@blue_towel please 
Great read. I never thought of such things before, but now I will.
What do you call a banana with 4 legs?
I don’t know!
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what do you call… a forumer, with 96 quintillion eyes?
idk i need a name idea
only a couple paragraphs in but i need to say now this is an incredible read bro, do you do any other stuff i can follow?
after actually finishing, i definitely gotta reread more in the future, lots of layers. one thing you touched on (this isn’t as developed a thought, but might as well spit it out and figure it out later) was the change to discord’s stream like format. i feel like, in a sense, this could be part of a larger concept of almost the “entropy” (there’s likely a better word, but it’ll fit for now) of the internet. you mentioned before how the internet as a whole was much more niche and therefore personable. in that same personable sense, you’d see deeper conversations/more depth to interactions in general. but as the internet developed, it became more universal. i don’t think being more universal on its own is a bad thing, but a lot of things that followed i don’t enjoy. specific examples off of the top of my head are, where it was much more personable before, the larger scale has made communities seem less personable (ie how you compared vetex’s “celebrity status”) and less in depth. to accomodate for less depth, you see more short form content (think of the fast paced nature of tiktok). another offshoot i consider is the switch to more minimalist designs/artistic directions for sites, media, and whatnot, but i’d say it’s more associated with capitalism joining in on that universalness to take advantage of what’s available and cutting corners for money’s sake (frutiger aero is an example of the more older-internet style, although the term was only coined more recently - to me at least, having a style such as that felt more personable in that you could almost feel someone behind the work)
this is really shittily (if that’s a word) written with my obviously lacking vocabulary but felt like getting my thoughts out, might try to better format this later
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Yeah, I think this word is fine. Like even to focus on a specific example (memes), there was a time where internet memes were inscrutable if you were not familiar with internet culture (I remember the hilarious bouts of confusion by non-internet savvy middle-aged news broadcasters at a meme whenever something deranged happened on 4chan or Twitter or something) but nowadays the journey of a meme is to go from being hyperspecific to some closed-in internet community to spreading and then eventually being overused to the point of being reduced its most basic elements (typically “thing I like vs thing I don’t like”).
Like, “meme overuse” and “meme death” as concepts were taken very seriously at some point. Then, “meme overuse” was seen as genuinely repulsive since memes were tokens of internet seniority and it being distributed freely and wholesale to uninitiated members (often by parasitic uninitiated members) was antithetical to this function. Meme death was simply a result of this precise overuse. Nowadays both are treated as natural processes that memes undergo, though people might complain about it. In my case I was around at a time in which this crisis had already long since began and was reaching its breaking point. I talked about Behind the Meme and the harassment unleashed upon him by the meta-internet community that did not like the irreverence with which he used and freely outsourced the internet’s memes, though the truth was that the people harassing him were also newbies like myself who were gradually undergoing the same process as well and we simply rallied behind reactionary elements on the internet whom we had formed parasocial relationships with.
The internet community no longer possesses a universal internal mythology because there is no longer a mechanism by which this mythology is inculcated into new users (that being the general hegemony of nerd-dom). Nowadays small pockets of the internet develop unique cultural tendencies which are inevitably eroded as the group expands or as cultural exchange occurs. I initially talked about how these days most “new” memes (well, American ones) are either pop culture references, white people aping black people, and reinvigorations of old internet memes which are inevitably reduced from their initial form. The second one is getting more popular because a great deal of American culture is aping black people anyway (basically all modern genres of music are outgrowths from the black community, the obvious ones being rap, hip hop, jazz and the blues) and that’s been a unique feature of American society since its inception so its invasion into the internet is just the normalization of the internet into American cultural hegemony.
A less abstract example: someone had quoted something I said in the “Epic forum quotables” thread and one of the most recent comments is someone complaining about the lack of quality in recent uploads to the megathread:
I personally don’t think that the “quality” could possibly have changed all that much, and I would instead blame this on the effects of gradual cultural erosion (that is, the moments being quoted nowadays don’t hold much significant cultural value and the “lore” behind them is paper thin). Like, “HERE IM THE FUCK” isn’t any more funny than the navy seals copypasta and is almost illegible when read without context but it’s funny to me because I remember LordGaltron and the community’s reaction to them - that is, it functions as cultural currency and invoking it is like invoking one’s belonging. This belonging is dying gradually as the community undergoes expansion and it isn’t a coincidence that most of the better cultural relics occurred when Vetex was still creating WoM and then AO (the natural activity death that followed made the community more insular). A similar thing can be seen on Reddit’s r/MuseumOfReddit where the vast majority of posts were posted at least 7 years ago, though this subreddit is more stringently maintained by its moderators than the “Epic forum quotables” thread because its moderators are genuinely interested in treating it like a museum.
