Bad Art Friend

[craner]

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

I really want to read this too.

I missed out on this part of our election thread because I drank three bottles of wine and passed out before any meaningful results came in.

 

[linebaugh]

And I really like watching Squid Game myself, and relish the nastiness of it.

I suppose it's cathartic? To think yes it is shit isn't it.

Black Mirror, another big cult show, constantly bleak.

I think its partly the low lying sense that we need to be punished, original sin, civilization built on top an innate evil and thus tainted. My mother in law ( ambiguously conservatize, deeply suerstitous woman in bumfuck texas) loves straight to sci fi channel movies- about swarms of killer snakes and bugs and tornados and etc- nature striking back at mans hubris and wiping the slate clean

 

[sus]

Actually come to think about it she did write some personal essay about me that she submitted to the New York Modern Love column. (They didn't publish it)

 

[sus]

I should find that. Would it be unethical to share? Probably. Okay I won't.

 

[luka]

i like
one-time-Berlin’ers and
Deleuze punks

maybe you made a mistake moving out of NYC maybe she is your one true muse

 

[yyaldrin]

what is a bad art friend? im too tired to read, can someone summarize in a few sentences?

 

[luka]

one girl donated a kidney and wanted to harvest the praise and admiration commensurate with that selfless act
another girl turned this into a story using personal information and letters in the story

the first girl was at the margins of the in-group, the second girl was at its heart

the first girl wanted to be and thought she was friends with the second girl.

the second girl looked down on the first girl.

the first girl was upset her life had been used as the basis for a story written by her so-called friend
particularly as she had been cast in an unflattering light

she tried to prevent publication, sue etc

bitter acrimonious fallout

the story is written in an oily,smarmy, prurient manner characteristic of american literary culture over the last 20 years

 

[woops]

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....

Or, perhaps, I'm too principled

 

[version]

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.

Who's the bad art friend in this situation; the ex-girlfriend taking on corporate America or the ex-boyfriend penning bloodthirsty sonnets?

 

[yyaldrin]

i always had a feeling andy warhole was a bad art friend

 

[craner]

He was a bad art vampire

 

[sus]

Who's the bad art friend in this situation; the ex-girlfriend taking on corporate America or the ex-boyfriend penning bloodthirsty sonnets?

I don't think it was bloodthirsty I think it was about the inherent brutality of tribalism and the way fear leads inexorably to violence

 

[william_kent]

what's the fuss about? this was like reading one of those long convoluted articles about the legal battles of outraged straight to kindle werewolf erotic fiction/ romance novelists where one author will insist that the other plagiarised them because there is a knot scene and then the other will argue that knot scenes are a trope of the werewolf sex genre...everyone is a loser in these games..

but.. is the kidney woman supposed to be a sympathetic character? I couldn't empathise with her neediness - who checks to see who hasn't commented on a post? and then emails questioning why you haven't recognised their superior humanity in selfless donation of vital organs? if you were truly selfless would you feel the need to advertise your charitable acts? who sues their "friends" in the first place? No wonder the in-group took the piss... if the kidney woman had posted here I'm sure there would be merciless memes aplenty...

 

[luka]

there isn't supposed to be a sympathetic character. i thought gus explained that well actually.

 

[luka]

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.

this is what im referring to

 

[william_kent]

I (mis)read that as Gus being sympathetic to "poor clueless Dawn", the victim of a cabal of "mean girls" - hence my confusion

 

[luka]

you can be sympathetic towards her without her being a sympathetic character. we can feel for her as a victim of class snobbery basically while also cunting her off in our own heads, like everyone else did

 

[william_kent]

but I'm not sympathetic to her at all - she sought attention and received it, it just wasn't the adoration she expected

 

[luka]

fair enough. i have some sympathy for her as the target of in-group snobbery and scorn.

 

[WashYourHands]

Dewey Crowe got there first with four kidneys