Quotulatiousness

March 14, 2026

What a Mickey Mouse idea!

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In my far-distant youth, a “Mickey Mouse idea” would be a way of disparaging someone’s notions and hopes, belittling and ridiculing it to prevent it from being realized. In spite of that somewhat dubious association, Ted Gioia has a Mickey Mouse idea to save Disney, and it might just work … except that the studio seems to think their most famous creation is somehow tainted and disreputable:

Do aging sports stars still get hired to shake hands with tourists at Las Vegas casinos? It happened to Joe Louis. It happened to Mickey Mantle. What a sad final chapter to such illustrious careers.

Once they were great. Now they merely greet.

I fear this is Mickey Mouse’s fate today. He does his meet-and-greet routine at the theme park, then goes home to a trailer park in Orlando. Here he gripes to Minnie that he deserves better than this Walmart-ish door-tending gig. She tells him to stop whining and take Pluto for a walk.

Ah if I ran Disney I’d bring Mickey Mouse back from exile. I’d give him a movie contract, a record deal, and a tickertape parade down Main Street USA.

I’d tell the shareholders: Watch out K-Pop Demon Hunters, the Mouse is Back!

But that’s just my dream, not reality. This little fella is just as charming as ever, but his corporate overseers don’t want what he has to offer. Disney is pushing ahead on hundreds of projects right now, but none of them involve Mickey Mouse.

Back in 2002 there was some buzz about a new Disney full-length animated film entitled The Search for Mickey Mouse. This was a big deal. It would be the studio’s 50th animated feature film, and release was scheduled for Mickey’s 75th anniversary.

But the studio pulled the plug. Two years later, Disney tossed a few cheese scraps in Mickey’s direction via a 68-minute reunion with Donald Duck — but they sent the film straight to DVD after a few showings in a Hollywood theater.

It was a low-budget affair. But the theater was packed to the brim, and audiences loved the movie. That didn’t matter. The studio had other priorities.

That was our beloved mouse’s last moment of glory. Since then Mickey has appeared in a 6-minute cartoon — back in 2013 — and been granted a few on-screen cameos in low-profile short films. I’m tempted to say That’s All Folks as I contemplate Mickey’s prospects for future, but Bugs Bunny owns that line. So I’ll simply note that this is what extinction looks like when it happens onscreen.

Why is he getting cancelled?

Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse (Source)

Not long ago, Mickey Mouse was the most famous storytelling character in the world. Time magazine claimed that he was better known than even Santa Claus. Everybody in the world recognized his face — not even Winston Churchill or Greta Garbo could make that claim.

Mickey’s exile is, of course, due to his problematic copyright status. Some aspects of Mickey are entering the public domain, and even though Disney could protect his more updated modern look, it’s possible that some outsiders might earn a few coins from a Mickey Mouse resurgence.

Disney would rather go mouse-less than let that happen. That’s a bad decision — a triumphant return of Mickey would go along way toward charming audiences and fixing Disney’s tarnished reputation. He is, after all, the most beloved character in the company’s entire history.

In two years, Mickey Mouse will have reached the ripe ago of one hundred. That would be a great time for a comeback — not just for Mickey but for the whole Disney brand.

November 12, 2025

QotD: Horror Victorianorum and the anti-Wilhelminites

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For now, please note that while there is a section in the “Wilhelminism” entry for “culture and the arts”, there’s no separate section on “Wilhelmine Art”. That’s because you can image-search “Wilhelmine Art”, and even “Wilhelmine Painting” specifically, and all you’ll get is a bunch of Classical-style portraits, and some Biedermeier landscapes. As far as visual art is concerned, the only important artists of the Kaiserreich were the ones who were most vehemently opposed to it.

Which is fine, if you’re an art student (or in that most unemployable of majors, Art History). But we need to know what “mainstream” art looked like under Wilhelm II, and for all intents and purposes it was Biedermeier.

