finding value in obscure art

[Music] okay so first up what do I mean by bad as a qualifier for art especially it's pretty subjective what I mean is art that isn't good at least not traditionally something that's divisive Rough Around the Edges obscure was unsuccessful unpopular you get the idea and I'm not implying that things that are popular can't have value but but if you want to connect to something deeply or motivate yourself to make art I think you're better off finding something that was made with the audience as an afterthought over something engineered to appeal to the most people possible so I'm going to gush about obscure art for a little bit because although admittedly it can be a little ugly it really inspires me and helped me better understand why I connect to Art in the first place when I say bad art inspires me inspiration functions on two tiers for me there's a general sense and a personal sense for General take the Olympics for example it's impressive partly because of how much better they are than me I'm on the stands saying that's so cool but there's no Second Step this is kind of how I feel when I see highly acclaimed art I'm impressed still obviously but it's too unattainable to want to act on that feeling I can appreciate it I just can't apply it to my own life there's no accessibility it can even be discouraging to recognize the talent gap between myself starting out and someone so far ahead of me and this is where bad art comes in because the second kind of inspiration is purely internal it's personal you're recognizing yourself and someone else's art it's as if there's a sense of class solidarity but for talent seeing something like this inspires me because of how much more approachable to me it is than this I get the same sense of that's so cool but then I also think maybe I could do it too and to motivate yourself in taking first steps to make anything you want as many of those maybe I can twos as possible and to me that's the point of inspiration to act on it a low barrier to entry is how you build confidence to try new Hobbies I'm way more likely to follow a cooking recipe from a home cook who says something like this I think my re the printed recipe calls for a yellow onion I'm just using this one cuz that's what I had because of how low stakes it feels these little moments of relatability carry a lot of weight in feeling like you are the intended audience this is what got me into street photography it just seemed so accessible with a point and shoot especially all I needed was a camera and I could start taking pictures too for me the Breakthrough moment though was seeing photos by da morama he's the primary photographer that inspired me because of how unprofessional and impulsive his pictures feel and they feel bad enough that I got past the initial hurdle of questioning if I was good enough and then just started I ended up shooting black and white film for the first time when I was in Japan not too long ago and got some shots that I'm pretty stoked about art feeling accessible is what keeps the cycle going I saw those photos and they incited something in me I wanted to recreate that and also felt like I could unpolished messy things remind me that someone else made them someone just like me and this sense of fingerprints or personality that's injected into art happens way more often in lowbudget DIY spaces so I highly encourage exploring them and if something is too accessible it's easy to be dismissive of its value you know I could have done that or anyone could make this that's a great takeaway to have because yeah anyone can so do it be derivative of something even especially if you're just starting out because everyone is I think of this Mary Oliver quote from her essay collection Upstream all the time in art there is no neutral place in regards to creativity if you aren't working with it you're working against it and you're working against yourself to feel that urge to make something and stifle it is such a disservice and now more than ever that call to be creative is everywhere liking things can be so impulsive and immediate if you watch something or play a game hear a song see a picture read someone's substack and really enjoy it and then proceed to not direct that energy anywhere you're doing yourself a disservice even if it's technically bad whatever comes out of that is coming from a pure place and that is never a bad thing to reiterate art feeling human is important and with passion projects it's easy to be reminded of the person who made it sometimes literally a great example is wandering emanon it's this manga I really love not going to talk about it but at the very end there's a section of the author talking about why they created this character and I just find it so Charming to know that I'm reading the culmination of someone's lifelong fantasies is Kenji Cuda a household name no but the people that he does reach have a much more profound experience with his work it oozes passion and it really melted me to be reminded that artists intention can stem from self-fulfillment and not always be profit driven or about popularity in a lot of cases they still do succeed but the success is an after effect of people responding to authenticity the same way that Kenji that Cooking Channel earlier has a million plus subscribers it's not despite him being authentic it's because of it I think we're seeing a lot of this in the digital age with influencers versus traditional celebrities and it's the same as before where with the Olympics you're in the stands looking in versus in this case you're on the same stage it's not a new idea uh there's entire film movements that focused on working with non-actors so that the performances would feel more natural one that I just watched the other week was this movie beyond the infinite 2 minutes it's this lowbudget time travel movie that was shot in one take it's really DIY really Charming I liked it