maleno

I'm an Irish artist, living in Ireland. I'm very far from a rich kid. Like most Irish artists, I make some of my living from my "artistic" work, and some from what others here might call "real work". Sometimes there's not a clear division between the two, and anyway the ratio of one to the other changes every year.

Because of the cost of living here, particularly in Dublin, there is no way that the Basic Income would provide me with anything like what most people here would consider a decent standard of living. (It would currently leave me with about €200 left over every month, after I pay just my rent. That's before any bills or groceries or anything.)

Plenty of people find a way to continue to make art that other people value, even if the cost of living continues to spiral ever upwards. This payment is simply a buffer to make making art a little easier, for a fraction of the many people who contribute to the social, cultural, and intellectual life of this country. For some it pays their rent or mortgage, for some it pays for childcare so they have time to work, for some it facilitates research or purchase of materials, for some it allows them a workspace outside their home.

It's not perfect, as no public arts funding is perfect but, to me, the kind of cheap cynicism displayed in this comment comes from a place of deep ignorance and bitterness.

Just to answer the question in this specific case: yes, a working class guy can decide he wants to pursue art (in quite a broad range of forms), and he can apply for the basic income once he can show that he is working as an artist. The artists who ultimately receive the payment will be chosen randomly once they meet the criteria to apply in the first place (which, again, is simply that you are working as an artist—exhibiting, publishing, performing, whatever "work" might mean in your case). There is a fixed number of people who can receive it in each round (I think it's 2500 people, cycling every three years), and those people are picked by lottery; if you receive it in one round, you cannot apply for the next. This, and in fact no arts funding in Ireland, has anything to do with certain universities or art degrees. This scheme is far from perfect, but these vaguely leading questions (so common to all commentary on public funding for the arts) are clearly irrelevant.

As for the second question ("would Daniel James work have been as good if he wasn't working in an ironworks"), well, life and art really are too varied to draw the kind of conclusions the following comment implies.

Maybe I'm missing some sarcasm here, but it would be worth asking what the consequences of this situation are for the people who actually make all the music/books/films you get to consume for a "comically small amount of money".

I think it's interesting that practically every time this point is made (and it is made so very often), the examples that are used to prove the point are objective and easy to measure. A 100m sprint time or a calculation of Pi is not the same as a work of art, because they can be measured objectively while art cannot. There is no equivalent in art-making to running a 100m sprint. The evaluation of a 100m sprint is not subjective, does not require judgement, does not depend on taste, context, history, and all the other many things the reputation and impact of a work of art depends on.

As ever, the standard defence of LLM and all gen AI tech rests on this reduction of complex subjectivity to something close to objectivity: the picture looks like other pictures, therefore it is a good picture. The sentence looks plausibly like other sentences, therefore it is a good sentence. That this argument is so pervasive tells me only that the audience for 'creative work' is already so inundated with depthless trash, that they can no longer tell the difference between painting and powerlifting.

It is not the artists who are primarily at risk here, but the audience for their work. Artists will continue to disappear for the same reason they always have: because their prospective audience does not understand them.

Why would anyone care what, say, Charles Babbage was trying to do, when he didn't actually do it in any sort of useful way? Surely this is largely how knowledge is produced—over time, with lots of false starts, and language and technique that is not yet adequate to the problem at hand.

Is there any argument here other than "Adorno is an old git who hates change, young people, and popular entertainment"?

I think there is a very serious argument going on here. The nub of it is in this paragraph:

I don’t think there’s any such thing as a pedagogical path to the essential that starts out by getting people to concentrate on the inessential. This sort of attention that fixates on the inessential actually indurates; it becomes habitual and thereby interferes with one’s experience of the essential. I don’t believe that when it comes to art there can ever be any processes of gradual familiarization that gradually lead from what’s wrong to what’s right. Artistic experience always consists in qualitative leaps and never in that murky sort of process.

Adorno is basically saying that the distortion of the experience of listening to music inevitably caused by dressing it up for mass broadcast results in a dilution of what is 'essential' in that music – roughly speaking, the capacity for revelation. The attempt to make the music more 'accessible', usually by cloaking it in cliché (what he calls here "the whole Salzburg phantasmagoria"), divests it of the potential to be revelatory. It actively lessens the chance of experiencing one of the "qualitative leaps" of understanding he's looking for in music—something beyond words, beyond discourse; an experience of the sublime, of something both absolutely beyond us and yet, afterwards, constitutive of us. Something that cannot be learned (no "pedagogical path"), but which can be known. It's obviously a high bar to set (almost insane, certainly irrational, to most people today) but it's worth engaging with, I think.