Everyone with me? I’m oversimplifying, but not too much, when I say that you can make a pretty good case that the ultimate cause of World War One was “tradition”. At least, the people who were there sure as hell thought so. If you’re not familiar with Wilhelmine culture — and I am very, very far from Expert — consider the analogous case in Great Britain. Horror Victorianorum has its own Wiki entry, and isn’t that odd? It’s great to see David Stove getting some of the credit he deserves, but if he hadn’t coined it, somebody would’ve, because the shift in English culture was so massive, so in-your-face, that you can see the 20th century being born, in whatever medium you choose: art, architecture, literature, music, interior design, whatever, it’s all stupendously, tremendously, egregiously anti-Victorian.

Imagine “Victorian culture” is Donald Trump. That’s how against it they were. By the end of Edward VII’s brief reign, anything and everything Victorian was not just wrong, not just outdated or silly or whatever, but THE WORST THING EVER. If the Victorians liked it, Edwardians hated it, for any and all values of it; if they’d discovered that any of the guys in Eminent Victorians had really enjoyed metabolizing oxygen, the entire Edwardian Smart Set would’ve asphyxiated themselves on principle.

At that point, Modernism was inevitable, because Modernism was all there could be.

Severian, “PoMo, P-O-M-O PoMo …”, Founding Questions, 2025-08-07.

July 21, 2025

AI slop seems to have finally triggered significant pushback

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia says that he’s seeing strong indicators that the AI slop superabundance has helped create a widespread rejection of it and all its works:

2025 has been the year of garbage culture.

Creators watch in horror as dismal AI slop threatens their livelihoods — and the integrity of their fields. It’s everywhere, spreading faster than a pharaoh’s plague.

In recent months, we’ve been bombarded with millions of lousy AI songs, idiotic AI videos, and clumsy AI images. Error-filled AI texts are everywhere — from your workplace memos to the books sold on Amazon.com.

Even my lowly vocation, music journalism, gets turned into a joke when it’s accompanied by slop images of fake events.

No, these things did not really happen.

But something has changed in the last few days.

The garbage hasn’t disappeared. It’s still everywhere, stinking up the joint.

But people are disgusted, and finally pushing back. And they are doing so with such fervor that even the biggest AI companies are now getting nervous and pulling back.

Just consider this surprising headline:

This was stunning news. YouTube is part of the biggest AI slop promoter of them all — namely the Google/Alphabet empire. How can they possibly abandon AI garbage? Their bosses are the biggest slopmasters of them all.

After this shocking news reverberated through the creative economy, YouTube started to backtrack. They said that they would not punish every AI video — some can still be monetized.

But even the revised guidelines are still a major blow to AI slop purveyors. YouTube made clear that “creators are required to disclose when their realistic content is altered or synthetic”. That’s a huge win—we finally have a requirement for disclosure, and it came straight from the dark planet Alphabet.

YouTube also stressed that it opposes “content that is mass-produced or repetitive, which is content viewers often consider spam”. This is just a step away from blocking slop.

Update, 22 July: Ted posted a follow-up with a bit more evidence that the pushback is working:

In my latest article I criticized Spotify for allowing uploads of unauthorized AI tracks to the profiles of dead musicians.

But the company may finally be listening to criticisms of its AI policies. In this case, Spotify has now taken steps to stop the abuses, and a spokesperson reached out to me today with an update and expressing a clear and proper policy on AI fraud.

I share it below (and have also updated my article):

    We’ve flagged the issue to SoundOn, the distributor of the content in question, and it has been removed. This violates Spotify’s deceptive content policies, which prohibit impersonation intended to mislead, such as replicating another creator’s name, image, or description, or posing as a person, brand, or organization in a deceptive manner. This is not allowed. We take action against licensors and distributors who fail to police for this kind of fraud and those who commit repeated or egregious violations can and have been permanently removed from Spotify.

They acted quickly, and I give them credit for that.

Update the second, 23 July: Ah, Spotify giveth and Spotify taketh away:

“Spotify is publishing new, AI-generated songs on the official pages of artists who died years ago without the permission of their estates or record labels,” reports 404 Media.

This scandal came to light because of an AI song attributed to Blaze Foley, who died in 1989. The bogus track is accompanied by an AI-generated image of a man who bears no resemblance to the singer.

