at worst the world will sing along

little-tealeafs-nook:

libraery:

tatyana-dreaming:

sawasawako:

unpopular opinion but i think a lot of the things that people think are “pretentious” aren’t actually pretentious - they just require a little more effort & intentionality on the reader / viewer’s part to understand. but bc we’re so used to mass produced media and instant, consumable content, we’ve come to take for granted that knowledge & information can be instantaneously grasped, digested and absorbed without any real participation or action from us. if people were actually looking to criticise pretentiousness, they would call out the classism & racism of ivory tower intellectualism and its cultural manifestations, not whine about how “inaccessible” media that don’t treat their audience like idiots are

#I am forever pissed at how Opera and classical music used to just be popular music for everyone #and now they’re perceived as snobby and pretentious in popular culture#like what?!? #same goes for classic literature #one of the reasons I love movies from the 30s 40s and 50s is that most of the times they don’t treat the audience like an idiot #also ANOTHER thing #democratization of art doesn’t mean dumbing down art so that everyone is a Master or even 5yo can understand it #it means making sure everyone has ACCESS to art via non-expensive concert tickets or free museum entry…  (via @revedebeatrice​)

I think this is also partly the fault of how we are often FORCED to understand art in a certain way that is presented as the only Correct Interpretation™. Olafur Eliasson puts it very interestingly in the episode about him and his work in the Netflix documentary series “Abstract: the art of design”. He explains that we have gotten so used to long descriptions and explanations that we seem to need to really “understand” a work, which gives us the feeling of something like ‘if I need these long explanations to understand this, I must be stupid for not figuring it out by myself’, and that these predescribed explanations leave less or no room for own interpretations. His works therefore focus on the audience creating a narrative from his works by themselves. They cannot be right or wrong.

I really resonate with the feeling he describes of feeling dumb when it comes to art in museums or even concerts, because I feel as though I need so much knowledge to really be “allowed” to enjoy it. And we all had that moment in high school where our interpretation of literature was not the same as the prescribed one so it was i n c o r r e c t

I highly recommend watching this episode (S2:E1), as he puts it much more eloquently than I do. The section I describe is around 30 minutes, if I’m not mistaken!

I love this