so much that I was going through the credits afterwards to figure out who made it and found out that the writer has this 20 plus year history of working on time travel short films and writing credits on other time travel movies directing his own just this lifelong relationship to the art itself and I found that so humanizing so heartwarming and that intention comes across so much in the final product case in point I found out that he wrote one of my favorite movies ever the night your short walk-on girl which is so crazy to think about this human element of art isn't always going to be heartwarming though sometimes it even adds to the horror of something going back to manga for a minute the horror genre is figurehead by junji ETO and I want to talk about someone less popular but directly related they both made adaptations of the same thing of no longer human but this is usum Maru fuya the reason I bring him up is because it is the complete opposite of what the author's note of Emon made me feel uh this also has this you know author moment at the end but it made it 10 times scarier so I'm not going to talk about no longer human I think the scariest thing that I have ever read comes from a short story collection that he wrote it has 30 views so we are getting pretty deep in the horror manga iceberg not going to show anything don't worry but the epigraph he kind of talks about how his process was his hand was so injured that he had to tape a pen to it in order to draw and that he went into this project with no outline and just let the pain guide him and he is drawing very not nice things so the fact that someone was like in this mental state making something that depraved feeling literal pain and having firstperson thoughts while all that is happening is really unnerving to think about and like unsettles me even now so the reason that I bring this up aside from it being like the opposite of emanon is because horror as a genre actually has a lot of it's essentially known for a DIY approach so many cult classic movies are horror movies and one that I saw recently that I think is a great example is Skinnamarink it's something accessible but elevated it was getting a bit of buzz when it came out like a year or two ago um anyways I find it inspiring because it's so Beed back and skeletal it's essentially just a handicam and a house and they were able to create Terror out of linal spaces and refusing to show faces technically anyone could have made it anyone with a house and a camera but having the vision to push boundaries is the inspire in part I feel like this for a lot of horror movies where they get to make a lot out of a little but this idea of kind of grand statement small resources or making something profound out of whatever is way more obvious in experimental short films and featurelength horror movies and before I go into more examples I feel like I'm kind of getting reference overload here but just want to slow down and kind of break down what I mean about simpli because Simplicity is kind of double-edged things being simple in terms of resources needed doesn't necessitate accessibility which is kind of what I started this as just because it's basic doesn't mean it's easily understood or replicatable and that can be the central conceit of a lot of high snobby art it seems simple unless you're high brow enough to get it take something like Pollock or Rothco or Warhol they're very simple but if you don't get it it's too simple that there's no wiggle room left for you to figure it out sometimes the takeaway is the opposite it's how much effort goes into making something even if it looks simple this is basically the entire conceit of Animation where you sacrifice and constantly balance detail and complexity because of how hard what you're doing is just wanted to preface kind of both of those sides because short films constantly overlap on both of these extremes you can get something like brage showing a classroom for 2 hours or whatever or a 3 minute video that took 900 days to draw by hand and it's not that one is less valuable than the other but depending on what inspires you they're a mix bag anyways short films that inspired me recently are in the first category actually Daybreak Express and bridg goo it encourages me to look up and try and recognize the potential that's all around me something as simple as a train ride can be completely transformed if you have the vision to do it just using Color filters and a cool song this went from mundane to really inspiring to me they're just the perfect example of that that's so cool maybe I can do it too kind of inspiration and in this case I already did do it too again sh out to that Mary Oliver quote but act on the impulse so I watched these and my takeaway was color filters are really cool and awesome and dope so I went out and I bought some lavender hued film and took a bunch of pictures and guess what they are in fact cool I just followed that potential and made something and felt accomplished and proud and happy about it it wasn't hard and it doesn't have to be the cycle of art is already complete this idea of deskilling art is kind of hard to come to terms with but effort isn't the be all end all sign of value in fact things that take too much effort can make something fall into this weird limbo between both kinds of inspiration where I'm out on the stands looking in but I'm thinking I should be on that stage I'm talking about tekashi ETO in this case for how meticulous and timeconsuming His stopmotion short films are I can't tell when watching them what the limiting factor is whether it's having the vision to come up with his idea in the first place or the patience and effort to put it all together on paper all I would need is a camera but it just feels so Out Of Reach and this sense of inspiration also stems from the fact that he's pushing boundaries and defying convention which is another reason that obscure art is so