What’s going on here? Is this just ignorance or carelessness at Spotify? Or does it represent something more sinister — another example of the company’s willingness to deceive users in the pursuit of profits?

These scams must stop. If Spotify doesn’t fix this mess immediately, courts should intervene.

But the dead musician scandal is just a start — because other bizarre things are happening at Spotify.

The whole situation is positively surreal.

May 26, 2025

QotD: A Slop manifesto

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Long live Slop!

Slop is a creative style that emerged around 2023 with the rise of generative AI. Slop art is flat, awkward, stale, listless, and often ridiculous. Slop works are celebrated for their stupidity and clumsiness — which are often amplified by strange juxtapositions of culture memes.

These Slop works are widely mocked by the audience — and even by the people who create and curate them. Yet they are the results of hundreds of billions of dollars in tech investment.

Slop is all about wastefulness!

Let’s put this in context: In the current moment, there’s no money for serious artists — in filmmaking, fiction, painting, music, whatever. But there’s an endless supply of dollars to create Slop technology.

In fact, no artistic movement in human history has soaked up more cash than Slop.

This seems like a paradox. Why is so much money devoted to churning out crap?

Ah, that’s part of the appeal of Slop. The audience’s gleeful mockery is actually enhanced by the fact that a huge fortune has been wasted in creating pointless and bizarre works.

In other words, this mismatch between means and ends is a key part of our aesthetic movement. Hence a certain degree of cynicism is embedded in both the production and consumption of Slop.

So it’s stupid. It’s wasteful. It’s tasteless. It’s cynical.

And that’s all part of the plan.

Long live Slop!

Ted Gioia, “The New Aesthetics of Slop”, The Honest Broker, 2025-02-25.

May 23, 2025

“‘[D]isrupting traditional ideas’ of what a ‘triumphant figure’ is”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

William M. Briggs uses the most recent installation of a statue of a black woman in highly public spaces to explore the idea that even black people “have Black Fatigue”:

Statues of fat ugly lumpen surly ill-kempt statues of black women, all in poses to accentuate their quarrelsome uselessness, are being placed in prominent places in the West. The Latest, rising like a creature in a 1960s Japanese monster movie, is in Times Square. The person who created these blots of bad taste said they were “a way of ‘disrupting traditional ideas’ of what a ‘triumphant figure’ is”.

He’s right. These figures do represent triumph. DIE requires elevating the least and representing them as the best, and forcing all to pretend the charade is real. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a more perfect representation of the true spirit of DIE than these misshapen piles of metal. They demand you say they are equivalent to great men whose statues we are no longer allowed to have.

If it were only statues, there would be no story. But everybody knows that bad black behavior of all kind is being ignored, excused or outright celebrated.

One example will suffice. After the lifelong thug and criminal lowlife George Floyd met his expected end — poisoning himself with drugs and engaging in all manner of misbehavior — our rulers and “elites” fell to their knees, even in Congress itself, to show their adoration of black criminality. Not to mention Floyd’s own statues which cropped up like poisonous mushrooms, each encouraging emulation of Floyd’s exasperating antics.

It’s so bad now that parents of white kids murdered by blacks rush out to forgive or excuse the killers, lest anybody dare to think they would condemn bad black behavior.

The question is why.

Before you answer, understand this is not only your “racist” Uncle Sergeant Briggs asking this question. Blacks themselves are asking.

There is an entire growing genre of YouTube videos of blacks telling us they grow weary of the constant misadventure of “ratchet blacks” (their word, not mine) and our culture’s welcoming attitude toward them. Take “Why Black Fatigue Is On The Rise“. Black fatigue is the natural exhaustion from having to deal routinely with with misbehaving blacks, where “dealing with” means having to pretend, while in polite society, we are not seeing what we are all seeing.

Watch just the first two minutes if you haven’t the time for more. The man in the inset quite rightly points out that blacks are now, as everybody always wanted, being judged by the content of their character, and not the color of their skin. The problem is the content of their character, or at least the character of those who are celebrated for misdeeds. As one commenter to the video said, the problem are blacks who are “Offended by everything. Ashamed of nothing. Entitled to everything. Responsible for nothing.”

