[looking-at-the-universe]

IRAS 05437+2502

[the-wolf-and-moon]

NGC 6946, Fireworks Galaxy

[shesnake]

that story was just a trick to get you to do something for me

[cosmicethos]

I'm working 60 hrs a week every week and I'm so tired and sore I could die On the plus side look at this fat ass pupper the lady I clean for has. If he would just stop shitting everywhere

[thelovejournals]

You are not a reflection of the people who can’t love you.

Caitlyn Siehl (via wordsnquotes)

[jackvanzet]

https://www.instagram.com/jackvanzet/

[dogalmighty]

I BLESS THE RAINS DOWN IN 

[lenaleaderoftheresistance-deact]

It looks how the song sounds

[geekynerfherder]

‘Last Spark’ by Jeff Langevin. Print on natural white matte paper with ultrachrome archival inks. Go here to buy.

[eatsleepdraw]

Lost in space by apanicker

[steampunktendencies]

Wearable corset made from copper tanks by Jon Harris

[sweet-sapphics]

who else gets gayer every time they see a cute girl???

[sosuperawesome]

Heather Penn on inprnt and Tumblr

More like this

[chavisory]

Why Authoritarians Attack the Arts

It’s not about making the world a drab and miserable place. It’s worse.

“We need the arts because they make us full human beings. But we also need the arts as a protective factor against authoritarianism. In saving the arts, we save ourselves from a society where creative production is permissible only insofar as it serves the instruments of power. When the canary in the coal mine goes silent, we should be very afraid — not only because its song was so beautiful, but also because it was the only sign that we still had a chance to see daylight again.”

[fierceawakening]

This is also why you should think about how you criticize art. I’m not saying don’t do it, I’m saying think it through.

[cromulentenough]

Fuck that ‘youre not a full human without the arts’ bullshit.

[earlgraytay]

Oh, come off it, you’re a) missing the point and b) drastically underestimating how much art you use every day.

Architecture is art. Fashion is art- and yes, even if you ‘don’t give a damn’ about fashion and dress in ‘what’s comfortable’, someone had to design your fucking cargo shorts to be maximally comfy. Industrial design is art. Furniture design is art. Cooking is art. 

You might be able to be a ~full human~ without being moved by interpretive wheelchair dance, but you can’t be a comfortable or happy one without some kind of goddamn art.  

[nuclearspaceheater]

That cuts both ways. “Why do you need arts funding when we already have houses and clothes? That’s art to, you know.”

[earlgraytay]

Okay. I’m going to come at this from a perspective of a robot who does not understand why art even exists. I understand that that is probably not you, but these are reasons for art to exist that assume you do not give a damn about art.

Firstly: fine art creates utility for many other people. Whether or not you find any utility in it yourself, many people in your community do. I do not find sports particularly valuable- I honestly think there’s not much in the world that’s more boring than men running around on a field kicking a ball- but most other people seem to for some reason. If the other people in my community want to fund sports, I think they should receive funding even if I’m individually against it. Because clearly, they’re getting something out of it.

Secondly: Fine art employs a lot of members of the community who would otherwise be unemployable. The tormented artist stereotype has a grain of truth in it: many artists struggle with physical and mental illness. Having a career in art- like many other careers where you’re self-employed- means being able to work at your own pace. Having too many bad days in a row won’t get you fired. Funding the arts means giving disabled people the time and breathing room they need to begin a career on their own merits, without working themselves to death trying to hold down a more ‘normal’ job.  

Thirdly: art gives us a common language we can use to communicate, in the same way that science does. If I say a government policy is “Orwellian”, for example, you know I mean “it’s dictatorial”, with the heavy implication that it creates a surveillance state. If I say something is a “Cinderella story”, you know I mean it’s an underdog story, presumably with a heavy element of rags-to-riches. Art creates connotations and shades of meaning that enrich and deepen human communication.

There are as many good reasons to fund art as there are to fund higher maths, honestly. Number theory isn’t immediately useful to anyone’s life, and yet I don’t think you’d have any problem with the government funding mathematics departments.

[the-grey-tribe]

I wish this stuff was phrased and argued better. Art funding is welfare for the middle class. Art does not solve problems. Art merely depicts them. People who say “this is art” mean a very narrow and positive thing. Imagine the NEA would stop in its current form, but instead that amount of money would fund creative writing classes and Bob Ross style painting classes for inner city children of working class parents. State-funded, state-sanctioned art benefits a narrow clique of an interconnected cultural elite. That cultural elite produces things that normal people don’t buy. If anybody did actually spend money on their stuff, there wouldn’t be the need for a NEA, would there? Are you afraid that only rich people could afford art and kickstarter would die or that, absent state funding, people would rather spend money the wrong art?

