discernment

I am writing the meditations of this pillar last. I have found discernment to be the most paradoxical and complex of the four. The core tension is between 1) ERUDITE's commitment to democracy, access, and radical equality, and 2) the inherent exclusivity and hierarchy of tastemaking. The tension is knotted into the very etymology of the word. Discernment comes from the Latin cernere (“to divide, sift, perceive, comprehend”). Also related: discriminare, to distinguish (from). The modern meaning of discriminate derives from its associated use against persons rather than objects. It is the sifting of people into categories based on unchangeable qualities.

Yet let's divide exclusivity into two applications. First is the very accessibility of making artistic judgments; the capacity for taste. ERUDITE rejects the use of unalterable characteristics (phenotype, caste, pedigree) to deny access to discernment. There is a universal and equal capacity for tastemaking. Exclusivity here is pure discrimination.

The second application, however, is the exclusivity of standards. The fact that anyone may engage in discernment should not mean that the bar is not high, the stairs are not steep, art is comfortable or fashion easy. Discernment, in this way, resembles nature. Like an alpine trail, the choice of scaling the mountain is free to anyone who chooses, but the slope is no less rugged.

Our current culture seems the opposite. Access is gated everywhere; feudal barriers to social mobility are being reinforced. At the same time, everyone is given a golden star, everyone is a gifted student, every opinion is valid, and no one stakes a claim. Our generation is the most coddled and comfortable generation in human history, but comfort does not translate to cultural, spiritual, or artistic depth. In fact, it undermines it. The inflated culture of participation trophies dulls us to hardening class barriers. It makes us more fragile and more risk-averse. Discernment always involves risk.

Please call shitty things shitty. There is bad content and a lot of it. There is a widespread norm that justifies the existence and value of any and all aesthetics. As existentially revolting as it is, the rise of AI-generated audio-visual content (or, slop) has led people to cherish human-made art. Audiences are concerned with the process and labor of art, not just the product. Perhaps this will lead to a renaissance of "certified human" content... Or maybe our defiance will be slowly whittled away by slop's vast onslaught.

Kitsch is a great word to describe AI output. Clement Greenberg, in "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," argued that mass consumerism trivializes art. Kitsch is "vicarious experience and faked sensations," art that is predigested and so rendered in gaudy, garish, and excessive form. As the reaction to slop attests, art is as much about the effect as the cause, about the reaction as the cognitive and aesthetic labor. Kitsch is not failed art, but an "ersatz" art, a simulacrum that insidiously mimics art. No wonder why fascists have been quick to adopt AI content production. Besides harming artists and intellectuals, it mass-produces provocative propaganda at zero marginal cost.

Greenberg, though, was snobbish and classist with his love of the avant-garde. Haute couture can be as much a bulwark against brutish right-wingers as it can be proof of leftist arrogance and condescension. Enter Pauline Kael's "Trash, Art, and the Movies" and Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp." The former is a 15,000-word (sorry) stream-of-consciousness slog, almost entirely criticism and almost no definition. However, Kael argues that, in short:

"The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies."

In other words, seemingly lowbrow art can be just as masterful as high culture. A discerning person, with full awareness and articulate reasoning, need not abandon low things. In the latter piece, Sontag describes camp as connoisseurship of "bad" taste. Camp is knowingly loving the exaggerated and the off-kilter. In that way, I'd argue it is the opposite of kitsch, as it demands that we know why we love what we love and be able to defend our tastes to others. The ERUDITE can explain their love of gas station hot dogs with hearty, staunch conviction.

ERUDITE seeks to use maximalist aesthetics to make important knowledge more engaging and vibrant. Already, there are rumblings of a reaction to cultural homogeneity. It isn't hard to find widespread disgust with the identical minimalism of every coffee shop, every Airbnb, every 'we do things differently here' restaurant. So many products and places look perfect on social media, but feel hollow and corporate. The systems that mass-produce mediocrity are 1) the Internet and 2) parasitic entities such as private equity.

The vast majority of our decision-making and taste-making is informed by digital platforms. Our exposure to new music, art, and ideas is at the whim of Spotify, Instagram, and TikTok algorithms. Kyle Chayka, in Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, explains how such data-driven equations are designed to maximize user engagement and, ultimately, corporate profit and shareholder value. First, that means the fate of small and large businesses alike depends on their visual appeal on social media feeds. That fact inherently encourages safe, easily consumable content. Recommendations must pander to the lowest common denominator of mass appeal. The mess of authentic creativity is too bold, too risky.

David Marx's enormous Status and Culture illustrates the churn of cultural creativity. He first argues that humans are status-seeking animals. Our material needs are either overrun or at least supplemented by social needs. This process spurs, for example, working-class kids, trying to stick it to middle-class counterparts, to create an offensive or avant-garde subculture like punk. In turn, artists and writers draw inspiration from punk and bring it into the spotlight. Then, rich kids (who feel guilty or disillusioned about being rich) adopt punk, effectively ending its coolness and leading the original punk kids to move on to grunge, post-punk, or hip-hop. And on and on. But the Internet lowered the barrier of access and exposure to subcultures. Now, any niche community or aesthetic can be invaded by wannabes and imitators overnight. They don't have time to simmer, evolve, and make their mark on culture at large. Everything becomes a sequel or remake or throwback. Everyone consumes a charcuterie board of styles and so less and less people belong to a particular tribe. Culture, in short, becomes boring.

Just like algorithms, capitalist entities like private equity are built for short-term extraction. Short-termism leads to mismanagement and excessive debt creation. Joshua Kosman's The Buyout of America argues that this will likely trigger an economic meltdown. In The Finance Curse, Nicholas Shaxson goes into detail about the parasitic operations of private equity and points to the brain-drain of talented workers away from productive industries and into the bloated finance sector.