The natural desire for separation, and to be with ones’ own, leads blacks to label blacks not confirming to expected behavior as “acting white”. The natural solution would be a formal separation: you go your way, we go ours. That, of course, would never be countenanced, and is anyway not desired by the majority. One thing absolutely demanded by our elites is “diversity”, by which they mean strict uniformity of belief. Our betters weep fake tears over things like colonization, which we know are fake because when we ask them to let us go our own way they say no.

If we can’t separate, then we have to find a way to get along with each other. Whatever this way is, it can’t have a basis in transparent lies.

May 20, 2025

The Death of Marat

Filed under: France, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Daniel Jupp uses the famous Jacques-Louis David painting of the 1793 assassination of French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday to illuminate the twisted dealings of the various radical factions within the larger revolutionary movement:

La Mort de Marat (The Death of Marat) by Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825)
From the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium via Wikimedia Commons.

One of the most famous and celebrated works of art in European history is a painting about a political assassination. That painting is The Death of Marat (La Mort de Marat in French) by Jacques-Louis David. It was painted in 1793. David was already one of the most respected French artists of the 18th century, a leader of French Neoclassical art. He was also himself a political figure, a prominent member of the Montagnard faction (itself a subset of the Jacobins) and a member of the revolutionary Committee of General Security.

It’s an overtly political painting in every way, created by a man who was as much a French Revolutionary politician as he was an established and esteemed artist. It’s about a shocking political event, and it was crafted as an exercise in propaganda. […] The painting shows us Marat in his bath, immediately after being assassinated by Charlotte Corday on the July 13, 1793. It is a beautifully composed image of political martyrdom. Marat’s posture, for anyone with the slightest awareness of Western art traditions, immediately shows where the sympathies of the artist lie (and also, where the sympathies of the artist lie).

Marat’s pose is, of course, a deliberate mirroring of the pose of Christ in hundreds if not thousands of Western art traditional depictions of the Crucifixion. The pale, slim but muscular figure, marked by the assassin’s blade but in a manner that might be compared to the puncture wound inflicted by the Spear of Longinus or to the stigmata nail wounds of crucifixion on Christ himself, has that peculiar serenity in death that other artists place in depictions of Jesus. The blood is present as proof of supreme sacrifice, but artistically minimised, prevented from distracting from the clean, shining, almost marble-like flesh of the deceased, who is already a kind of heroic statue in repose, fixed for the admiration of the ages. The dead man has a gentle, compassionate smile on his lips, as if interrupted in the process of forgiving his murderer. The angle, the gentleness, the delicacy of it all suggests Christ-like self sacrifice, as if Marat has chosen his death knowingly, given his life willingly.

Here is the martyr of the Revolution. A new Christ, as good as the old one … if not better.

[…]

It’s at this point that we should mention the central dishonesties here. Christian self sacrifice and martyrdom is a very different thing to one politically radical extremist being murdered by another. Marat was, in reality, about as far away from this movingly gentle depiction of him as one could imagine. As one of the most radical and zealous figures of the Revolution, Marat was a lesson for the ages in the exact opposite way to the one that David depicts. He wasn’t a gentle figure of self sacrifice. He wasn’t a Lamb bringing Peace in the manner of Christ. He wasn’t an innocent. He was a brutal, grasping, rapacious sadist. He was one of the leaders of the storming of the Bastille, and that too has symbolic and practical importance – the terrible monarchical regime had hardly anyone in its most hated prison, whereas the Revolutionary “liberators” soon stuffed it full of their political enemies.