I think it’s actually the reverse and that the structure of the website precisely encourages the lack of depth, and since production on TikTok is predominantly amateur and fast moving the goal of the TikTok poster is to seize at the ephemeral threads of virality, whose movements are almost completely unknowable to them. The fast paced content optimized for virality is basically an adaptive strategy adopted by TikTok content creators.
Actually, my gut response to this part of your comment was that TikTok’s creators correctly noticed the tendency of the modern day consumer of social media content to engage in passive consumption and simply condensed this to its limit but I was wary of this train of thought and I didn’t want to be lead to a misanthropic conclusion about the matter. So I thought about it a little bit more and probed my own doubts until they were direct enough to be articulated in the form of a direct question: “Does the structure of social media apps afflict the activity of its users, or do the users simply incentivize certain structures to be made according to their already existing proclivities?” Upon further reflection, my current conclusion is that the former is the case and that the reasoning behind the proliferation of TikTok-esque structures among social media platforms is specifically that it is a more economical option. I’m not fully satisfied with this though; I’ll think about it a little bit more.
I hadn’t even considered internet aesthetics while thinking about the history of the internet over the past few days, thanks for this. I’ve seen this point articulated before and had previously accepted it but my main objection to this is that I’m not sure if it’s really true that the minimalist art-style is cheaper. It very well might be but modern websites also use complex CSS constructions that one might also consider “expensive” (this website uses a floating div for its post creation and has a live markdown preview display; these aren’t really “cheap” and I would intuit they would be more expensive to maintain due to being more complicated code).
Also, would this necessarily predict that with the wave of AI (by which such images can be easily generated quickly and with little cost) the modern “minimalist” aesthetics of websites would be abandoned? I do know that the minimalist style of this forum, for instance, is boring to look at but is also more readable for it, and Discourse’s forum creation baseplate’s flaws to me have much to do with them being too complicated, honestly (like why not just make the category page the default front page? It was like that earlier and the way it is now just makes things harder to navigate but I guess their intent was to incentivize users to look at newer posts?). Discourse, by the way, is the website that provides this forum with its baseplate. Roblox’s dev forum also uses Discourse.
One other thing that I just thought about was whether this was a global phenomenon or local to the English speaking internet. As a point of comparison, here’s Fallout’s official website as compared with that of a Japanese mobile game I fell in love with about 4 years ago. Actually, a better example on the Japanese side would be Dokkan Battle’s website. There are some stark differences - both Alter Ego and Dokkan Battle’s websites do not use navbars and use the vertical scroll as virtually the sole method of navigation - but the main point of my bringing this up is that this kind of mucks up the theory of “cutting costs” unless one supposed that Japanese capitalists are motivated by something different. I’m more partial to the idea that this change was simply a result of an artistic movement that has little to do with penny-pinching, and I’m guessing the “capitalist greed” perspective comes primarily and originally from artists who are in a precarious position currently due to the aforementioned revolutionary developments in AI generated art and long for more simple days. I might be wrong though.
Actually on second thought here’s a Japanese shopping website. It definitely still seems to adhere to older internet styles, and you would probably be called “shit at CSS” for suggesting this at a job as a frontend developer in the English speaking internet. This is all very interesting and I’m sufficiently ignorant on the topic for literally everything I wrote here to be wrong.
I’ve also never heard of this term, thanks again. I went on the reddit page and yeah, your description is rather apt. I think that the tendency to long to “feel” someone behind the work of art in a website that in the modern age is most likely just going to be used for buying and selling anyway is interesting since it seems like a reactionary urge (especially in the age of AI) to save online art from the cold unfeeling grasp of capitalist expansion (I imagine the Luddites would have also imagined factory-created textiles to lack the “human feel” of a professional weaver but this isn’t a common public outcry in the modern day). I’m somewhat sympathetic to it but I realize that life is cruel and our children will probably not care just as most today look upon the Luddites in the modern age as crazed fanatics and treat the word almost as a slur.
