Belly Button Lint

Feeling Lint-y?

Tag: art

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    Create something

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    1–2 minutes

    Create something to uplift your spirits—it won’t be a masterpiece, but the simple act of creation can anchor you while discharging the ruminative loop of your thoughts.
    Engaging in a tangible, attentive activity (a concrete action) is a small step toward agency and a reminder of one’s ability to shape your environment, which in turn can shape one’s mood.

    Oddly, the physical item (the remnant of action) embodies your time spent, mapping it into the real, while so much of our time is spent scrolling or pontificating with no memorable results.

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    nostalgic turn: plastic history

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    1–2 minutes

    As the postmodern present dissolves and becomes increasingly mutable, we find ourselves looking for stability by returning to the past—the nostalgic turn.

    And yet, in our look backward, we find historical movies have a jumpy and grainy unreality, which has now been smoothed into a slick hyper-reality: history is re-envisioned as epically cinematic, which reads as another slick, artificial fantasy.

    The production of the real underscores the fake, further deteriorating our search for stability.

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    Disavowal and Fantasy

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    1–2 minutes

    Fantasies transcend mere wishes, crafting realms for emotional fulfillment sans repercussions—a rejection of acknowledged desires, a disavowal to retain approval.

    Prevalent are erotically non-consensual and hero-centric fantasies, navigating the delicate balance between community esteem and clandestine gratification. These scenarios permit indulgence without the burden of consequences, focusing on pleasure while eschewing associated horrors.

    Recognizing the antagonisms your fantasy ignores is to move back into reality, collapsing the escapist pleasure, the forbidden moment. Enacting your fantasy necessitates your disavowal from society as one who exercises specific deviations or perversions.

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    The Covert Violence of Architecture

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    1–2 minutes

    Expanding the concept of violence to include behavioral manipulation through subconscious cues reveals architecture as inherently violent.

    Structures like classrooms, churches, and prisons dictate roles and delineate dissent visibly demanding the subsequent consequences. This perspective transforms static buildings into entities with a form of will, channeling behaviors while punishing deviation.

    Such architectural violence, akin to ideological indoctrination, forces conformity for survival, elevating seemingly mundane designs to coercive tools.

    This redefinition extends architecture’s banality into the realm of atrocity, from which more grievous metaphors can be argued, such as rape via forced ideological insemination to produce (and replicate) passive and subservient normalization.

    Thus, we encounter the violence of redefinition of language: converting the walls into deviant oppressors.

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    Cycle of Novelty

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    1–2 minutes

    Approaching the new: As children, we learn to experiment and experience novelty until the thrill produces anxiety, threatening to overwhelm us. Then we rush back to safety, regain our courage, and set out again.

    This cycle remains, but as we grow older, we can detach from reality, allowing our pathologies to simulate the anxiety and thrill of novelty and discovery, often at the cost of relationships.

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    Technology as becoming

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    1–2 minutes

    Realizing yourself through the machine is to remain underdeveloped: to become yourself as an executor of technology is not of the heart, leading to subversion or perversion.

    Using the prosthesis of the machine grants power as you subvert nature. The trade is to become a perpetual functionary of the machine, enslaved to its dictates until its desires are yours.

    The tool as facilitator and benefactor is a provider and, as such, can be worshiped and fetishized. Still, as reliance moves into deification, similar to religion, we forget the role of metaphor: we make the “thing” that seems to do the work universally applicable and appropriate for every situation, forgetting it is merely a tool or extension.

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    friendship based on lameness

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    1–2 minutes

    People often find it challenging to befriend someone who is unpredictable. Even if you are generally somewhat weird, there is a limit beyond which you may become off-putting. Overindulging in your creative freedom can sometimes overwhelm those who simply seek casual entertainment.

    Many relationships seem to be based on your ability to moderate your level of creativity to a degree of lameness, which is not true creativity but rather something adjacent to it – adjacent to being interesting.

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    gentrified artists (graffiti)

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    1–2 minutes

    In an art magazine Instagram post the editor complained about a lack of graffiti on walls as a sign of artists being gentrified.

    Perhaps. Perhaps the art world has been entirely packaged and purchased. Maybe art was only briefly a transgressive modality and (with the help of this magazine) has returned to propping up transcendent naval gazing (religion or commerce).

    Interestingly, this sentiment was pasted on a digital wall, where outrage amplifies more readily than sloganeering on physical barriers. The internet is a better modern tool, as is money to convert graffiti into a mural.

    As well, to call artists "gentrified" for not vandalizing (bemoaining the loss of rebellion) undermines the succesful inclusivity work the artworld has done to grant all fringe practices space inside rather than out. The point of graffiti (for artists rather than taggers) has been rendered mute.

    I will concede: Defacing the real world is becoming passé. Cluttering my feed with inane observations and advertising is the new trash that concerns me.

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    Rock Star v Dragon

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    1–2 minutes

    The rockstar creates and energizes while the dragon protects its hoard.

    The glamour of creativity is alluring, yet for most, it is a consumptive trap (drawing more from you than returning to you).

    The less glamorous persistent strategy to maintain wealth and status is not to create but to wrest power and eternal resources, such as real estate, away from the aging dragons: don’t waste your time making; start slaying and squatting.

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    Seriously foolishly good

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    1–2 minutes

    The shock of witnessing high craft with an element of absurdity is extraordinarily endearing and pleasurable.

    We crave the seriousness of mastery (slavish hours of discipline and excellence) to be thoroughly commingled with blustery foolishness. It recognizes the best of being human.