one link before I begin my day's reading

[sofiaviolet]

thingswithwings: some things to think about in this VVC discussion

The links in this post will almost invariably go to posts and comments that contain (or are right next to) a lot of ablism, cissexism, dismissal of peoples' disabilities, and general dismissal of social justice efforts. If you're feeling worn out by this conversation or unable to look at any more posts/comments of that nature, my recommendation is not to click. And not to read this post, perhaps. In addition to discussion of that stuff, this post also contains discussion of triggers for things like rape and violence. If you've run out of spoons for this debate, please scroll on by: I completely understand if you don't feel up to reading this. Especially as it's rather extravagantly tl;dr.

I also want to pull out the following chunks of text from thingswithwings's post:

There is a very popular cultural meme (found in many art cultures, not just vidding fandom) that making people uncomfortable or disturbed is the holy grail of Good Art, which is to say a particular brand of canonical avant-garde masculinist art that Does Things To The Audience. Art penetrates you and makes you feel a certain way (a way you need to feel, even if you don't want to feel that way) while you receive the art passively in the manner it was intended.

... Art Does Things To The Audience; the audience is and should be helpless to stop it; art affects you, you don't affect it, and you certainly don't choose whether or not to be affected by it; in an interaction between artist and audience, the artist is and should be the one with the power and the rights and the freedom. Above all, art is more important than you are. Artistic freedom - a word often tossed around very vaguely - is more important than you are. Artistic freedom means not just the kind of literal artistic freedom in which I wholeheartedly believe - the freedom to produce whatever you want and not be limited in its distribution - but also the freedom to take away the audience's choice; to make people watch it when they would choose not to; to do something to people with art against their will. This is often framed as "forcing people who don't think about X to think about X" in a fighting-privilege sort of way, and indeed art can do that, but the problem here is with the assumptions about art - and the privileging of art over audience - that go along with this process. ...

...

... Making someone feel this kind of pain, without giving them a way to choose for themselves and opt out of it, is not part of making radical art that undermines social structures in some vague avant-garde way (even if your vid IS in fact undermining social structures and fighting back against patriarchy or what have you!); making someone feel that way because you know better than they do what they need, because you refuse to give them a choice about it, is part of a process of propping up social structures like misogyny, homophobia, racism, and ablism. ...

I don't have a coherent response to this, really. I love this section to itty bitty bits. The overall concept of being assaulted by art is not something I remember running into before, but I think it's useful and I am going to add it to my toolbox.

It also kind of blows my mind that people within fandom keep privileging the artist over the audience, when fandom-as-we-know-it is a rejection of that model of one-way communication of Artist-->Art-->Audience. Fanworks such as fic, art, vids, and meta are contrary to the notion of a single correct interpretation of a work. The simple existence of fandom as a bunch of active consumers blows the "passive audience" myth out of the water.

Comments

[turlough]

I love what she wrote about art! It's exactly what I've been feeling but haven't been able to articulate beyond "those people are a bunch of pretentious twits".

[sofiaviolet]

Heh. Pretty much.