EDIT: Incidentally, the Wikipedia article pinpoints the revival of this category to the early 2023 period, presumably originally on TikTok. This is pretty nicely corroborated by the Reddit statistics of the r/FrutigerAero page, which show a spike precisely at that period, presumably from the content creation wave on sites like TikTok. This makes more sense to me as being as a result of AI panic.
Nah, it’s fine. Personally I wouldn’t fret too much about your vocabulary since that naturally builds up as you are exposed to more literature. I had said earlier that discord tends to “pull” its users (especially the younger users) towards adopting a kind of “performative stupidity” to protect the user from being serious and being taken seriously. This forum tends to be less supportive of the attitude (though this is partly because of the intervention of the moderators here, who are surprisingly competent when compared to a lot of Roblox discords that I remember) but is still all over the internet, which is how you get posts like this:
Obviously Dubious was emotionally vulnerable at the moment and this outburst is actually a result of several factors which are not mentioned in the thread but that their response to feeling like their art wasn’t being appreciated was to flee into the ever-outstretched arms of “artistic shitposting” (what I call “performative stupidity”) isn’t all that surprising. In truth all art (and really all forms of interhuman expression) require taking the risk of being misunderstood and the fundamental “human condition” (not even; even dogs experience this) with regards to interpersonal relationships in society is being uncertain of the opinions of other people. Maybe my views on this are overly affected by Neon Genesis Evangelion of all things and I need to interrogate them a little bit more but Dubious insulted (or rather, ridiculed) their own previous artistic endeavors by refusing to be genuine out of a fear of being hurt. It’s not like this is a serious art forum where the mods can ban you for not showing your art school credentials when prompted but “shitting up the forums” with non-serious art is non-productive and is genuinely irritating if the person wants to equate themselves with artists that take themselves seriously. Don’t read my interpretation into liu’s rebuke, though, I think she was annoyed for different reasons there.
Note that I don’t really have any negative feelings towards either party and I’ve also been in several situations (some in this very forum) where I acted out in an antisocial manner out of the fear of being genuine. Actually, my post after the first one I made here is exactly me explaining how my entire experience in this forum was exactly that. I’m just providing this as an example since I want to be understood. My point here is that the act of responding in a genuine manner is in itself laudable and reading all the English encyclopedias in the world will not get you any closer towards understanding the world around you if you do not dare to be “wrong” or “genuine”. So yeah, thanks for being genuine.
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what in the sam hell was I summoned to
this is a college textbook page holy shit
(time to read it all)
oh, well, okay I read the part I was mentioned in.
I dunno man, I was angry, and liu makes me tweak out genuinely (they’re like the only person I’ve actually blocked online unironically which is definitely saying a lot since I normally don’t block anybody) and I felt like I needed to create something (or I suppose, someone, if we look at sashanatashablissymaymeow as a genuine character rather than a shitpost) because at the time I saw people creating characters that I felt were uninspired and lazy. I saw how well they were doing with attention and reception from their pseudo-fanbases on here and I was honestly quite envious, because I thought that my works were more creative and had more effort into them and weren’t just another generic anime girl ice conjurer or something along those lines, and yet I didn’t feel as if I was getting as much reception as they did, which confused (and irritated) me a lot, and I felt like I needed to express my frustrations, through none other than a satire shitpost, as stated before.
I guess looking back it wasn’t exactly the most mature move but I don’t have much else to add onto it besides the fact that yea, I wasn’t in a good mental space at all and I was displeased with the state of the art community (I somewhat still am tbh but I’ve realized such stunts like making shitpost parody characters and pissing off mods I don’t like isn’t really worth anyone’s time, including my own.)
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actual distortion library of ruina
This is honestly extremely relatable to me, both with regards to feeling envious about the attention other people get and feeling contempt for how “base” or “low-effort” other people’s attempts at posting are. By the time I joined this forum I had long since stopped drawing out of what I can only now describe as burnout but I still felt this way about most writing projects, which were generally well-written but fundamentally uninteresting to me due to the content that they often covered. My views back then were a less clearly articulated version of my current views on the matter[1] but I think most of the angst that came with it at the point was that I was not even sure whether I was just being pretentious out of a feeling of inadequacy or if I was genuinely serious about my objections. My crime then was not daring to write anything simply under the expectation that nobody would care for it so in this regard you are already better than me.
The envy part is kind of funny because I feel like a common “ritual” undertaken on the internet is the denial of any attachment to virtual tokens of recognition like “likes” or “retweets” or “reposts” or whatever else. It’s like admitting that you really care about little things like that is genuinely humiliating even though everyone is on some level aware that everyone else cares about them. In my case the only real solution to this I found was placing myself in a position wherein likes are rendered meaningless to me but this would probably just be a reactionary urge and there might be a more healthy middle ground I have not yet explored.
