Comradeship // Freechat

Yeah you can look at it as the result of someone's trauma from WW1/WW2 and dealing with Industrialisation. Hobbits are a reflection of Rural Britain and no one can say different

Tolkien said that his works didn't intentionally contain any specific allegories. In other words, Gandalf is not supposed to be a direct stand-in for Christ for example. But that doesn't mean that there aren't Christian influences on Gandalf that the reader can infer, along with other types of influences, or read into Gandalf futural aspects that didn't even exist at the time of writing. There is complexity to Gandalf.

He just didn't like simplistic meaning like that because it kills the depth and layers of interpretation to the story. Instead of saying "Gandalf is a fully fleshed out, independent character" people say "Gandalf is just Christ!" and either leave out or don't need or want the Gandalf character development because they already know he's just Christ.

I use that example specifically because he disliked how C.S. Lewis (close friend of Tolkien, by the way) made the Lion in Chronicles of Narnia a literal and direct allegory for Christ, like the Lion is literally Christ, which Tolkien found to be lazy and hated allegories for this reason.

Certain Tolkien nerds are so obnoxious about this, it's like a mantra. In a lot of online spaces if you ever try to talk about allegory in Lord of the Rings you'll get a dozen of these people responding purely to tell you Tolkien hated allegory. As though everyone isn't already aware.

ai art is art because people are mad about it.

Most persuasive point here haha

Also seems useful to separate the economic impacts of AI art (on artists, on the environment, etc.) and larger criticisms of how AI is currently used (destroying the usefulness of search engines) from the question of whether AI art has artistic value.

i totally agree with you! https://www.marxists.org/archive/kim-jong-il/works/On-Fine-Art.pdf

I think the author's perspective is the solution should aim towards the social organisation of workers (in this case artists) as a group in a step towards the worker's state; the technology is not the problem but the privatisation of the surplus value from socialised labour is. Art-luddites (if such a thing is even possible now) would actually be a good thing - they could threaten "machinary" to gain leverage for workers at large.

It is not one's personal failure for attempting to survive in a system that exploits one and their labour, neither is a recognition of any classes that we fit in that is not exclusively proleteriat. As individuals maybe our only realistic solution be attempts towards becoming petty-bourgoisie or highly sought after labour aristocrats - if not already there - (which will not mitigate sufficiently the contradictions) but as an organisation the scope is much much more.

We have to remember when we are reading more radical writing that they are trying to push where we could be as a society ie the opposite of tailism. However, we should always place those ideas in the context of our own realities and trial them where appropriate, and learn on the feedback from this process - that is the more scientific and dialectic approach.

I felt the same way. I would liken it to the author technically living in the same city, but they were describing the other side of it and mistaking their small sphere and local description for the rest of us in that city. Their idea of the art world was similar yet very foreign. A few proverbial landmarks could be seen from both our relative places, but they lost me with their inaccuracies so their critiques and conclusions didn't land.

Art has already been industrialized. Content, which is the only thing AI can make, is not all of art. Art and the creative fields are part of an evolutionary survival strategy to impart experiences to others. If you've ever wondered why the Greeks had only two genres, Drama and Tragedy, it is because Drama was about helping people navigate the world, and tragedy was a warning of what not to do and why. So if class consciousness will help people the most, then the most substantial form of art will pass that experience along (e.g., Social Realism). Modern narratives are mainly content—and we can see that they are unsubstantial because they are "just entertainment" (Fun fact: American films had their right to free speech revoked in 1952 for this reason). They exist for profit. Art is much more than that, and if art helps us, the working class, better navigate life with experiences we don't yet have, I would argue such art is inherently revolutionary. That is why the ruling class can't make new stories; they only make entertainment and content, lest they risk imparting valuable lessons to the working class. And yes, this is a summed-up version of a fascinating thread of soviet art philosophy but one that the author of that article has either never encountered or has a more limited audience (i.e. western lib artists) the article is applying to than let on in the preamble.