What Becomes of Art Without Limits and the Trouble of Snapchat Dysmorphia
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Art in the Absence of Limitations
I’ve been watching a lot of Rick Beato lately. He’s got one of the few great YouTube channels amid the throngs of shit that is YouTube content. He’s a music producer who now runs a channel talking about everything music, and I love it because this guy actually knows what he is talking about.
In the past week or so, he has released a series of videos that touch on something that I have really thought a lot about for quite a few years now, and that is the cheapening of art. The fact that people care less and less and invest less of their time, money, and attention into art in all forms, whether it be music, film, dance, painting, illustration, etc.
In Rick Beato’s case, his focus is on music and why music is getting worse, and how he’s noticed that people just truly care less about music today than they did in the past. I think almost everything Rick says in these videos could be applied to movies, which is something very close to my heart. I want to link some videos here and just discuss things that come to mind when I watched these videos.
This is the first in a series of videos he made on the topic recently:
In Rick’s opinion, why is music getting worse?
Reason number one: music is getting easier to make.
There are a plethora of technologies helping everyone, on any spectrum of musical talent or dedication, create sound that sounds like you are immensely talented in all the ways a musician can be. This has the consequence of devaluing actually learning how to be a good musician who understands theory, timing, techniques, dynamics, tempo, etc.
Why are all these technologies that make making music easier a bad thing?
“Creative dependence on technology limits peoples ability to innovate.”
“It creates a homogenization of music. The over reliance on similar tools… creates a lack of diversity… it leads to music becoming more formulaic and people just following trends.
“Quality versus quantity… the easier production makes the process go faster, which creates an oversaturation of music, making it harder to find really exceptional things.”
This directly correlates to A.I. “music” and platforms like Spotify now creating fake artists with A.I. generated songs. The platform is becoming saturated with fake music of low quality that follows an individual Spotify user’s own personal taste. So now the listener can be over saturated with homogenized, low-quality music. It should be noted that now Spotify doesn’t have to pay any artist royalties on this music. They get 100% of the profit. Can you see the economic efficiency incentives here? If that wasn’t offensive enough there are a number of lawsuits against A.I. music companies because they are using human-made, copyrighted music to train their A.I. learning models.
Reason number two: music is too easy to consume.
In 2023 there were more than 100,000 songs added to streaming platforms every day. That’s more than 1 song per second for the entire year. You have this endless stream of new content always accessible as long as you have access to a device with the internet and $11.99 a month.
Rick said:
“By comparison, when I was a kid, if I wanted to buy this Led Zeppelin record, I had to get a job or borrow money from my parents to buy it, because I wanted to own it. I wanted it to be in my collection… I bought this album with the money I made bagging groceries. You actually had to expend energy riding your bike or walking to your job, working your shift, getting your paycheck at the end of the week depositing it in the bank getting money out going to the record store, buying the record, bringing it home, playing it, listening to it a bunch of times, going to your friends house, and sharing it with them… When a kid opens Spotify and clicks on a song and they don’t like it, they can just skip to the next one.”
Compare all of that to how easy and cheap it is to have access to almost any song that has ever been created being immensely easy to access and, if you choose, disregard. Compared to having to work for the experience, to having to put effort in to earn the art, and therefore placing yourself in a more likely psychological position to actually focus your attention on listening and engaging with the music. What he described reminds of me a really good meal, one that was created through your labor or someone else’s. Modern art, whether it is music or film or whatever, is so low quality and cheap. It’s like fast food.
“Which is why music is not as valued by young people. There is no sweat equity to obtaining it, having it be part of your collection. Having it be part of your identity of who you are.”
“What I am saying is that music has basically become valueless…”
“You vote with your attention.”
“Just a couple of times a week, play just a few songs. Don’t look at your phone, or as I like to call it, the “thought deletion device.” Because it empties your mind out.”
The same parallel can be said about film in many ways. Previously, one had to put effort in to drive or walk or bike to a place, not in your own home, and go sit in another physical location to then have no other distractions, therefore committing yourself and your attention to focus and fully engage with film.
This has all led me to want to really declutter my mind. Why is it that I rarely listen to an album from start to finish, or that I have such a hard time focusing on anything these days? Well, it’s because I’m surrounded by all sorts of cheap shit that clutters my mind.
Here is another video Rick did as a response to the response he got from the previous video:
“People don’t care about music as much as they used to.”
In Google trends, the term “music” since 2004, 20 years ago, has fallen to 25% of that original search trend, dropping by 75%. The term “art” is down 60%. So if people don’t care about art or music, what do they care about? Maybe video games? Nope, video games are also down around 60%.
“Well, what is actually up? Social media, it’s at its highest right now. Social media is what people are on. They are on TikTok, they’re on Instagram, they’re on YouTube shorts, but practicing music, listening to music, or looking up things about art or playing video games? They’re not doing that. Why is music and video game playing going down? Because it takes work. And they don’t want to put in the work. Because it’s way easier to put TikTok on…and swipe up.”
What a wild thought to think that all art forms including gaming have become less valued and less important. The idea that even gaming requires too much work to participate in for most people really is something interesting to digest. We really have become mindless consumers addicted to the endless easy scroll from our devices that numb our minds.
This next video has not as much of value in here except this line from Orson Wells.
“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”
Goddamn, if that hasn’t been on my mind lately.
“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”
In a world that is so determined to remove all limitations as the very line of code that operates our society, what hope does human art have?
