Bad Art Friend

luka

luka

Well-known member
not me. keep hoping craner will write a scurrilous novella featuring a vicious pen-portrait of me as a minor character but he hasnt got round to it yet.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
edmund has known such a improbable cast of grotesques that he is perfectly placed to be a bad art friend to all of them but again, hasn't got round to it. but really an unparelled number of delusional narcisists, underhand schemers and backstabbers, addicts, thieves, conmen, wanton hussies....
 
sus

sus

Moderator
entertainment said:
I think the appetite for something like this article Bad Art Friend is more about the sense of superiority it produces in the reader over these obviously delusional and shitty but more importantly miserable and unfulfilled people. What propels you through an otherwise boring and inconsequential story is the validation of the animus your harbor towards some vague cloud of the social layer they represent. It is obviously teased up to a perverse degree by the journalist.
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I also think that this board isn't fully the target audience, and like The Feminist or Cat Person, the piece goes viral because it touches on a buncha hot-button topics in a way that's morally ambiguous (instead of just playing into existing ideological positions). Many people reading this Times piece I imagine feel conflicted about whether plagiarism is OK or not (conceptual art, Andy Warhol vs middle class values on copyright law and intellectual property), and about the culture war discourse (how race is weaponized, punching up vs. down rhetoric, whether HAPAs are even POCs). Plus, women's nastiness has been effectively censored from much of modern liberal media, in favor of an oppressed pacifist saint narrative (see also American Indians, long familiar with this kind of othering), but mean girls are real! The way (some) women are highly effective at social games, reputational warfare, and status play is keenly of interest to people right now, because it's both underrepresented and highly relevant—especially if you're a woman. So you don't end up like poor clueless Dawn, who can't even recognize when her "friends" are playing nasty games with her.
 
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sus

sus

Moderator
Clinamenic said:
I can see value in this kind of public therapy way of communicating, as I've engaged in here. But it seems people can over-feel things, just as I am prone to over-think things. Halfway through the article and I have trouble understanding why Dorland took such offense.
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Did you finish the article? When it gets into "gaslighting" it gets very interesting. Because yeah, Dorland probably overreacted a bit at first, but then you go—wait, she had this hunch—and her friends told her she was crazy—but that hunch was spot-on. Something was up.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
luka said:
Dorland was a person who is sneered at and marginalised by the Liberal Elite, the people whos respect and friendship she had been trying to gain not realising it was impossible because she is inherently the wrong type of person. its natural that she was hurt by this realisation.

The Brooklyn Cultural Mafia thread is also about this which is why Gus is drawn to the story.
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Not untrue! Except for the ascription of motivation—pretty much everyone on Twitter's been buzzing about it for weeks, so I finally dove in—but you're right that it's a story about hierarchy, and beautiful losers, and realizing that people in a certain group won't value your contributions the way you expect them to. That your meta-logic of their values and motivations is all wrong. You haven't abstracted properly from the concretia.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Traldi writes:
What’s endearing to me is—maybe rightly, maybe wrongly—imagining Dorland thinking to herself: These writers are all into good causes, like gay marriage and Black Lives Matter. So I’ll join a good cause too … something like, I don’t know, donating my kidney. I’ll fit in that way, and I’ll seem good. It makes sense, doesn’t it? It makes sense in the same way that it made sense for me, as a child, to think “amn’t” would be a valid English contraction. But kidney donation isn’t the right sort of good cause. You signal your dedication to it by donating your kidney, not by learning to throw around jargon about white saviors and so on. I’ve had moments like that too—moments in which, in a fit of absolute and devastating hickishness, I took it for granted that the people who spend all their time talking about being good, about hardship and evil and justice and so forth, would be thinking hard about what’s actually good. But they’re not, and in particular, there’s little that people in politics hate more than the idea that the most morally important actions might be those which, though they might require some sacrifice, just about anyone can take, like donating money, or donating an organ, or treating close friends and family the right way.
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Which, I'm less confident that this kind of essentializing, "it's not about what you do, it's about who you are" ethic is the core motivation, but it gestures at the same idea—Dorland getting the logic of their values wrong.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
version said:
Has anyone here ever had a bad art friend?
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Once an ex-girlfriend asked me to be like, writing partners? where we share new bits of work every couple weeks and give feedback. In the very first round of swapping text, she messaged me saying that my poem was "violent" and "aggressive" and "disturbing" and she didn't think it was a good idea to continue. That was alright by me; IIRC her submission was an essay on how Google was racist.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
It's actually a poem about the day after the election, very topical, I should post in comment
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
this is harder than i expected you might have to get version to find it. it starts off with everyone eating nachos and going hilary is going to be an awesome prez! i stand with her! and then the horror show starts
 
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