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Oncle Boris
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Once in a brown moon
Aug 2001
time: 00:21
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quote:
Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Of course you can want it. Obviously you haven't been afflicted by this, otherwise you wouldn't think there was a problem (and there wouldn't be). So that's clearly not the case. |
 You don't have any better argument? There are different levels of accessibility to culture, and as they get more complex, more refined, more elegant shall I say, they receive less exposure. As someone who studies philosophy, studied cinema previously and is deeply interested in artistic matters, I read specialized magazines that are obviously read by less than 1% of the population and don't have any money at all to promote their own views (which aren't, anyway, designated to be marketable in the first place).
So tell me, how do you know that you don't want so see German films from the 30s? And in the case you've really seen them and made an informed opinion of them, then how do you know that average Joe, who has been raised within a certain cultural framework intended at forming his beliefs before he even knows how to talk, doesn't?
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In addition, by your logic the government must fund exposure to each and every conceivable form of culture possible, so that everyone has a full range to choose from. That's just stupid. If you really want to look for something else, there's plenty of stuff on the web, or you can even use your own money - imagine that, not being able to use someone else's money - to go and find it. |
Stop being an ass. I'm not saying anything as "cartesian" as what you're accusing me of, as if I thought that each and every culture should receive a certain % of exposure decided by bureaucrats.. Simply, some market regulations combined with subsidies to artistic creation should do the trick to promote free artistry. That would be like, subsidizing different museums, funding art schools so that it doesn't cost 30,000$ a year to become an actor or a musician, tax credits to movie productions, etc. You do realize that restaurating an old painting or importing an African statue requires some expertise and money, don't you? What's wrong with the government contributing to such endeavours if it benefits society in a way that the market won't?
In most civilized countries they're doing it already, and my expose so far has been about continuing and enhancing these practices.
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It's like complaining that there aren't any good games in a particular genre because no one buys that type of game, and then demanding that the government fund development of that type of game and restrict the development of other types.
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Yeah, sure... that sophism is as big as a mammoth, shall we really need to debunk it? 
quote:
The problem isn't a monopoly, the problem is no one cares about your stupid culture! |
Are your legendary debating skills coming out again! So when AT&T was having a monopoly, the problem wasn't a monopoly but the fact that no one cared about other phone companies! I guess it's the same for M$ Windows?
Interestingly enough, you don't care about, say, Quebecois culture. Not that it's the most interesting in the world (a personal opinion) but like anything it's got worthy stuff. So next time you call it stupid can you name a single author from Quebec, and if you do, then explain how your knowledge of the works of a few, if not none, of our artists allows you to call a culture stupid?
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They're all happy to adopt ours! It's not our fault your own people don't like your culture as much as they like ours, it's yours. Why the hell should the government prop up anything that is failing for the sole reason that no one wants what it's selling? |
The problem is that the market is gobbling up areas of society that traditionnally haven't, and arguably shouldn't be deemed as consumable goods. In fact, your failure to acknowledge the coercive market forces in influencing cultural behaviors of the masses is ridiculous. When was the last time that AOL-Time Warner, who has not produced LoTR and has no interest in selling it, therefore decided to dedicate the cover of the Times to say Andrej Zulawsky, you know the famous Polish director, instead of giving it to LoTR?
An interesting case can be made when comparing France and America. The general intellectual level of French culture, in movies, litterature, theater, etc, is noticeably higher than that of America. Ever heard about the stereotype of boring French films?
The fact is that intelligent culture tends to make smart people. Idiots tend to believe that intelligent stuff is boring.
To answer your question plainly, the government has many interests in influencing free thinking and culture positively, because these are things that the market does not favor. Actually, they are at the exact opposite of the interests of a huge corporation, which is money.
You definitely overestimate the choice that average Joe gets in the cultural market. Something I can tell you from firsthand experience is that mainly anybody studying artistic topics in art school doesn't terribly like the way pop culture works, but later fall for it because it's their bread and butter. They have no real choice because they're facing powerful multi-billionaires foes. Student films are what they are, audacious and provocative, because they don't face financial constraints of bigger and badder productions. Give those people money and time to educate people, to push their talent to its limit, and you'll probably witness a change in what makes the bulk of culture.
You really convey a very naive view of the world, as if someone with the right amount of money and influence cannot decide what the consumers are going to want. I can point you towards very interesting essays on this topic.
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Oncle Boris
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Once in a brown moon
Aug 2001
time: 00:21
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quote:
Originally posted by Spiffor
False.