Even at a point where many murders were already being committed, Marat was noted as an unusually brutal proponent of Revolutionary excess. His assassin was from a rival, supplanted Jacobin faction, the Girondists. The Girondists too had supported the earliest uses of violence, riot and uprising within France, and were a “war party” who wanted to export the Revolution abroad and topple monarchical dynasties across Europe. These two factions did not really differ on whether you should murder your political enemies or not, but the Girondists were at times embarrassed by Montagnard violence when it was at its most indiscriminate. The Girondists tended to be the most intellectualised of the Revolutionaries. They were the writers of pamphlets and doctrines of great length and increasingly mind-numbing tediousness. Marat, although also a street-level gutter pamphleteer, was much more of a bloody handed man of action, more akin to a modern terrorist. But the two were aligned in the creation of the bloodshed, even if the Girondins wanted it to be more focused and controlled and ultimately directed outside France:

    Temperament largely accounts for the dividing line between the parties. The Girondins were doctrinaires and theorists rather than men of action. They initially encouraged armed petitions, but then were dismayed when this led to the émeute (riot) of 20 June 1792. Jean-Marie Roland was typical of their spirit, turning the Ministry of the Exterior into a publishing office for tracts on civic virtues while riotous mobs were burning the châteaux unchecked in the provinces.

The split between the two factions came to a head as a fall out from the September Massacres of 1792. Marat, a leader of the peasant sans-culottes mobs, was personally engaged in the orgy of bloodshed. Girondist leaders were alarmed, already sensing that previously aligned Revolutionaries or widespread mob violence could turn on them. Typically, the Girondists took defensive measures that were mainly concentrated on written statements, declarations or on bureaucratic ministries, whereas the Montagnards gradually took control of revolutionary militias and the people who were prepared to actually decide, at the point of a sword or via the barrel of a musket, who got killed and when. Neither side could be described as moderates, but one side were more ruthlessly pragmatic, which is why it was the Girondists who ended up being put on the execution lists of the Terror.

At the time that Corday assassinated Marat, Girondists had already been ousted from positions of power and arrested. Marat, along with Danton and Robespierre, was one of their three most prominent denouncers and enemies. Corday stated that she had “killed one man so that 100,000 could be saved”. It’s clear that she had hoped her action would save her arrested Girondin allies and personal friends, but it had the opposite effect and sealed their subsequent trial and executions.

April 4, 2025

QotD: Nero’s persecution of the early Christians

Filed under: Europe, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If many among the people loved him, then this was in part because Nero had offered them the chance to share in his conflation of the heavenly with the earthly. In the wake of the great fire that, in 64, had destroyed much of Rome, he had planted a park in the very centre of the city. The sprawling lawns, lakes and forests that surrounded what he termed his “Golden House” had offered to the masses a feel of fresh breezes, a break from the monotony of smoke and brick, a hint of the pavilions of the immortals on Mount Olympus.

Senators, of course, had hated it. The loss of Rome’s familiar sights to countryside had borne witness precisely to what they had always found most disorienting about Nero: his ability to dissolve the boundaries of everything that they had previously taken for granted. So it was that they had accused him of starting the fire deliberately, as a way of clearing a space for his building plans; and so it was that Nero, looking to shift the blame, had fixed on convenient scapegoats. These culprits, even by Nero’s own taboo-busting standards, embodied everything that decent citizens had always most dreaded about moral upheaval: the adherents of a sinister cult whose motivation was nothing less than, in the words of a Roman historian, “their hatred for the norms of human society”.

“Christians”, these deviants were called, after their founder, “Christus”, a criminal who had been crucified in Judaea some decades before, under a previous Caesar. Nero, ever fond of a spectacle, had displayed a vengefulness worthy of the Olympian gods. Some of the condemned, dressed in animal skins, had been torn to pieces by dogs. Others, lashed to crosses, had been smeared in pitch and used as torches to illumine the night. Nero, riding in his chariot, had mingled with the gawping crowds. Suetonius would include his persecution of the Christians in the list — a very short one — of the positives of his reign.

Among those put to death, so later tradition would record, was a man who in time would come to be viewed as the very keeper of the doors of heaven. In 1601, in a church that had originally been built on the site of the tomb where Nero’s two nurses and his first great love had buried him, a painting was installed that paid homage, not to the notorious Caesar, but to the outcast origins of the city’s Christian order.

