bling

I don't consider the opinion that poor art, or even very poor art, is not art to be a valid opinion.

You may not like it. And all your knowledge of the history of art and your self-professed "professionalism" in the "field" of art doesn't make something which you do not like, non-art.

In my view, it is a shame that someone who claims to be an artist would even hold such an opinion.

To go back to the original point - that it is disigenuous to have indignation that song writers express political opinions - I agree completely. Song writers, painters, graphic artists, musicians, etc - they should not be disqualified from political opinion. Just as they should not be disqualified from expressing an opinion on love, happiness, saddness, the L.A. landscape, rural living, (insert anything you can think of here). EVERYTHING is fair game for expression.

ARTelevision

I don't make claims I can't back up.
Many of the opinions we all hold are seen as "a shame" by others.
Thanks for your opinion.

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Locobot

I suppose you gave Kieth Haring an earful too when he attempted to address the AIDS problem through his art? Seriously, what are your criteria for deciding something is propaganda? I've got news for you, if the Beatles and Eminem are to be dismissed as propagandists than so can pretty much any artist.

quoth the OED:
Your concepts of aesthetics and propaganda are reactionary and arbitrary and therefore completely irrelevant, sorry bub.

I've had a love-hate relationship with Eminem from the beginning. I was turned off by his homophobia and violence but attracted to his poetry. It wasn't until I heard his song Stan that I felt he was doing something unique. I own all his albums, not just mp3, and I'll probably end up getting this one too now that I can see there's more depth than the first single displayed.

What's so startling about the new video is that it preaches something other than complete apathy or narcissism (e.g. "life as a rockstar is so tough, poor me!"). I personally could do without the messianic complex:
But its true, I approve of his message so I'm much more lenient on the techniques he uses to disseminate that message. If he were preaching "follow me, were gonna kill all the fags" or something I would reject it. Instead we see Eminem deliver a fairly cogent response to current events and deliver that response in a powerful artistic statment. It's powerful because it's true, young people are being sent to fight in a war they don't understand (by a president who doesn't understand the situation either) against people they actually have quite a bit in common with. I know, at least anecdotally, that Iraqis love Eminem.

bling

And you're entitled to your opinion as well, as unsupported as it happens to be.

ARTelevision

My relationship with Keith was a personal as well as a professional one. And yes, he was well aware of my ideas regarding the nature and significance of political propaganda as art.

The first socio-political issue he chose to make art with was drugs and young people. After that, he included the political and racial liberation of South Africa and after that - after he was diagnosed - he began his work informed by the politics of HIV.

Just as with many folks here, we agreed to disagree. This is not a subject of disagreement I'm unfamiliar with, by any means. I simply choose to maintain an unpopular position on it. The reason for this is that I see our collective identity being subverted by mass culture. I've made these points many times. My responses in this thread involve a continuation of those thoughts.

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irateplatypus

hmm...

i think of art as the conveyance of thought or emotion to the mind experiencing the art through a medium. eminem excels in using musical performance as his medium of communication. i judge this video to be both art and propaganda.

as reflected by my posts in the jon stewart threads, my worry is the weight that is placed on propaganda that is also pop culture. we seem to take too much of our political thought from the loudest, the funniest, the beautiful and the most obscene. a learned man who has devoted his life to understanding knowledge and truth will lecture to an empty room while the crude attention of pop culture is revered as "genius".

it's an issue of imbalance, we've lost coherence.

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Locobot

Wow, so you did give him an earful. That's amazing. I can't understand why someone would choose to remain a friend to someone who saw their life's work as rabble-rousing demagoguery. But I don't really know your complete history, so... that's all I can say.

rukkyg

I think the video was very powerful and moving. Moreso than the lyrics.

ARTelevision

Heh heh. Yeah, Locobot. Fact is, just about every single one of my artist friends disagrees with me. I figure that's reason enough to state my views. We wouldn't want all this creative evolution to be achieved without dissent, would we?

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OFKU0

I used to think that way also, especially of Andy Warhol who I personally felt was not only totally overated but also a fraud. But that was my then opinion.

