Author Archive
Subscribe via RSS
Mass-Produced Sentiments
20th Jul 2010So this is my first ever blog and I feel this immense pressure to say something profound and earth-shatteringly artistic that will change art discourse forever. Obviously that is not going to happen…well, not today anyway!
I want to start by discussing what I have been looking at recently which ties in with a piece I have just sold. ‘Token Support’ was based on the idea of generic speech. Words that people say all too frequently that lose any sort of meaning or emotion in the process. The idea is that the ‘tokens’, which have the generic text engraved onto them, can be given to people instead of the words being said. Its the same sort of thing as people giving greetings cards, particularly the ones that have messages like ‘Thinking of you’ or ‘Congratulations’, they lose all emotion through the very fact that they are mass produced by a smart arse computer whizz at Clintons who works on the same template day after day.
So is generic speech useful? Well, as a person who struggles to understand the emotions of others, or more importantly, the social etiquette that goes along with it, I often wish I could simply hand out my sentiments to save the self-conscious voice inside my head that questions, ‘Did I sound genuine enough?’ It’s true that if we didn’t have this social etiquette in place, which requires us to lie through our teeth to reassure others, I would not have to worry about my insufficient capacity to sound genuine. But, as we can’t go around being brutally honest and hurting people, I would much rather just dish out a token and walk away.
So, in a world where we are collecting friends in cyberspace like the Victorians collected insects, or silently ‘laughing out loud’ to people via text, why not go one further and exchange tokens instead?!
I do want to point out, before I receive a wave of negative feedback, that ‘Token Support’ and other ‘tokens’ to come, are about highlighting this issue of generic speech, making people aware of just how unfulfilling these words truly are. I do not wish to live in a mute world, (although certain people should be banned from ever opening their mouths again!) I simply want to live in a less generic one.
2 Responses
-
This is a really interesting post, a great first time blog. Modern technology and society seem to be limiting our vocabulary, like you say, a ‘LOL’ or ‘congrats’ is commonly accepted. Its as though the world we live in has no time for language, expressing things in words is too old fashioned & time consuming!
This could be a positive thing for visual artists, as works of art commonly express complicated ideas/feelings through one single image. One image = a whole essay! Good art can often represent things that cannot be articulated via words alone. On the other hand, we could be slowly turning into the society Orwell describes in his famous ‘1984′ where all language is reduced to certain (generic if you like) words that have no ambiguity at all, only direct meaning.
I’m all for a world that operates slowly by the exchanging of art, instead of a hyper-fast generic word swap. Maybe that’s just because I’m currently reading ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’, and it could well be turning me into a hippy. -
09th Aug 20102Hi Emma,
I liked this post. I thought you might be interested in Christopher RIcks’ ‘chapter called ‘Clichés’ (another species of generic speech) in his book ‘The Force of Poetry’.
“A cliché begins as heartfelt, and then its heart sinks. But no song about lovers and their hearts can afford to turn away from those truths which may never get old but whose turns of phrase have got grey and old and full of sleep. The trouble with a cliché like take it to heart is that by now it’s almost impossible to take it to heart. Yet genius with words is often a matter, as T.S. Eliot said, of being original with the minimum of alteration…”
Anyway I think you might like him – he’s a very vigilant writer.
Soraya
Leave a Reply
29th Jul 2010