The artist, a young man from Milan by the name of Caravaggio, had been commissioned to portray a crucifixion: not of Christ himself, but of his leading disciple. Peter, a fisherman who, according to the Gospels, had abandoned his boat and nets to follow Jesus, was said to have become the bishop of the very first Christians of Rome. Since his execution in the wake of the great fire, more than 200 men had held the bishopric: an office which brought with it a claim to primacy over the entire Church, and the honorary title of “Pappas” or “Father” — “Pope”.

Tom Holland, “When Christ conquered Caesar”, UnHerd, 2020-04-10.

February 9, 2025

What Was Life Like for a Servant at a Royal Palace? | Secrets of Kensington Palace with Dan Snow

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History Hit
Published 19 Sept 2024

Dan Snow explores behind the scenes at the majestic Kensington Palace, the glittering centre of the royal court in early Georgian England. It’s a very special time to visit — the Historic Royal Palaces team has been delving deep into the archives to lift the veil of the public facing court and explore the lives of the many people who lived and worked here. Beyond the kings and queens in the stately rooms, there were hundreds of other men and women — people born high and low — who played a vital role in keeping the court going.

This exhibition brings together an amazing collection of objects, many of which have never been seen before. From an ice saw used by Frances Talbot, the “Keeper of the Ice and Snow” to the revealing scribbled notes of the Master Cook’s Book. From the intricate stitching of Queen Charlotte’s dress, contrasting with the plainer uniform of her dresser, Dan gets up close to objects which build a much more vivid picture of life in this palace, upstairs and downstairs. The extraordinary mural of George I’s court on the striking King’s Grand Staircase, as well as detailed portraits of individuals who worked in the palace, shed light on the real, often forgotten, people who worked, lived or attended court within these palace walls.
(more…)

January 18, 2025

QotD: On Auguste Rodin’s Fallen Caryatid

Filed under: Architecture, Books, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“For three thousand years architects designed buildings with columns shaped as female figures. At last Rodin pointed out that this was work too heavy for a girl. He didn’t say, ‘Look, you jerks, if you must do this, make it a brawny male figure’. No, he showed it. This poor little caryatid has fallen under the load. She’s a good girl — look at her face. Serious, unhappy at her failure, not blaming anyone, not even the gods … and still trying to shoulder her load, after she’s crumpled under it.

“But she’s more than good art denouncing bad art; she’s a symbol for every woman who ever shouldered a load too heavy. But not alone women — this symbol means every man and woman who ever sweated out life in uncomplaining fortitude, until they crumpled under their loads. It’s courage, […] and victory.”

“‘Victory’?”

“Victory in defeat; there is none higher. She didn’t give up […] she’s still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her. She’s a father working while cancer eats away his insides, to bring home one more pay check. She’s a twelve-year old trying to mother her brothers and sisters because Mama had to go to Heaven. She’s a switchboard operator sticking to her post while smoke chokes her and fire cuts off her escape. She’s all the unsung heroes who couldn’t make it but never quit.

Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961.

January 2, 2025

QotD: Sincerity

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“… in the ’90s, the human spirit was alive and free. And that’s the vibe that resonates with me.”

This is what the French call le horse pucky. If we may be so bold as to speak of “the human spirit” — which is pretty heavy for a column starting with a professional wrestler — the 90s killed it stone cold dead. The human spirit can flourish in the most awful situations, but one indispensable requirement is: Sincerity. You just can’t be snarky about the “Ode to Joy” or ironic about the Sistine Chapel. If you do, then there really is no difference between Beethoven and MC Funetik Spelyn, nothing to choose between Michelangelo and a dog turd on the sidewalk — someone placed them there intentionally, which is the only distinguishing characteristic of “art” possible in a world overrun by Postmodernists and Deconstructionists.

Severian, “Why the 90s Was the Worst Decade Ever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.

November 12, 2024

“Nice business ya got there, Patreon. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to it …”

Filed under: Business, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Above the paywall, Ted Gioia discusses Apple’s latest attempt to cut itself a nice big middleman’s slice of the indy creator market by putting the thumbscrews to Patreon:

Can Apple really charge a 30% tax on indie creators?

What Apple is now doing to indie creators is pure evil — but this story has received very little coverage. Journalists should pay attention, because they are under threat themselves.