Now I don't care who has or hasn't an opinion because opinions are just that, neither right or wrong regardless of the source. To dissaprove of a fellow artist's right to an opinion be it political propaganda or otherwise while having the luxury to state yours, implicitly political or not, is superficial to the point of ignorant.

But what do I know. I'm a musician.

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ARTelevision

I'm compelled to do this at the point where said artist begins influencing the minds and behavior of millions of young and not so young people. At that point, there are public issues that are not superficial. Addressing them and voicing an opinion on them is not ignorant.

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OFKU0

I understand and as said, everyone has and is entitled to an opinion regardless of status or stature. Does the influence of Eminem send a message,..a wrong message,..a right message? That is for those who hear it to decide where they stand. If anything, I prefer to characterize any message by anyone as a chance of awareness and to have people think of that message, rather than discount it because of the source.

As I see it, Eminem is creating a climate of differing opinions because of his work which again, I see as healthy if only for the fact that it makes people think. Much more distressing to me is the medias continuing ed-op biases for whatever the position taken that people seem to swallow up on a daily basis without much thought, rhyme or reason and mainly because it gets drilled into them at every possible moment. But that's another thread.

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kutulu

When given the choice of having musicians that sing "get down and fuck/drink/dance" and musicians that write about what is going on in the world and can provoke a 50 post thread of discussion about said music I'll take the mucisians that provoke thought.

ARTelevision

I'll let you in on a secret: me too.

It looks to me that stating contrarian opinions can be beneficial toward our ongoing creative evolution. We probably agree on that.

And when it comes to art, I tend to reference my MFA training, in which rigorous critique was assumed to be the proper response to things aesthetic.

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ARTelevision

I think I should underscore the notion that once an artist makes a move toward political propaganda, that artist is taking on a heavy burden of responsibility. As I see it, the restraints of social responsibility versus "pure" aesthetic pursuit are somewhat antithetical. Hence, I thought this video and the response to it required the accompaniment of the statements I made above.

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flstf

Eminem has every right to use his rap songs to protest. Having grown up in the 60s when there were many peace and anti-war songs, some I even listen to this day like The Beatles - Just Give Peace a Chance and Imagine, and Edwin Starr - War, What is it Good For, just to name a few.

My only critisizm is that this song seems to be trying to demonize Bush as much as it is to protest war. When the blame for the war (if you dissagree with it) is in the hands of the professional polititians including Kerry who voted for it. Rarely in the 60s did the songs put the blame on Kennedy, Johnson, or Nixon. One of the biggest protest rallys was at the Democratic national convention in Chicago. The protest was against the establishment more than any one of them.

I do remember the Smothers Brothers getting kicked off the air because of a song about Johnson being stuck in the big muddy, or something like that, LOL.

Also this protest song seems insincere to me and almost like a campaign jingle. Maybe I'll listen to it some more but I doubt it will be inspiring enough to encourage me to vote for either one of the major parties.

maximusveritas

This was President Bush's war, make no mistake about it. There never was a vote "for" or "against" the war. There was a vote that gave the President the authority to go to war if he needed to. As Kerry and others have explained, they simply voted to give President Bush the loaded gun. They thought he would use that gun responsibly, only as a last resort, only after he had the backing of our allies, and only if he had a plan to win the peace. Unfortunately, President Bush didn't do any of that and he bears the primary responsibility for the mess we've gotten into.

roachboy

interesting--after talkin gabout the video with some friends last night, this morning i watched it--i am not an eminem fan at all--but this is interesting...not so much for the song, but for the animation, which is pretty cool.

it is agitprop.
i like agitprop when it is well done.