This argument lies on a common misconception, that I read often in cultural threads.
You assume that any product that has a potential for success will be sold, and thus meet the success it deserves. This assumption lies on an absolute trust in the market, that always both knows and acknowledges a potential success.
This is wrong. The people who decide what product is sold, they are human like you and me, they are prone to make mistakes, they are prone to conservative -a.k.a only sell "products that work".
There is a particularly telling example of a success that has been hindered by the decisionmakers' conservatism: French music on the domestic market. In the 90's, the radio stations destined to youth aired almost only American (and a bit of English) music. Then came the quota laws, that forced radio stations to air 40% of French music, including 20% of young artists.
French music sold extremely well in stores shortly after that. Some excellent bands arose and became famous. It was a complete renewal of French rock for instance, and a blossom of French rap. I like to tell it was like a "rain in the desert".
How come the customers bought so much a music that was supposed to suck, given that radio stations didn't air them?
Same works for movies. Crouching Tiger is one of the few non-American movies that had such international success. But many movies didn't manage it, because of crappy domestic marketing based on false assumptions by the decisionmakers. |
Spiffor, I admire your legendary patience in showing facts that I don't have the willingness to. 
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Sandman
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Sinister Penguin
Aug 2001
time: 05:21
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quote:
I would assume poor grammar, which is different from vocabulary, quite so, was not characteristic of Shakespeare |
It ain't not poor grammar. It's acceptable in polite Southern society.
According to thee, the seventeenth century English used words like 'ain't' like Southerners. Why do the Southerners not use other seventeenth century words? Why aren't words like 'thee', 'shalt' and 'knave' used by Southerners?
Furthermore, why don't recordings of English accents from one hundred years ago sound more like Southerners?
Oh, and why are the Pitcairn islanders described as speaking in an 'Olde English' accent (plus their Polynesian/English hybrid) even though they colonised the island in 1790, only a century after England was supposed to have been speaking like Southerners? There's no mention anywhere that their archaic dialect of English sounds 'Southern'.
Last edited by Sandman on 11-10-2004 at 14:42
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DanS
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Kickball Capital of the World
Jan 1970
time: 00:21
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I agree with Oerdin about this. A jolt inserted into the system can be good -- a catalyst that helps artists find an audience. I have no problem with that and we do that all the time in the US in other industries. (By the way, I do wonder whether these subsidized artists aren't just doing a "me-too" on the art coming in from outside.) However, continued subsidization enourages artists to do art without an audience.
When Spiffor mentions all of the good things that subsidization has brought initially, I say that's great, as far as it goes. But over time, I expect this protection from competition to be stifling to good, vibrant art.
Last edited by DanS on 11-10-2004 at 18:52
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Saras
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Vilnius, Lithuania
Apr 1999
time: 06:21
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Catastrophe? Choked by US values?
quote:
What Were They Thinking? Nobel Goes to Porn-Writing Phobic
Oct. 12 (Bloomberg) -- ``Who?'' In the English-speaking world, the Swedish Academy's announcement last week that Elfriede Jelinek had won the Nobel Prize in literature produced widespread incredulity.
Actually, the announcement produced two sorts of incredulity. The first, more widespread and benign, was among those who had never heard of the 57-year-old Austrian novelist and playwright. Despite the fact that her 1983 novel ``The Piano Teacher'' was made into a repellent 2001 movie starring Isabelle Huppert, Jelinek is barely known in the U.S. (Unscientific confirmation: five large bookstores in the towns of Boston; Westport and Norwalk in Connecticut; and New Paltz, New York, turned up only one copy of a Jelinek title.)
The incredulity among those who didn't know Jelinek's work was nothing compared with the incredulity, heavily seasoned by outrage, among those who did. Jelinek's particular brand of kinkiness tends to the sadomasochistic.
The official Nobel ``bio-bibliography'' ( http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2004/jelinek - bibl.html) says that in her novel ``Lust'' (1989), Jelinek ``lets her social analysis swell to fundamental criticism of civilization by describing sexual violence against women as the actual template for our culture.'' That is just lit-crit-speak for an exhibition of pornographic violence.
In ``The Piano Teacher,'' for example, an apparently prim Erika Kohut teaches at the Vienna Conservatory and lives with her emotionally suffocating mother.
