Authenticity and Mirror Images

If our art is a mirror, why do we need it?

Your enthusiasm for this show makes us think we should start watching it.  You make a lot of excellent points about the current state of TV and what can be done to improve it.

Now mind you, (disclaimer) we have not seen this show but we have heard about it. Of course, we have big ears, so we hear about a lot.

A few things make us perk up our ears though -  Tolstoy?  Really? Does he mean like Battlestar Galactica was? Even though I'm sure it's good,  I'm pretty sure that War and Peace, it ain't.

As for some modicum of moral complexity layered atop the baseball batting, this isn't new, it's just that now it is being brought into our living rooms. Scorcese made films more interesting for awhile when he perfected the gritty realism that came to typify his early style. Unfortunately, he had his imitators too, who amped up the id and forgot about the ego.  Soon, his ego made him fall for this too, when he made technically superior dramas with lots of stabbing and little else.

Is it possible that the complexity, intelligence and interesting elements such as "randomness" are merely, really, a cheap catharsis?

Like 3d, Justin TV provides a mirror. What does it tell us? Maybe a philosophy degree from Yale doesn't mean much.

Behind the scenes, isn't that kind of redundant?

Pretty cool. Maybe seeing isn't believing after all.

Well put. Such a horrendous act, and the use of media in this manner, make us hit pause, and wonder what we have wrought.
The problems are quite deep, actually.

The idea of art and images as a mirror has evolved to our present state where the values espoused - therapuetic, informational, documentary - are well known “virtues”. Yet, anyone who has looked through microscope, or a Walker Evans photo, and really thought about them, will understand how much images don’t tell us. Yet in this era, the idea that seeing is believing is paramount.

A mirror is not a virtue of art but rather deconstructs it and the meaning it might have. Art could help us understand who we are, but instead, we get weak “selves” reflected back. What is this latest grotesque monster, but the reflection of our most hideous selves, played over and over for emphasis. IWe can gaze at ourselves transfixed, but we might end up like Narcissus, and drown from such ardor. In this age of the screen, it is unlikely much will be repressed.



 

The aid of existentialism, in knowing our selves?

The Mob  is a mirror.

One thing that most of the pundits don't understand, and therefore don't report, is there is no "democracy" of information with web 2.0 (yet at least) Rather, it is a tyranny of tech users. Why on earth is it that this is the big event on Digg? Is it because it is news in the broader sense, and a  cross-section of America cares about how to bootleg DVD's? Or, is it because that's what's big to Digg's user base? The rest of America isn't digging this. There is no revolution. There's a mob, that's getting center stage like vandals often do.

The reason Web 2.0 seems to democratize news is because they are promoted by complicit tech journalists. These folks need to know where there next interview is coming from.  Further, most of these journalists are fetishists about technology anyway, and are more full of overstatement than critical judgment. Didn't anybody recognize snakeoil during the last economic bubble?

Lastly, if indeed news was a democracy, Lord help us all. The last thing a Democracy needs is a user base with a projected will. What will that projection look like?

oh, look at the "naughty bits"