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pacaveli

MichealMoore.com is hosting it also

flstf

I don't want to be put in a position to have to defend Bush but come on. Those guys (congress), Kerry included, were chomping at the bit to do something after 9/11. The executive requested permission to hit Iraq and they gave it. Those guys knew what they were voting for and to look back in hindsight now and say they really didn't mean it is just campaign rhetoric.

maximusveritas

well, we're pretty far from the intent of this thread, . so I'll leave it like this:

I can't speak for all those who voted for the resolution, but John Kerry has consistently made his position clear, from when he voted for the resolution to the beginning of the war to today, exactly as I laid it out in my previous post
Even if you charge that Kerry and the Democrats in Congress should have known the President was going to screw everything up and didn't do their job in standing up to him, that doesn't change the fact that this was the President's war. He was the one who brought it up, who made the false case for it, and who has carried it out in such a shoddy fashion.

Ustwo

A nation of 22 million conquered and held so far with a total casualty count of 1261 lives to date. This included all allied forces not just the US.

This is a war, and never has one been such a great success. If only we could have done so well in ANY of our past conflicts.

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bling

And the first couple of years of stats from Vietnam looked basically identical.

Here's to hoping Iraq does not continue along the same path as our recent history of past conflicts against guerilla fighting.

seep

Blah, mud-slinging across partisan lines.

If it makes you feel any better, I don't like Bush, I don't like the war in Iraq, I didn't like or respect Eminem before I saw this video, I still don't like or respect Eminem after I've seen it, I think the video was propaganda and not art, and in conclusion, Eminem bites and the current music industry is a mass-consumption entertainment trainwreck. Thanks for reading.

reiii

You have a really warped definiton of propaganda/art. Your definition includes both of these pieces:
<img src="http://www.theotherguy.com/~reid/nazi.jpg">
<br>
<br>
<img src="http://www.theotherguy.com/~reid/picasso.jpg">

The top is a nazi propaganda piece, the bottom is picasso's opinion of the spanish civil war.
Definitions of things as complicated as art, and propaganda do not need harsh boundaries, things get all muddled.

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ARTelevision

My statements apply to both of those items as well.

Warped is in the eye of the beholder.

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reiii

Wow ARTelevision, that sentiment requires me to reach back three generations to find the proper words:

Oy gevalt

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Ustwo

This I think is the part so many fail to grasp.

Would a average german have thought the Nazi poster was warped in 1940?

On the other hand, since Nazi germany aided the facists in Spain would would that same person think about the Picasso? Just more communist propaganda no doubt.

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reiii

Let me rephrase

The definition is restrictive. Not warped, just restrictive. Its boiling down a complex cultural insitution, art, into "pure aesthetic pursuit."

Art has never historically been a pure aesthetic pursuit, its complexity and beauty is manifest in the diverse motivations of its creators.

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Ustwo

I think the vast majority of art is purely for the aethetic.

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ARTelevision

My statement doesn't boil anything down. It describes the tension between different polarities of experience.

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flstf

I know that Eminem's song and Picasso's Guenerica are both political statements. But I have a really difficult time putting Eminem's campaign jingle in the same category as Picasso's protest against the war. It just seems like more campaign rhetoric coming out on the eve of the election. Even more so since he is trying to falsley blame only one of the candidates. Rock the vote indeed, LOL.

martinguerre

Art, you've never been shy about expressing your views, even through your artistic endevours. You want to rail against Ted Nugent for a while too? Then you might at least be consistent.

Your criticisms bely a certain prejudice which while you're entitled to, at least deserves examination.

propaganda masquerading as "art."


Tell that to Leni Riefenstahl. Now, i don't happen to be a National Socialist...but that intro shot? That's art.

Or for the hell of it, look to the other side. Casablanca... Do artists occasionally make questionable choices in how to use their artistic expression in political manners? Yes. Leni Riefenstahl would probably be example numero uno.

But is it the role of Established Art, as expressed by professional artists, to claim that political speech ought to be stricken?

" This sort of demagoguery" "sociopath" "cartoon"

Funny, that for a guy who says he doesn't decide with emotions, that half your original post is ad homiem attack.

Frankly, as a queer person, i don't care much for Em. But the video has some artistic merit...becuase of my political beliefs i happen to like most of the lyrics, too.

But honestly...since when did art become too pure to tolerate a message?

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