Unfortunately I don’t think there’s really a solution in this case and what you would be fighting against (seen generally) is the rather recent phenomenon of fanart and what I intuit to be the cultural effects of postmodernism on the current age. I’m currently reading a book about the phenomenon as it pertains to otaku called Database Animals but one can easily find parallels between it and communities like “booktok” and the average art community online. People in the modern day in the vast majority of cases are increasingly only interacting with art as social currency in fandoms and specifically seek out hyper-specific genres of art to replay some emotional moment in their life so what one might describe as “laziness” but might be more aptly described as “rigidly following social trends” ensues. Like my sister was talking about some TikTok drama concerning an author whose writing is so self aware in its formulaicness that it’s like she just makes books to adhere to the standards of specific genres (like pushing out boxes from a factory). It’s a little bit frightening seeing as I have lived long enough to remember a time that was not like this but, having been an anime fan once, I saw this phenomenon happening long before it started reflecting on Western art fandoms and I’m already somewhat emotionally detached due to over-exposure. I suppose my one consolation is just how interesting the phenomena is, like this is totally uncharted territory that humanity is treading into and we are here to see it in its nascent stages. I regard this as a privilege.
[1] I’m putting this in a footnote because it’s not that important, but my opinion currently is that any attempt at “worldbuilding” is morally required to be politically sensible and that not doing that was essentially dehumanizing whatever you were depicting, which is often a reflection of some real group of people that have existed or still exist. So, a work of art depicting life in medieval europe that (as often is the case) completely ignores the plight of the peasantry to focus on life in the more prosperous merchant centers is fundamentally immoral, talk less of one that fancies itself with the goings about of royalty. That in itself is an opinion that the author is making and it is not a funny one to me. I actually attempted to get into worldbuilding in a fairly large worldbuilding discord but it was this same thread of irritation that led me to lash out at someone’s artwork that I deemed particularly offensive and eventually leave the discord. I haven’t attempted to worldbuild since then except in my personal time and that’s been going as slowly as one might expect. I realize that people are fundamentally just writing to have fun though and by being so punctilious I’m essentially not “reading the room”, like if I cared so much I should have just left in the first place.
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I don’t think I’ve ever seen you post a one paragraph reply
Can I hire you to do my English class for me
this always gets me a lot. It’s also one of the huge reasons why I’ve been slowly burning out from the AO art community as a whole to move on to other horizons, I just don’t think I have what it takes in me to conform and draw generic anime girls with 1 of 3 personality types and have no depth beyond that. I want to make cool things that people haven’t thought of yet, and following trends is basically the exact opposite of pioneering. Maybe I am being a bit pretentious but I can’t really lower my own standards in what I expect with my artwork, and I guess to a bit of an extent, the artwork I see from others.
Another thing that really gets me about this forum and why I’ve been moving away from AO’s art community is mainly for the fact that it really only seems like the most trendy pieces of artwork are always just thirst-trap horny art for teenagers, which, as a teen myself, I’m just not exactly super comfortable with making. I wouldn’t ever stoop so low to be making weird borderline predatory art (like femboy morden, if you know what that is) to get clout, but it seems like it’s technically the most viable strategy on the forum, or really on any social media platform in general.
I guess I could learn to draw female characters a little more often (I have quite a few female OCs) though I don’t think I’d consider them horndog anime bait material in the slighest… I mean, one of them is literally a sentient apple, but I think I’m starting to ramble a bit.
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I’ve tried this too, take my word of advice, it’s absolutely not worth it
nepotism hell.
if you thought last one was bad this one’s super rambly good luck reading
i agree with this, i think i just worded it weird (“accomodate” probably skewed the direction i was intending, maybe more “as a result of less depth”). where you also mentioned whether short form social media affects its users or vice versa, i would say it’s a mix of both. with the entropy idea, i feel like short form has massively gained popularity over recent years (i’d say maybe ~2020- most notably, especially with covid shutdowns) and in turn, affects users (ie lowered attention span - i find myself doomscrolling tiktok way too much)
it’s kind of a stretch given i’m associating it with one specific symptom of adhd and there’s likely other affecting aspects (mental health generally being more acknowledged in recency - more likely for people to get tested in the first place) but the uptick in diagnoses, especially among younger people, could definitely show correlation.