Life of Fantasies
Erika has an active and unpleasant fantasy life, which she finally gets to share with Walter Klemmer, a nasty piece of work, who reads her deranged letters and becomes a willing collaborator in Erika's degradation. Pleads Erika: ``draw the belt in at least two or three notches, the tighter the better. There'll be old nylons lying around. Just stuff them into my mouth as deep as you can and gag me so cunningly that I can't emit the slightest peep.''
Klemmer unleashes a self-destructive passion in Erika and terrible prose upon the reader. Klemmer ``gnaws on her lips, his tongue plumbs her depths. He burrows around in Erika's innards as if he wanted to take them out, prepare them in a new way.'' Most of ``The Piano Teacher'' cannot be quoted in a mainstream news service, but you get the picture.
Ad Nauseum
Brutalizing sex would not be enough to attract the attention of the judges in Stockholm. A certain artiness is helpful -- the judges spoke in their official citation of Jelinek's ``musical flow of voices and counter-voices'' and ``extraordinary linguistic zeal.'' What the reader actually finds is an irritating literariness: the Marquis de Sade on a prolix day.
Jelinek's indispensable appeal is her politics. Her Web site notes she was a member of the Communist Party from 1974 to 1991. As the political commentator Stephen Schwartz pointed out in a piece on Jelinek in the Weekly Standard: ``After Soviet troops were withdrawn from the occupation zone of Austria in 1955, the Austrian Communist Party was little more than a KGB network.'' Jelinek left the party only when Moscow, reeling from the breakup of its empire, withdrew financial support.
If members of the Swedish Academy applauded works like ``The Piano Teacher,'' it was surely ``Bambiland'' (2003) that captured their hearts. One member of the Nobel committee enthusiastically praised the play as an exploration of ``how patriotic enthusiasm turns into insanity.'' What it really reveals is how reliably extreme left-wing sentiment turns into a simpleminded anti-U.S. diatribe.
Staying Home
Jelinek is given to preening gestures. In 2000, when the right-wing Freedom Party came to power in Austria, Jelinek prohibited the performance of her plays there, explaining that ``My words will have an effect in that they won't be heard anymore.'' She also has announced that because of a ``social phobia'' she won't travel to Stockholm to receive her award, though unlike Jean-Paul Sartre she has not gone so far as to refuse it.
There have been some worthy recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature in recent years: J.M. Coetzee, V.S. Naipaul, Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky to name a few.
Far too often, though, the prize has been lavished on literary mediocrities who happen to fulfill some geographical, ethnic or other non-artistic criterion, from Pearl S. Buck in 1938 to Camilo Jose Cela (1989) and Nadine Gordimer (1991). (There was much speculation that Philip Roth might win it this year; why didn't he?)
Even more troubling are those Nobels that are essentially politically correct badges of honor. Elfriede Jelinek joins left- wing fringe figures like Jose Saramago (1998) and Dario Fo (1997): writers whose works are political sermons masquerading as literature. Jelinek's innovation is to introduce a vicious sexual obsession into the infatuation with Communism. It is an unedifying amalgam. |
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Oncle Boris
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Once in a brown moon
Aug 2001
time: 00:21
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quote:
Originally posted by JohnT
So, you're essentially saying that the French government is subsidizing (for want of a better word) local variants of American musical forms?
Bravo! :clapping: |
French rap has built its own identity, topics, and content. No one said that a musical style was bad in itself. (edit) just because it emerged in America.
Last edited by Oncle Boris on 16-10-2004 at 20:02
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Geronimo
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st cloud USA
Jan 1970
time: 05:21
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quote:
Originally posted by chegitz guevara
quote:
Originally posted by Sandman
Who 'deliberately' changed the accent? . . . The upper classes? |
Asked and answered! As nationalism became a dominent ideology in Europe, the ruling classes decided that the nation's needed a single language, rather than a different dialect every twenty miles. In nearly every European country, efforts were underway in the 18th and 19th Century to standardize the national language. |
If the upper classes altered the national accent to make it more uniform how is it possible that the English all had southern accents when that would suggest that they already had a uniform accent and would not have felt any need to standarise it to make it uniform?
Something about this claim to know precisely what accent the english had hundreds of years before the first audio recording and that this original accent was a dead ringer for a miraculously unchanged modern accent seems to seriously stretch credibility.
At best I would suppose, we can possibly find evidence to suggest that a southern accent has changed less over this expanse of time than any other accent but even that would require some spectacularly comprehensive evidence to back up.
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11-10-2004 03:01
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