greedy abandons its responsibility towards the wallpapers of successful pretending.
“you've been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life”
Television gave us a *could-be* world, an ornamental castle; built on dreams, wishes, endeavour and longing. A Romantic Movement caught/captured in celluloid and decennia later broadcasted via the ether. With heroes on horses and heroes in far away parallel galaxies and men on moons. Television nowadays gives us an * it-is * [moderism vs postmoderism] world. Real life is shown in all its dullness and shallowness. Jaded world founded on the “been there/done that” glorification. Reality-shows as though we are our own heroes, but no one exceeds and has the wings powerful enough to fly beyond this so-called authenticity (and we even don’t dare to have Ikarus’ Urges) We are lamenting the losses of authentic reflecting that became part of a self-indulging media-circus, that will proceed without further questioning as long as the consumer get what he belongs, or assumes to identify with. . Commonness is the magic word. It is a recipe wherein the absence of irony as main ingredient. Everyone is a character in the coincidence of so-called Reality TV, we are all stand-by for the Show of Our Lives.
The emperor’s new clothes
When urge, genuineness and romantic endeavour once were a quality, there is now nothing more than the sum of losses, dull confessions and out righteous lamenting kvetch. The sum of meaningless dialogues and whiny self-pitying confessions. Self-justification is mediated in sentiment. TV became a medium of fake democracy, and banality is the keyword. There IS and we are ALL heroes. The girl next door is a hero, the obese bulimic car seller is one; our masturbating grandmother is a hero and the Jewish pagan with 4 nipple-rings. We are heroic in the underlying aspects of mediocrite intentions that would have been banal ten years ago. And television gives the description of random ennui and all-days-life escapism. The new heroes walk on the catwalks of public tragedies and obscurism, proud in their new solipsistic and ignorant consciousness, and dressed in the “Emperor’s new clothes.”
Reality imitates television
And art? Oscar Wilde said: “ life imitates art” his vision is now developed into the media-circus: “ reality imitates television” * Art as medium of confession, self-legitimating in ego documents. Art that is due in the glorification triumphed over utter self-estimation and chronic self-indulging narcissism. Obscure thoughts are written on walls. The artist as son shows his Oedipal longing by making his mother centre of his art, publishing his parents’ divorce and battlefield. The artist as postmodern whiner shows her used tampons, the bed she laid in hour after hour, the psychofarmica she uses, she consumes her own history and gives it away to the audience as a pink pastry strip-tease show with a glossy cherry on top. Nothing is private. Neo-neo-Expressivism. We are allowed to see all personal drama from the artist: his questioning, his depression and suicidal urges, his love and losses: his personal history. The only restriction are the borders of the imaginable world from the artist, therefore he re-builds his world by the grace of the tolerant and consuming audience. The audience awkwardly laughs and shrugs: ‘’yeah…whatever….’and walks on. The sequence of private experience, thoughts and ideas are echoed into the world of continuing registration. There is no authenticity, only banality. And by showing the private layers of this obscenity, we are no longer surprised. This entrepreneurial, selfish and individualistic attitude merely made us puppets of the media hyped world. In that television is profound solipsistic boredom. Broadcasted ennui. In that bourgeois decadency is a new iconoclasm. And in that we are weak plagiarism of our former television heroes.
The ingredients of postmodern art pie
While the artist might recognize that there are contradictions and inconsistencies in his beliefs he is afraid to dig into his belief structure to reconcile the differences in case there is no answer. He turns out as much ordinary as his audience. He laments the grief en uncomfortably as though simulacra are enough legitimating to show authenticity via the diverse angles of personal perception. Art about this process, about the role of artist. The fashionable art has turned in on itself, had some therapy sessions, and put its analysis in a glass case. In this notion Art is a Glass House. The worse the analysis, the better: secret narrative or direct personal confession? Eternal repetition or blatant refusal of the past? The only engagement with the outside world is the engagement of self-promotion, publicity and attention-seeking. This is the art of confession: putting the private life in the public sphere and making a statement of doing so. But this, like any other subject in art, can range from the sublime to the pathetic. By showing his solipsistic world the artist is nothing more than the new TV hero here, and by giving away his history he is anonymous again, his confessions and self-perception are on the whole as common as the audience’s. The best explanation of culture today takes its very life from looking reflection of tv and other consumerism that is even echoed via the essence of art. It can affirm that much of life is full of phoney gestures. Oddly enough, they all sound just like art. Art concerns each of them, in one cliché or another. Art shattered the old consensus pretended to be almost pathetic sincerity. Why the drive to be shocking? It is easy: because there is nothing new to say. Culture has become so utterly sterile that the outrage route is the only one remaining to the attention-seeker. After modernism shallowness is a pale left-over. And fermented shallowness eventually leads to confessions. Therefore resembles broadcasted fakery.
lamenting kvetch idiologics
There are no stories. The outside world goes through our personal perception in staccato movements; it is as though we are tide up in a non-stop merry-go-round bombardment of frequent imagery. The borders of personal experience and anonymity are changing, the preying and publishing of emotions and sentiments now haunt what once was clearly enclosed. New Media makes the availability and accessibility to interact easier; it passively invites more people to show themselves in a public space. The Web, in this way, is the habitat for lots of people with a few bytes of webspace and a story to tell. While there is a certain amount of hype about the anonymity of the Internet, most personal webpages are clearly authored by someone who is quite happy to be identified in a public space. But only a few persons have a story worthy for telling. In this non-stop open community the world never has been this escalating. At the same time we become more anonymous, as though we are echoes from our own existence. We are just icons. Icons in redundancy. The urge for “Higher”, exclusive and more excessive experiences are expanding. Our world is never-ending. Yet fading