shit i meant to mention ai art in that post lmao. i think nostalgia ends up playing a huge role for this sort of thing (ie frutiger aero’s trending), mostly for people born late 90s/00s. for me at least, i have a lot of good memories tied to around that era and just appreciate that aesthetic in general. in hindsight, my claim that the more modern minimalist style is to cut costs doesn’t sound quite right, but i do think it correlates with trying to be more universal for the internet’s overall massive growth (safer option to display a blank slate with little personality that anyone can use than a specific personality that’d realistically only resonate with a certain niche group). i think from there, with ai art’s developments, it almost seems like a final destination for minimizing that personal aspect in general, and is a lot more apparent in regard to cutting costs (no need to pay an artist/designer when you could type some words and getting something made yourself, though i’m not certain if this’ll persist in the future, given the potential legal issues with how, for example, ai art engines had used artists’ work without permission, though i wouldn’t be surprised if said suit went nowhere). but anecdotally at least, i just don’t like seeing ai art everywhere, it just leaves a bland taste in your mouth after seeing so much. (i have no clue where my thought train is headed with this part so i just gotta move on)
this genuinely shocked me to a degree reading this cuz of how surprisingly relatable this is in some aspects. to diverge a little, in a very simple definition, i see something funny > it makes me laugh > i like that feeling - it’s almost primal in a sense. but for me, i feel like it’s really easy to almost lose myself in trying to amuse myself (ie difficulty in trying to be genuine). a lot of the time i spend on these forums (and a lot of the internet in general) i’m just trying to enjoy myself or whatnot. typically i’ll leave lil quippy oneliners cuz i thought it was funny and hoping others do to. but when i saw your initial post here, it really sparked trying to better analyze and interpret my thoughts as a whole (i feel like i’m aware of this sort of thing, but don’t often do much about it for the sake of bliss, as much as i hate or want to think on it), so definitely thanks for that.
i feel like i had some other thoughts to type out, but my brain is way too scrambled atm, might try to leave some more later
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That’s fair, I had initially brought up pretension because that’s an inevitable thread of self-doubt that comes up in most people’s mind when they attempt to critique others (it certainly does for me) so I expected that you would have also considered it. I don’t think you’re wrong, though.
I have heard someone describe art as “necessarily intersubjective”, that is, necessarily shared by more than one mind, necessarily social. The increasingly modern sentiment that runs directly counter to this is that “art is subjective”, where in this case “subjective” actually means “necessarily intra-subjective”, atomized, central, and belonging solely to the artist themselves. The consequence of this more modern conception is the complete denial of criteria of what makes art good that surpasses individual sentiments and emotional reactions, though like all modern (capitalist) conceptions of the individual that reign supreme in public discourse it doesn’t make much sense and the people saying it do not act like it’s true anyway.
Like, you and I both know that the only reason why people are attached to those “generic anime girls” are because of the things they have watched and the memories attached to them (though unbridled teenage lust is also a part of it) but if you were to interrogate anyone on it they would likely say that it’s “their taste” and that you have no right to critique them because “art is subjective”. In actuality the modern human desire to seek the opinions of others on their “taste” in art bears witness against them on this charge - if it were exclusively intra-personal, why would they be so offended by your disregard of it? Art has always throughout history been social and it is only now, when the socialization of art has reached an insane degree due to the forces of capitalism (I’m in Canada in a forum with people all over the world talking about a Japanese art form right now), that people are this interested in completely denying its sociality. That is also interesting to me, though.
Yeah, it’s been becoming increasingly obvious that the internet has made pornography and all its exploitative consequences impossibly difficult to defeat in a way that would not require capitalism itself to be brought to its knees, though to be clear this was always true. This is just more obvious now because the rate at which such works are being churned out has intensified, especially with the creation of art generating AI. The consequences of this can be felt throughout the internet, and one of them is this.
I remember watching a series on YouTube called Helluva Boss. At the time, I think I was mostly interested in seeing how the plot would go and I’m not interested enough in it anymore to go and rewatch it (my reasons for disliking it are related to what I said in the post you’re replying to) but with you having brought this up I’ve come to the realization that this situation is a lot more tricky than it seems at first glance, since a lot of what I would consider “thirst-trap” art cloaks itself in progressive language and pantomimes as “sexual liberation”, which is a progressive movement that is unfortunately gradually getting weaker.