Apple is now putting the squeeze on Patreon, a platform that supports more than a quarter of a million creators — artists, writers, musicians, podcasters, videographers, etc.

These freelancers rely on the support of more than 8 million patrons through Patreon, which charges a small 8-12% fee. Many of these supporters pay via Patreon’s iPhone app.

Earlier this year, Apple insisted that Patreon must pay them a 30% commission on all new subscriptions made with the app. In other words, Apple wants to take away close to a third of the income for indie creators — almost quadrupling their transaction fees.

This is the new business model from Cupertino, and it feels like a Mafia shakedown. Apple will make more from Patreon than Patreon does itself.

The only way for indies to avoid this surcharge is by convincing supporters to pay in some other way, and not use an iPhone or Apple tablet.

This is what happens when Apple decides to treat a transaction as an “in app payment” — as if an artist’s entire vocation is no different than a make-believe token in a fantasy video game.

But you can easily imagine how almost anything you do with your phone could be subject to similar demands.

I’ve been very critical of Apple in recent months. But this is the most shameful thing they have ever done to the creative community. A company that once bragged how it supported artistry now actively works to punish it.

October 6, 2024

QotD: Putting the past on trial

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If you pass through Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury, London, you might happen upon a statue of Virginia Woolf that was erected in 2004. You will already know that Woolf was a leading figure in the Bloomsbury Set, that coterie of artists and intellectuals that included E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey. But if you scan the QR code next to this statue you can also learn that Woolf was a vile racist who must be condemned by all right-thinking individuals.

Historical context is all very well. When it comes to Woolf, perhaps a few details about her novels To the Lighthouse or Mrs Dalloway would be appreciated, or some information about her relationship with Vita Sackville-West. But no, instead we are to be hectored about her “challenging, offensive comments and descriptions of race, class and ability which would find unacceptable today”. One wonders what the person responsible for these judgmental remarks has ever accomplished, if anything at all. These petty moralists are like the crabs in the bucket, pulling down the most accomplished out of envy and spite.

The best approach to writers of genius is humility, but this quality seems to be on the decline. We see evidence of this in the self-importance of those who have rewritten books by P.G. Wodehouse, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl. It should go without saying that Wodehouse’s prose cannot be improved, least of all by know-nothing activists who have inveigled their way into the publishing industry.

I recently bought the complete set of Fleming’s James Bond books, but I had to seek out second-hand copies to ensure that they had not been sanitised by talentless “sensitivity readers”. Yes of course, these books include sentiments that are unacceptable by today’s standards. But what’s so wrong with that? “All women love semi-rape” is a shocking sentence – in this case, it’s by the female narrator of The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) – but what purpose does censoring the passage actually serve?

The rewriting of books and the creation of cautionary QR codes are symptoms of our current strain of puritanism. These are the descendants of those religious zealots who shut the theatres in 1642 out of fear that the masses might be corrupted. And while I concede that Ian Fleming’s views on relationships between the sexes may not have been progressive, I don’t feel the need to be berated about it before enjoying the adventures of James Bond.

It’s not as though Bond is even meant to be a likeable character; the man has a licence to kill, for heaven’s sake. This isn’t someone you’d wish to invite to a dinner party. In that regard he’s reminiscent of the hero of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series, a character based on the bully from Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes. He’s a violent boorish rapist, but the novels are still entertaining because most of us aren’t reading them for moral instruction.

In exploring the gamut of human experience, writers will often feel compelled to recreate the grotesque, the uncomfortable, the outrageous, even the downright evil. Who ever supposed that works of fiction should restrict themselves to rose-tinted idealisations of human existence? Imagine Macbeth without the regicide, or King Lear without the eye-gouging, or Titus Andronicus without the cannibalism. Would Dante’s Divine Comedy retain its power if some “sensitivity reader” excised the Inferno?

Andrew Doyle, “Putting the past on trial”, Andrew Doyle, 2024-07-04.