valuable making things that are increasingly Niche or deeply personal means that they have a lower chance of eding commercially they still could but it's important to engage with art that's unpopular that takes these sorts of risks the entire idea that making art is a risk though led to the biggest takeaway that I've had from appreciating bad art overcoming a fear of failure by engaging with it I'm proving to myself that it's possible to reach an audience despite whatever doubts I have I'm living vicariously through someone else taking a risk and putting something out there despite knowing it could fail it could be poorly received but they decided that it's worth that to unburden themselves of a potential lifelong what if the second part of the epigraph to that one horror manga I was talking about mentioned something that I found really profound which is that was a technical failure but a personal Masterpiece was very poorly received very divisive abrasive evil bastard whatever but that's why art should be made as something that's intrinsic to you as something personal something challenging that can be a technical failure and also exactly what you needed to make I was projecting the idea that things being unsuccessful meant that they had failed but I'm finally realizing that the only way to truly fail in a creative sense is to not create making something should be the end goal especially if you're starting out reception is is another thing entirely and matters sure but shouldn't stop you from deciding if your idea is worth acting on by learning to see the value in art that's traditionally bad you can train yourself to feel less reluctant because it's kind of the point to make something despite knowing it will be bad because realistically it will be and that's okay make it anyways I encourage anyone to find artists that you see yourself in to consume art that accessible until you feel a creative spark and then just act on it chances are it'll be in something that's driven by Passion instead of profit so start digging around it has literally never been easier to find obscure things but instead of just looking up a list of hidden gems I think it's worth it to look for yourself because taste is subjective and having the starting place be something you already like is a cheat code so let's say you want to find new music you're a musician you want to make something okay so makeshift tutorial um if you want to make music for starters there's like a ton of DIY and stuff like Outsider music is like a really easy way of just random like DIY goofball stuff ton of gems like shout out to the space lady but let's start somewhere popular you know not bedroom pop let's go to sweet trip half a million you know whatever whatever all you want to find is appears on compilation albums are gonna be your best friend so Drummond Bliss is one that I've already listened to um painter from New York is one of my favorite songs period it's so sick but you know let's say you didn't know it and so you went to find their other stuff color filters really cool band um any of these could be stopping points you know if they're new to you but let's just Deep dive for a bit just for the sake of example um Darla is sweet trips label as well so Darla 100 it's just a compilation album of the label mates so let's just stop here at liip pun and as you can see you know these are places I've been before because this is how I find music but um you can just explore like features on albums like I know that she has a collab with Mary Latimore we're already in a really different place like this is ambient harp instrumentals which are really cool but let's just pretend we went to this album instead um go through same thing just going to like features and going to different bands uh T Coco rot so from here I know that they were on this album The Pastels has like a Remix album with a bunch of cool people pastels themselves are like a cool band that I like but um same thing like compilation albums remix albums and just see who they collaborate with Like My Bloody Valentine Cornelius stereol lab really cool um let's go to the very last one chimo roor don't recognize this so we're somewhere new going to appears on and we're at the warp compilation album this is like the Apex Twin label so FX twin pram Boards of Canada stereol lab AER Seafield foret yeah this is kind of a crazy album damn but let's go to foret you know you could go to comp albums you could go to remixes or you could go to side project and foret has a ton of side projects um one of them is like in wingdings like the font um I don't see them uh I know I have in my last playlist though kind of cheating but KH um is a foret um side project really cool obviously like in my last playlist I've been listening to it myself but maybe I can find another one there's like a bunch of like obscure random text font stuff like this Morse code one or barcode is another cool one that make like electronic music uh this one I don't know what this is called but these are places I've been before um I personally do this to find new music I think it's really cool uh just kind of follow Deep dive like rabbit of related artists so this one is the foret one I was talking about and then you just kind of keep going uh now we're back at sweet trip you know the circle just complete you can do this for anything for for music for movies you could do this on letter boxed um on good reads for books maybe I don't I haven't personally done that um but yeah if you dig deep enough if you start with something you like just following this little like bread Cil breadcrumb Trail can't talk um will lead you to cool places so yeah uh anyways you get the idea um find something that you like dive deeper until you find something that you love basically go find Art go make art peace and love

Channel: pato

Views: 89,398

Keywords:

Id: q7FS_XWKvRI

Length: 20min 47sec (1247 seconds)

Published: Mon May 27 2024