writings on math, logic, philosophy and art

To kill an art

To kill an art, create a way to perform the utilitarian aspect of it in a way that is formulaic and efficient i.e. artless.

(The art is not really dead, it is just understood by a very small amount of people (mostly other creators).)

The art of manufacturing clothes, pottery etc were all killed in the previous generation. And in this generation, will see the dead of writing drawing and coding.

Capitalists kill arts for profit. But they don’t think collectively, so they don’t realize that profits only come from (economic) activity and the only wilful activity that people do is creating art, so by killing art you are reducing the wilful activities (AKA fun) and replacing it will unwilful ones (AKA work).

They don’t think collectively, so they are not concerned by the fact that they are creating a world that is incompatible with people: if you replace a worker with AI, your profit is up, but if all workers are replaced by AI then there can be no profits as there would be no one to buy (that’s the difference between thinking for yourself and thinking collectively).

No one will buy willingly, so what’s left is coercion: fascism, wars — those are things where you have no choice but to participate (“He who is not with Me is against Me”). Until everything is destroyed. That’s why I don’t like people who don’t like art.

The moral of all this is that Hannah Arendt’s principle of the banality of evil is also valid in the other way around: not only that evil is banal, but all banal things are evil i.e. a thing is banal if and only if it is evil.

Written on February 20, 2025

More on philosophy

Subscribe for updates

Powered by Buttondown.

Support the site