September 27, 2024

So much “modern art” ages like milk

Filed under: Britain, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Most of Andrew Doyle’s latest column is behind the paywall, but I found myself nodding along to the first portion about the descent of modern art:

The works on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) have been curated with care. On my recent visit I began on the fifth floor, where you can admire art from the 1880s until the 1940s. On the fourth floor you will find works from the 1950s to the 1970s, and then two floors below are the collections from the 1980s until the present day. I wonder whether this arrangement is deliberate; the literal descent of the visitor from one floor to the next reflecting the figurative descent of artistic quality through the century.

And so while on the upper floor you can admire the melting clocks of Salvador Dalí’s most famous and haunting work, The Persistence of Memory (1931), and René Magritte’s The Lovers (1928), a curious meditation on romanticised desire, by the time you reach the second floor there are some cuddly toys glued together into clumps which are dangling from the ceiling. I didn’t bother to check who was responsible for this nonsense.

I have often tried to defend some of the more intriguing efforts at modern conceptual art, but I also recognise that we must be able to admit when art is simply bad. I felt the same when I saw the most recent sculpture to grace the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. It is a piece by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles entitled Mil Veces un Instante. It consists of over seven-hundred death masks of trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people arranged into a cuboid. The faces are meant to represent those who have been the victims of violence, including the artist’s friend Karla who was murdered in Juárez in December 2015.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of the passion behind the project, or how the tragedy of this death informed the vision of the piece, but as a work of art it is banal. Like many conceptual pieces inspired by voguish identity politics, it is propagandistic and uninspiring. The Pink News has claimed that those who dislike the piece are “bigots”. I would say they simply have good taste.

I suppose it is an improvement on Heather Phillipson’s godawful “The End”, a sculpture of a dollop of whipped cream with a cherry, a drone and a fly on the top which was finally taken down from the fourth plinth in 2022. I doubt that anyone except the artist and her close family members were disappointed to see it gone. While I understand the subjectivity of such matters, surely we should be aspiring to higher standards when it comes to art in public spaces?

August 9, 2024

Why Oil Paint Is So Expensive | So Expensive

Filed under: Economics, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Business Insider
Published Jul 13, 2019

Oil paint is simple. At its most basic, it’s just a mixture of oil and pigment. But depending on the color and quality, a liter of this paint could cost you $285 to $1,100.

While the rise of oil paint is associated with the Renaissance, paintings using poppy-seed oil have been dated as far back as seventh-century Afghanistan. So what is it that makes this paint so special? And why is it so expensive?
(more…)

August 8, 2024

“The future was then” – the Avant-Garde is so passé

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia shares some observations on the Avant-Garde in modern culture, where the bourgeoisie seem to have become immune — or at least inured — to all the épater-ie:

Some time back, I was invited to attend a concert by an up-and-coming avant-garde band. These musicians were hellbent on disruption and mayhem, proving their transgressive credentials at every turn.

My companion that evening was a well-known jazz musician and, at the end of the concert, he turned to me and said:

“The future was then.”

I laughed, because this was so true. The performance we had just experienced wanted to be cutting-edge and futuristic, but every note played reflected a notion of the avant-garde as it existed sixty years ago.

The future was then.

I thought of that concert recently when a magazine convened a group of artists and intellectuals and asked them a troubling question:

What happened to the avant-garde?

Few people paid attention to their hand-wringing. I didn’t even hear about this online colloquium until months had passed — and I try to stay on top of precisely these kinds of issues. Nobody I know mentioned it, and I stumbled upon it purely by chance.

But that only proves that there really is a crisis in the avant-garde. It’s a crisis of neglect. Of disinterest.

People once got worked up about cutting edge art and transgressive culture. They loved it or hated it, but they always had strong feelings. Nowadays they hardly notice.

Perhaps they are just deadened to it from over-exposure.

You can put up the strangest statue in the town square nowadays — let’s say Albert Einstein getting swallowed by a monster snail — and people just walk by it. They’ve seen it all before.

You have too.

Artists can make the most bizarre music, destroying instruments, shouting obscenities, and creating all sorts of noise. But — yawn! — somebody’s great-grandpa was doing all that three generations ago.

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