“We would listen to albums all the way through. That’s it! No looking at anything… you just look into space, and you imagine, you think. You think about life. That was it.”
Listening to Rick talk about this made me realize how the past few years I really haven’t been thinking a whole lot. I very rarely do nothing, or go very long with nothing playing in the background, or do an activity like practice an instrument, or skateboard with nothing but my own thoughts. This has really left me in an impoverished state. I am inspired to just think more honestly. Even if I am to watch a movie, I need to learn again how to just watch a movie. How to engage with it. How to not look at my phone and really immerse myself in the story and its themes and messages.
Ricks videos and this Orson Wells quote really have me thinking a lot. I think in the near future I am going to write a piece about how I see this whole art without limitations theme and its relationship to cinema.
Please if you all watch these videos, let me know what you think. Would love to get your thoughts.
Can We Escape the Blight of Social Media “Beauty Standards”?
I, like many women born in the 90’s, had an eating disorder when I was a teenager. I was quite thin, but I had an extremely skewed sense of myself: and this was before I ever had a smart phone, which I didn’t get until I was 18 years old. Strangely, I feel like I’ve returned to a similarly skewed sense of myself as I age. Fine lines are developing, grey hairs are growing, and my tattoos are starting to fade. I’ve been a bit surprised by how much this preoccupies me, considering I believe that we should embrace aging and not buy into the idea that appearance is the most important aspect of ourselves.
Nevertheless, in spite of how little time I actually spend on social media, I believe that the pernicious anti-aging rhetoric coming from social media has been getting under my skin in unconscious ways. I’ve been feeling insecure about a totally normal process, and one that is not even that noticeable to the people around me. I often think that I’m one of the lucky ones, because at least I insulate myself from the worst assaults on this negative self-image by not really ever taking selfies, or being on social media constantly seeing made-up, polished, photoshopped, medically altered influencers and celebrities. I am able to remind myself that actually no one in the world looks like those people, including those people themselves. But this isn’t the case for everyone.
A recent study out of Boston University showed that the desire to undergo plastic surgery or other cosmetic procedures increased on average 20% compared to before the pandemic. The New York Post reported that, “The Boston University researchers speculate that the distorted body image associated with ‘selfie culture’ spurred an increase in aesthetic procedures during the pandemic, when screen time skyrocketed.”
“While there are many factors that likely contribute to this, social media usage did likely increase the desire, amongst a subset of patients, to seek cosmetic procedures,” the authors wrote.
This tracks with a 2022 study which showed how the usage of front-facing cameras (how we all take selfies) has skewed our perceptions of our faces. Selfies, according to the study, are increasingly being used by patients seeking cosmetic treatments. This is a problem, largely because selfies use wide-angle lenses, so therefore they are depicting an inaccurate view of our actual appearance. Comparing clinical photography to selfies, the authors found rather stark differences in proportion. For instance, if you’re basing your nose length on a selfie rather than clinical photography, you’re seeing your nose length as ~6% longer than it actually is. This 6-ish percent might not sound like a lot, but it could be a lot to a person who already feels like their nose is too big.
If these selfie-induced distortions weren’t bad enough, there’s also a cohort of people who have been increasingly been basing their cosmetic procedure goals on photo filters, which is common enough to have been coined “Snapchat Dysmorphia,” which is the subject of a Vice mini-doc from 5 years ago. This problem has only gotten worse as time has gone on, and more and more people are requesting procedures to make their faces look more like the filtered versions of their faces.
As A.I. has improved, this problem is likely only getting worse. Take this video here and tell me, do you have any idea what this woman actually looks like? I certainly don’t!
Now, I generally think people should be permitted to do whatever they want with their body. I don’t know what we “do” about the rise of a problem like this other than chucking our smartphones in rivers, which I may eventually do. I do think this is a good example of how we are susceptible to contagious behavior as a deeply social creature. In spite of my own resistance to the tide, I too wonder if I would look better with a few “tweakments” even as someone who promotes a quite naturalistic lifestyle, particularly regarding what I consume, put on my skin, and ingest. It’s hard for me to parse out what is social influence and what I truly desire, let alone what is a truly healthy aid to my “aging gracefully.”
Regardless, I think this a case where our social media actions aren’t totally harmless. How we present ourselves to the world, our façades, and guises do influence others. We can’t really avoid this as a social creature, in spite of how we might perceive ourselves (inaccurately) as atomized individuals.
So why do I even care about this, and why do I feel like my opinion matters? I think it’s because seeing perfect, thin, photoshopped, and surgically modified women — A.K.A, representations of our cultural “beauty standards” — as a teenager did influence me to harm myself with bulimia and starving myself. While I think that this sort of issue is always deeper than simply these external forces, they certainly played a role. My already low self-esteem, anxious attachment style, and self-hatred made it easier for me to become bulimic — that is simply true. But it’s also true that I was only able to break free from that when I realized, through seeing other possibilities exemplified in other women, that I could prioritize strength and capability over thinness. This is something I’ve carried with me ever since.
So, is there another path for us? Can we promote buff women, too? Can we make it cool to have a dozen or so grey hairs at 28 years old? Can we value laugh lines and crows feet? Is it possible for there to be just enough representation of what I value to make the social media landscape seem balanced, or is that just magical thinking anyway? I really don’t know, and I honestly don’t judge other women for doing what they need to do to feel good about themselves. I do things to feel good about myself, things that might be strange to some people, too. Maybe there’s no easy answer here. Let me know in the comments what you think about all of this.
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