Total Eclipse

“You are a total nutcase, completely deranged, delusional, paranoid. Your thought process is all fucked up. Your information train is jammed, man!” – the character of Jeffery Goines, in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.

A disturbing thought has occurred to me, one which relates to a mess of other thoughts concerning our culture and it’s biases.
I often have arguments concerning intellectual property. I’m of the opinion that culture needs to be (mostly, nearly, ideally) free, while the most prominent counter-argument is that artists need compensation for their work. True enough. My normal response to that is that our society will find a way to compensate artists, because we need them, and we need culture. Besides, it’s not like artists only do it for the money, and while it’s fair that talented people be able to live comfortably, I’m not sure it’s in our society’s best interest that the richest people it produces, the celebrities it quotes and stalks and congratulates again and again with ridiculous awards are the popular performance artists of our time.
It’s always a question of who stands to gain and who stands to lose, and to me it is obvious that in the current mode of intertwined art and entertainment industry, those who stand to lose form a paradigm shift are not the talented artists we’re all inclined to protect. Talented visual artists of our age slave in veal-fattening pens (aka cubicles) in the advertising industry. Talented performance artists are rare and far between, and often quite deranged.
There’s a new film out about Madonna where her grace shows us the light, or rather, how bonkers she really is with her new age crap. We all know about Britney Spears, Tom Cruise, Michael Jackson, The Artist formerly known Prince, and the like. A question arises, is this really more common in showbiz, or is everybody batshit crazy and these people just get more exposure?

Hard to say really, but let’s assume for a moment not everyone is fucked up (a trying thought experiment, I know), is there something about fame and fortune which drives you off the deep end?

We live in a society that pays (some) actors more than it pays most teachers, doctors, and nuclear physicists. Economists would credit this to marginal utility, but I think at the bedrock level, the question of subjective value becomes a question of ethical, or absolute value. This in turn, becomes a question of political value, which might explain why in the United States, Actor’s Guilds are just as much a resource for aspiring politicians as Academia or Big Business.

The real problem? Most performance artists have nothing to say. They read from scripts, written by (more often than not) better people than themselves. They dance and sing to music produced and lyrics written by better people than themselves. Every newsstand in the west is filled with magazine-worship of a culture of The Fake.
And these are our Godheads we present to the world.
Hear that Confucian civilization? Hear that Islam?
Christendom The West will have you kneel before our modern-day Madonna. Beg for mercy from the most powerful woman on the planet, Oprah Winfrey. Take heed not to offend Mel Gibson, or he shall smite you down with his redneck God and his redneck money.

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So the next time you download something off the internet, remember, the people who are most hurt by this are deranged and have no souls.

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Then again, maybe we’re all nuts.

The End.

Tagged as biases, copyright, creativity, culture, insanity, intelectual property, quotation, showbiz, subjective value + Categorized as Art/Culture, Social Politics