Imagine that amount of money spent on after hour soccer leagues, or bowling, or anything else that does not stink of top-down class warfare!

Imagine a world without the NEA. Would people still spend money on industrial design, on illustration, on fashion, on beauty? Would people like Ben Stahl, Dieter Rams, Bob Ross, Gianni Versace or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe still have existed?

In a world without state funding for the arts, would Interior Semiotics still have happened? Would we have Mattress Performance(Carry that Weight)? Would we still have gotten Merde d’Artiste? And if the answer is “yes”, does cutting funding even matter?

[nuclearspaceheater]

“We’re going to fund high art, and make the plebs pay for it!”

[oktavia-von-gwwcendorff-deactiv]

When someone says “publicly funded arts” what I hear is “the aristocracy playing its internal signaling games, at everyone’s expense, in spaces everyone else has to inhabit”.

Arts in the valuable meaning of the word happens when people have free time. A materially prosperous society, with enough abundance that kickstarters and patreons and other voluntary crowdfunding bazaars are viable, and without deprivation and involuntary unemployment, seems like a way better way to get arts than funding well-connected cathedral insiders.

[the-grey-tribe]

I believe that giving other people’s money to charity is not a virtue, even if it is a net positive.

I feel slightly bad for @earlgraytay here, because there are so many good arguments for funding art, but if you just admit that you want to fund political activism that is edgy and contrarian, but not ultimately well thought out or tied to a concrete policy, please don’t call it art.

I don’t believe @earlgraytay thinks that free markets won’t fund art ever, but it seems like the linked NYT author does. Half the people in the notes call it the “cathedral“, and I can’t tell if they are referring to Eric Raymond or that other guy. But the NYT article definitely gives the impression that a “cathedral”, in both meanings of the word, is supposed to be a good thing.

[chavisory]

I’m gonna address “cathedral” separately, but…

What if I told you that taxes aren’t charity, and public investment in the arts isn’t charity, it’s a sound economic and cultural investment?

[appalachian-ace]

And that public investment in the arts in the US rarely takes the form of direct payments to individual artists anymore. It’s much more likely to go to art associations, museums large and small, stage theaters, etc.

So cutting public investment in the arts won’t do a thing to take money from Rich Dude With Paintbrush. It’ll get rid of local summer art classes for kids who can’t afford private lessons. It’ll get rid of the two or three field trips my elementary school could take to the local civic center for plays meant for kids - everything paid for but a couple of dollars, and there was a fund for if your parents couldn’t afford that. It’ll get rid of the ability of the local museum where I grew up to have so many local shows and competitions for artists who weren’t rich enough to buy their own gallery space.

Crowd funding individual artists only works if they get exposed enough to the art of others to say ‘Hey, I Want To Try Doing That’.

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

Yes: the arts can be used to maintain social privilege and economic disparity (Which is why the Religious Society of Friends had been so long opposed to art).

But art is also the doodle at the edge of your notebook page, or a drawing in chalk on the sidewalk. Even during the darkest periods in human history, people – and not just members of a specialized Artist class – have made art.

Authoritarian regimes throughout history have:

A) Tightly controlled the arts for use in State propaganda, and

B) Suppressed and punished artists for creating art outside the State-sanctioned parameters.

They don’t do this because they are Big Meanie villains like you see on Saturday morning cartoons, and just want all their citizens to be Sad, and their nations to be Gloomy.

They do it because they fear the arts as an expression of the citizens’ voice, as a way to challenge the status-quo that keeps the authoritarian regimes in power.

That, right there, should be a clear enough reason why the arts are important, and should be defended.

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that.

Samuel Beckett, from Endgame  (via prousts)

[femininefreak]

Mr. Rogers once sued the Klan.

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

[Image description: a cropped scan of a page from TV Guide, showing a segment of an interview with Mister Rogers (quote):

TVG: When do you get angry? Where does Mr. Rogers draw the line?

Mr. Rogers: I was incensed by what the Ku Klux Klan did recently. I am hardly a suing person, and yet that just got my goat. Members of the Klu Klux Klan were giving out a telephone number in a schoolyard, and these kids were calling the number. There was a Mister Rogers sound-alike voice on it with terribly racist messages. I just saw red. And so we sued them and we won. Maybe it’s strange, but the only thing that really angers me is something that’s demeaning to somebody else.

TVG: If you had one message you

(end quote) Description ends.]

Frankly? I don’t think that’s strange at all.

Mr. Rogers also gave the next town over from the Neighborhood of Make-Believe a Black Woman for a mayor (in 1975), and gave her a White Man to be her assistant.

Fred Rogers: Quietly radical since forever.

[jenizupan]

[liryae-blog]

There is literally nothing in nature that blooms all year long, so do not expect yourself to do so.