So, I made the mistake of picking a performing arts degree, so I spend most of my days pondering how pointless of a degree it is. I did manage to pick a module about performance protest, and while some of it gets a bit bullshitty, there’s been other parts like looking at native American performance/protest at the Dakota pipeline and stuff, which have been interesting and useful.
Yesterday there was some group work. It was a bit of a brainstorming exercise but as a group we settled on the idea of spamming the illegal immigrant report line/letterbox with shit so that new reports wont go through. Ok, it’s nothing amazing, but it served the purpose of the exercise we were given.
Then this girl speaks up. Previously her contribution to class has been telling everyone about how she culturally enriched herself by going on holiday in places where poor people exist.
On our idea, she says that it might be illegal to do, so we should create a fake website and have people fill that in as a symbolic message.
A FAKE WEBSITE FILLED IN AS A SYMBOLIC MESSAGE
At that moment I realised why the arts seem so useless at changing things. It’s jam packed with trust fund kiddies.
that is complete insanity. what could possibly drive someone to have that thought at my young age? To remove all potency from the tiniest little act. Seriously ghoulish.
I know a lot of people who are like this, and met most of them while studying law at university. Tried to join a local org that ostensibly wanted to use volunteers to help some marginalized communities, and like 90% just wanted to turn the place into a book-club that occassionally held seminars for trans people about their rights. All I could think of while listening to them was “if I was 15% more charismatic, I could coup this place in a month”. Because the desire to do good was definitely there, but people were incredibly afraid of doing anything that might get them in trouble, and I think the same is true for the trust fund baby you had an encounter with.
There’s a good movie called “Soul on a String”. It’s a Chinese film set in Tibet, with a mostly Tibetan cast and based on a book by a half Han half Tibetan author. Me and my sister saw it at a film festival together. Like a year later she went on a rant about how China “wiped out all the Tibetan and suppressed their culture”. And I was like “uh, we saw a Chinese movie set in Tibet like a year ago”. She said they must have censored it in China, but like no, they didn’t it was released there. I literally pulled this info up on my phone. She just rolled her eyes and went “okay commie”.
I’m genuinely convinced once someone is that lib brained they’re a fucking lost cause, gonna feel real bad when I gotta gulag my own sister.
when these little stupid notions pile up its easy to write them off as a fucking moron, but at the end of the day all it reveals is that they have no idea what they are talking about. i hate that we have to learn a new way to talk to people with these prepackaged beliefs because even the rare attempt to remove the veil seems to them as if all we want to do is make them feel wrong and/or stupid. like, you are, but it’s your fault you feel that way and there’s nothing i can do about it. fuck.
there’s a couple examples of activist performance art making the illegality of the performance part of that performance. i think it was rimini protocol that programmed a bot just randomly ordering stuff from the darknet and shipping it to their art exhibition. they ended up with a bunch of ecstasy that got seized by the police, but they didn’t get sued for it.
zentrum für politische schönheit had a performance where they built a fake holocaust memorial in the backyard of a german nazi politician, then used the ensuing media attention to announce they had also secretly observed him for months. when they got sued by him, they revealed that all the “observation footage” was just pics from his own press kit and that “there was nothing to observe, this guy does nothing but chop wood all day long”.
I remember one from Reddit. It is seared into my memory, word for word.
“Self-driving cars are the key to the post-scarcity future!” :so-true:
There’s another that I don’t remember the exact wording except the final two words of it: “Climate change doesn’t matter. Pollution doesn’t matter. Humans will live in space and raise cows in habitat modules and slaughter them for meat. Elon Musk.” Yes, “Elon Musk” was said at the end of the bazinga brain-stroke as its own mini sentence with a period stop. :galaxy-brain:
Imagine the absolute waste that a massive space habitat FOR COWS would be. :jesus-christ: just make the same thing and grow plants on it, that’s atleast self sufficent to a point. Fucking burger brains
:frothingfash: “NO I MUST HAVE MY SPACE TENDIES!!!”
Even if humanity survives long enough to abandon a wasteland Earth to those who can’t afford to go to space… People will be eating lab-grown meat by then.
I’m glad you noticed that, too. That blew my mind when I first read it. With all the dangers and perils of the void, hostile to life itself, to dedicate space to something as inefficient and crude as LE MANLY MEAT sounded farcical.
That’s how much bazinga brains truly want nothing to change.
I once had an art teacher, in college, go on a bit of a tirade about how she doesn’t understand why we do drug trials and/or testing on animals when we could just do it on prisoners instead. Had to walk out of the classroom for a bit and really do some evaluation on the human species…and I was still a sucdem at that point even.
I knew people like that, too.
A disturbingly popular sentiment among people my age when I was going through public school was “Why isn’t The Running Man real? It would get rid of a lot of prisoners and the revenues from the show would make the prison system (more) profitable!” :le-pol-face:
The same people who whinge and cry about Salinist gulags wish our prisons were as brutal as they imagine the gulags to have been.