Yeah, I’d seen it before when I was here. Obviously content like that is extremely entertaining to a lot of people for reasons that cannot be divorced from the increasingly frequent consumption of pornography by the average internet user but it is very predatory, as you said. Actually the entire conception of a “femboy” is predatory and its acceptance into the parlance of otherwise progressive individuals is an example of the weakening of the sexual liberation movement that I mentioned, like people genuinely look at the violently predatory and pedophilic practice of pederasty of Greek and Roman civilizations and get “gay acceptance” from it. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.
I don’t really draw anymore so just how much my opinion is worth can be questioned but honestly I think if you are able to interrogate why exactly you draw in the first place (and what you want your reasons to draw to be) then you will find a solution. That you are questioning the moral implications of what you are expressing artistically is already a step in the right direction.
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you know, this is probably a bit of an unpopular take, but personally, if you make artwork, or do any creative pursuit that has a finished final end product, but you don’t share it… that makes your artwork rather useless doesn’t it?
a painting with no audience to admire it, is just a picture in a frame.
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Never seen a footnote this huge before
I suppose this is where my experience fails because, for reasons probably particular to my own personal “life-journey”, I never got to using TikTok or Instagram. I only have accounts on both platforms because all the friends I made did and they wanted to be able to contact me through them. I’m not sure why things turned out this way but I think it was mostly due to circumstance: I was already an avid YouTube user and I happen to not be very adventurous when it comes to new platforms so by the time TikTok became very popular I was not compelled to use it. In the case of Instagram, it was definitely just social awkwardness and paranoia since I perceived Instagram to be more “personal” in the sense of requiring you to compromise personal information and I was averse to it for that reason. It feels like this way of thinking of the internet is a vestige from my earlier experiences in the mid 2010’s; most people using the internet now do not care about anything I just said and my younger sisters find my logic irrational. But I’m not sure how complete this attempt at self-analysis is since a good number of those people who were using the 2010’s internet with me are currently posting on TikTok. In truth it’s probably a combination of several factors.
The closest parallel I can think of in my life is aimlessly scrolling through comment sections on YouTube. I’m not sure just how relatable this might be but I found that I was really only doing it for the slight chance that I might see something interesting to amuse myself with, in actuality most comments are rather dull and boring and the excitement of seeing an interesting comment is never really worth the hours spent scrolling (in the worst case). I remember the issue being serious enough that I had to download uBlock Origin just to make sure I couldn’t see the comment section anymore, but whenever I was feeling down (and my urge to doomscroll has always been related to my emotional state at the time) I would just use some other browser to scroll through the comments anyway. This solution wouldn’t work with TikTok and Instagram since the mobile apps do not support extensions and my experience of using both apps on my phone’s browser was genuinely dreadful.
Yeah, I’d say part of my personal development was realizing just how “automatic” the entire process felt, and describing it as “self-amusement” seems like a perfect description to me. In fact, if one considers the main goal of an internet poster to be self-amusement then everything else makes sense. Obviously what counts as amusing oneself will differ based on what is being discussed but there are some commonalities. I think you’re being sufficiently vague here for me to not know precisely what you mean by amusing yourself but I hope I wasn’t too off-base.
Instinctively I am cautious towards this for reasons that you have already stated, but it’s also important to note that ADHD is not actually literally tested by doing an MRA scan on the test subject’s brain but is instead diagnosed through behavioral examination, so it should very well be expected that ADHD be a socially contingent phenomenon. That it commonly isn’t articulated in such a matter is also something interesting. I have some thoughts on that but they are extremely underdeveloped.
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Basically, though my inclination to not be so “harsh” when saying this to people says more about me than anything, honestly. Art is used and has always been used by human beings in an intersubjective way, so any attempt to describe art as a sociological phenomenon cannot ignore this. For most of human history this has been common sense but that common sense has been sacrificed for the sake of something else (I think it has something to do with the idea of intellectual property, but this isn’t a developed thread of thought yet).
I remember once reading an article on Maori poetry (for a worldbuilding project, if I remember correctly) and it was talking about the fact that they did not perceive poetry as “belonging” to anyone other than the culture itself. The article was interesting but I couldn’t help but think: “Isn’t this how it’s always been?” I mean, it’s not like Romans didn’t know that Ovid wrote the Metamorphoses but the work itself would have been considered a “Roman work”, if you get what I mean.
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I really like the topic of this thread, you seem to be!! Very nice, Loki!
(I am quite bad at socialising, apologies 
)