I think you're right that Adorno would despise most YouTube musicians. After all, there is hardly a better example of the fetishisation of technique, equipment, and process (not to mention the unquestioning habituation to cliché) than what you'll find on the average YouTuber's channel. (I say this as a regular watcher of many YouTube guitarists, some of whom I really like.) The idea, totally general on such channels, that you can follow existing patterns and paths to mastery (where the satisfaction comes from memetic reproduction of the already known) is obviously antithetical to the view of art and revelation outlined above.

Finally, I don't think there's anything conservative about Adorno's argument here. He is ultimately arguing against holding up what already exists (the Western classical tradition, in this case) as a fixed symbol of greatness, ready to bestow its gifts of historical authority and sophistication on anyone intelligent enough to encounter it. Adorno is saying the greatness of a work cannot be divorced from the nature of both its presentation and the audience's engagement with it. It is a sometimes subtle but I think fundamental difference of perspective to the conservative view of 'the canon'.

They don't have everything when it comes to tech or more niche material, but Kenny's (https://www.kennys.ie/) is very good and offers free (and often fast) shipping.

The same Nobel prize that was given to Peter Handke in 2019? I like Handke's work an awful lot, as I do Tokarczuk's, but he's certainly not someone who furthers any "progressive-left agenda".

It's not a CMS thing, it's a Chrome thing.[1] It highlights the text in the URI fragment when you click through to the page, and also auto-scrolls to that text.

[1] https://web.dev/text-fragments/

You can just use a VPN to sign up. Works perfectly (with no VPN) after that.

As a counterweight to the other opinions here, I'll just say that I think these chairs, particularly when grouped together, are immensely beautiful. I understand they are not intended as chairs one sits in for eight hours a day, but as lightweight, easy-to-make occasional furniture. There are other examples of Judd's furniture, mostly the desks[1] and tables[2], that are more 'practical' in the traditional sense, and which could even be described as approachable and warm.

I actually made a copy of his library bed[3] out of plywood last year, and intend to make some of these chairs (and maybe one of the desks) when I have some time this summer. I believe this is what the furniture was intended for: easy DIY replication, minimum of fuss with the maximum aesthetic impact. Easy to understand if one is familiar with Judd's work as an artist/sculptor, which is obviously the biggest influence on his furniture. You could also look to Gerrit Rietveld, Enzo Mari, and Shaker furniture as background for Judd's designs. I'd recommend reading his 1993 essay "It's Hard To Find A Good Lamp" [4] and seeking out a PDF of his (very rare) 'Furniture Retrospective' book[5], which places this work in its proper context. As he says in that essay, "Conventions are not worth reacting to one way or another."

As an aside, it is frustrating to read (over and over again) that one could only like this work, and work like it, out of some cooler-than-thou pretence. This is a very common bad faith response to art and design that does not (and does not seek to) conform to traditional expectations. As someone whose tastes run very much in a modernist direction, I find the assertion that "since it's so ugly, it must be avant-garde so I'll pretend to like it" ungenerous and shallow. Is it that difficult to accept that there are other ways of looking at the world, other traditions and other intentions? I'm not saying it's all good (when was it ever?), but the assumption of bad faith in those who respond to it is wrong.

[1] https://champ-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Archit... [2] https://media.architecturaldigest.com/photos/5907ae9cca0b764... [3] https://judd.furniture/wp-content/uploads/Single-Daybed-32-P... [4] https://s3.amazonaws.com/juddfoundation.org/wp-content/uploa... [5] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Donald-Judd-Retrospective-Museum-Bo...

'Dialectic of Enlightenment' might be a good place to start when it comes to thinking about thinking. If you want something a bit more fragmented/playful/debatable, then 'Minima Moralia' would be interesting. 'The Culture Industry' is well worth reading too.

Don't want to open up a whole other can of worms but this is very clearly the role of a union in quite a number of industries. Such a body would offer both legal and financial support in a situation where an engineer was being asked to do something they felt was illegal or sketchy.

My favourite Shepard Tone example is Stephin Merritt's 'Project Song' video for NPR [1]. It's also way more playful than most.

https://youtu.be/OfFtEfxhMEQ

Not OP but this is a wonderful essay by Mary Gaitskill, one of the most interesting writers at work today. This is probably my favourite Gaitskill essay, but I am a cat person so I'm biased.

There is no way a landlord in Dublin can get stuck with a tenant for 30 years. Rent increases are capped/set at 4% a year. The length of a lease is meant to be six years, but a landlord can terminate a tenancy at practically any time using a number of exemptions/loopholes in the law – to let a family member use the property, selling the property, refurbishing the property, etc. The rent increase limits should apply between tenancies too, as the landlord is legally required to tell new tenants the rent of the previous rent if they ask, but it is up to the prospective tenant to enforce this. At a time when demand for rental properties has never been higher, landlords can easily choose the tenants that don't ask these kinds of questions.

