Title of course borrowed from 00’s band Art Brut, whom I kind of miss, though they only did one album.

I hope this video lasts on Youtube. It’s really one of the best arguments I’ve heard on the objectivity of taste as it pertains to art and experience in general. Who gets to judge? Who decides? The answer?

You do.

It’s not even “we do,” though we-do sums up how art is judged and valued. I’ve come to appreciate the challenges to consensus a lot more than I once did. My first challenge to my own conformity came from my seven-year-old son while we stood in a museum in Madrid looking at a Rothko painting. I stood considering it and said I don’t get it.

Evan repeated, “You don’t get it.”

No, I don’t.

“Look at the texture. Look at the colors.”

Who the fuck was he channeling? Who knows? Anyway, this is worth watching.

***Added note*** My support of the ideas of this video may seem entirely at odds with everything I said about the author Knausgaard a couple days ago, and that would be a fair criticism. I never said I was consistent, but I’ve never said My Struggle had no business existing. Surely his sprawling chronicles of the utterly ordinary resonated with enough people to justify their place in the world. It would be dishonest to say that the trajectory of his relationship with his father didn’t move me at all. It did strike me as tragic in the extreme, especially in the way that it was laid out across time. There was a sense of hopelessness in the immutability of the relationship, and that he himself, Karl Ove, was left to piece it all together and try to make sense of it after the fact. It was moving that he came up empty-handed. It was a fair reflection of so many of all of our deepest relationships. Time moves on and things crumble and disappear. There is power in the book in that respect. Things go on and on and on with no novel event or cataclysm to affect change, as you see in most novels or even memoirs, and then they are gone like they never existed at all. But we are left with a sense of loss, or the loss of possibility that there will be a different future.

Back to hauntology? More on that later.