Let's say a private equity firm buys up a local restaurant. They are most likely looking to sell within five to seven years. Like a house flipper, they are interested in a fast, profitable turnaround. Locally sourced and fresh ingredients, which are expensive, are replaced by cheaper prepackaged ones. Labor costs are drastically cut by firing experienced and expensive workers and reducing hours, killing employee morale. Basic upkeep and maintenance falls by the wayside, tarnishing the brand reputation. The restaurant itself is saddled with debt, and its most valuable assets (such as the land beneath the building) have been sold off. To market the most general appeal possible, the restaurant rides shitty trends. In pursuit of frictionless consumer experience, they remove clutter, history, warmth, and organic imperfections. It is replaced by a sterile, uniform aesthetic of beiges and sans-serif fonts.

Fuck that dude. Add to the mix the generic and uncreative output of large language models. Nothing will be bad, nothing will be good, everything will just be "mid."

Mexican poet César A. Cruz (might have) said, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." Art is that thing that provokes us to see the world as an outsider would. To see ourselves as a stranger would.

Artists are agitators. Tyrants and theocrats detest art not sanctioned by orthodoxy or regime. It is because the words and paints and clays and melodies stir our spirits and invite us to imagine different worlds.

T.S. Eliot asks the theatre for "immediate compensation for the pains of turning blood into ink." The artist's world is often a lonely one. Just as the alchemist takes great pains to transmute lead into gold, so too does the poet sacrifice much to turn suffering into art.

Jose Ortega y Gasset explains a sociological function of art. In the 1925 essay "The Dehumanization of Art," he demonstrates how modern art strips away recognizable human stories and deep personal feelings. It focuses purely on structure, color, and mechanics. This type of art, in particular, "divides the public into two classes," those who get it and those who don't. In that way, Ortega claims that real art is not easily likable and thus unpopular. It is offensive by its very nature. The capacity for discomfort is a symptom of real art's presence.

That said, I really don't like modern art. I find most of it uninspiring and even grotesque. Yet my taste is a product of my time and place. Modern art and its auxiliaries (brutalism, futurism, neofuturism, constructivism, and deconstructivism) now saturate society. Once, these were radical, rousing an old world to democratize, mechanize, industrialize. They grappled with relativity, utopianism, nationalism, eco-optimism, and irony. Their dynamism has more or less settled into static. Yet even for myself, I cannot tell if my distaste for modern art is truly just distaste, or it's a discomfort, a sign that something about it is still challenging and disquieting.

ERUDITE has a color palette that most either find vibrant or repulsive. It blends hyper-modern packaging with anti-modern content. No one yet has had a muted response to our design choices and whether a first-time viewer smiles or grimaces, I feel more and more at ease in its disturbing comfort/comfortable disturbance.

So many young Americans today are disillusioned with being American. There is a pervasive and indiscriminate belief that things are getting worse. If we perceive our primary identity (in this case, nationhood) to be in decline, we must make sense of it. A conservative response might see the national community as in need of purification, a return to a previous state of prosperity. A leftist might abandon the nation as an illegitimate identity altogether and find alternative community in local and other disempowered voices. Many simply drift into malaise and apathy. All reject or become alienated from mainstream culture. We, fleeing the crumbling center, instead seek refuge in the rural, plural, peripheral, and parochial. We shore up our own flailing identities by commodifying and cannibalizing the 'ethnic.'

In decolonization-era Britain, nostalgia erupted for medieval simplicity and white yeomanry. Facing collapse, the metropole invades and siphons legitimacy from its rural spaces, colonies, and minorities. The white West has always had a romantic fantasy of the "primitive" and "noble savage." As Marianna Torgovnick writes in Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, the "West's fascination with the primitive has to do with its own crises in identity." In other words, whites fetishize the authenticity of minorities without relinquishing their privilege.

In "Eating the Other," bell hooks casts Otherness as seasoning on the dull dish of the dominant culture. With "no sense of grounding, no redemptive identity," white youths crave the "life-sustaining alternatives" of Others. We search for Eden, the primitive paradise, "whether that location be a country or a body, a dark continent or dark flesh." hooks argues that rap constructs the Black male body as a "site of pleasure and power," arguing the vibrancy and decadence on display is inseparable from proximity to death. Living "on the edge" of possible extermination intensifies the capacity to feel pleasure at all. She diagnoses the white audience with anhedonia—the inability to feel pleasure. America is so numbed by daily bombardment that we can only feel intensely "on the edge." The result, in her account, is a culture that finds young Black men simultaneously dangerous and desirable.

The capitalist world of existential insecurity and relentless monotony not only represses fun and pleasure, but our very ability to feel fun and pleasure without guilt. No wonder we are obsessed with hip-hop, rap, 'ghetto' music, and the associated hedonistic lifestyles. It makes us feel alive. We cosplay the edge of extermination and erasure. We consume it and spit it out.

Truly, I am not in a position to comment further beyond this. I am undoubtedly guilty. All I can say is that the taste for the authentic periphery walks the tightrope between appreciation and appropriation.

Discernment is labor. It takes attention and mental energy to refine your intuitions into tastes. Think critically about the content and art you consume, because they shape your thoughts, decisions, and habits. Consuming everything means you consume nothing.

Don't be a dick about what you like and don't like. The world is not pre-ranked into tasteful and distasteful. Not everything mainstream is bad, and not everything niche is good. Do not be so close-minded to alternative tastes that you become a bigot.