The root cause of high rents in Dublin is two-fold: competition for rental units is extremely high, which drives prices up; meanwhile rent is usually a function of the mortgage that exists on the property, which is determined by the price of the construction and/or the value of the land it's built on – and that's where you get massive amounts of speculation in Dublin. Land in Dublin is so expensive that it drives up the cost of everything else along the chain.

Most of the vacant units in Dublin are old, and in terrible shape. They're largely owned by people who either don't have the resources (money/energy/time) to improve them so they meet minimum standards, or they're owned by people who know they can let them sit for five or ten or twenty years and sell them for a profit then. The site they're on is nearly always going to increase in value, regardless of the state of the property.

There's nothing at all stopping Dublin from being much more dense than it is, and there's no need whatsoever to build high to do it.

Huge gains could be made by bringing more 'above the shop' units into use. Vacancy and dereliction are massive issues, both in the city centre and further out - tackling that through vacant site levies or compulsory purchase orders would be huge. Regulating the abuse of AirBnB could bring a few thousand rental units in the city back into long-term use practically overnight.

As far as building new stock goes, everything is too expensive because land is too expensive. Development land around the city has been stockpiled and hoarded for decades, creating artificial scarcity and driving up prices. It's basically impossible to make a profit on reasonably dense, reasonably priced, two or three bed apartment schemes in Dublin. The SCSI and PII have good reports on this if you want to look them up. It's nearly always more profitable (and easier) to just sit on the land rather than actually develop it. The reason all the nightclubs are being replaced by hotels is a result of this: hotels are a lot more commercially viable than almost any other form of development right now. (Hotel beds in Dublin had over 90% occupancy rates last summer - they're bursting and demand is massive.)

The majority of new residential building happens in the outer suburbs and commuter belt, from Lucan to Navan. Just 31 (!!!) new homes were built in Dublin 1 (the very centre of the city) in 2018.

Apartments made up just 13% of new builds in the state last year. The apartments we do build are, on average, smaller, darker, less well serviced, and more expensive than almost any other European city. The apartments built between 1995 and 2008 are riddled with issues, from fire safety to damp to electrics. I think that accounts for a lot of Irish people's apparent antipathy towards apartment living, much more than any nonsense about an inherent desire for a semi-d with a garden.

Rents are expensive because of an increase in the numbers renting (doubled in last decade); because the rent-certainty regulation is weak or non-existent; because tenure security does not exist; because build-to-rent is expensive to develop; because REITs and larger commercial landlords are soaking up all supply and charging as much as they can. Take your pick. It's a mess.

Sorry to go on, but I just finished a six-month deep dive on the reasons behind the housing crisis in Dublin and there is just so much misinformation out there, it's frustrating.

P.S. In case anyone wants to hear more, I made a four-episode podcast series about this, the final episode of which just went up today:

www.dublininquirer.com/2019/02/27/supply-demand-a-podcast-about-dublin-s-housing-crisis-episode-4

'Duty Free Art' by Hito Steyerl might be of interest to you. It's largely about how artworks are used by the rich to store wealth in tax-free locations, and how that affects and distorts the art market more generally. Steyerl is an artist herself but her work is often critical of contemporary art practices and institutions.

This was really bugging me until I realised that sorting the people I follow into lists basically reverts my feeds into a standard chronological timeline again. Minus Twitter's "screwing around", the site is actually useable. Might take a bit of work if you follow a lot of people, but it's totally been worth it for me at least.

Just last night I found myself watching some Wordpress-related videos on the Chrome Developers Youtube channel [0], building on a talk given at the Chrome Dev Summit last year [1]. The Docker implementation is something I'd been considering for a complex Wordpress install recently, so it caught my eye. Building in more PWA features is no harm either.

I have no idea what it all means for the bigger picture of Wordpress/Google/Automattic, but these are nice little tips and ideas to start with anyway.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jav5hPmUaUw [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di7RvMlk9io

Just in case anyone wants to read more on the subject, a friend of mine wrote a similar essay last year.[1]

Just today I was re-reading a Susan Sontag essay[2] and came across what I think is the most succinct description of boredom: “There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom. Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration.”

[1] https://fallowmedia.com/2016/jun/boredom/ [2] https://www.scribd.com/doc/189866321/Susan-Sontag-One-cultur...

I'm not sure that's right. I mean, if we replace the word "power" with the word "agency", then maybe it's clearer. The goal isn't so much a world without power, but a world where agency is more evenly distributed, and far less coupled with wealth/capital.

This isn't to say that such a world is easy to imagine, or easy to bring about.