Aesthetic Erosion (Rock Records)

 

 

I've been watching some of the documentaries by geologist Myron Cook. People generally have found geology to be a boring subject, but I've always liked it for its useful metaphors.

In this episode, he was talking about erosion taking place over millions of years in which unconformities of erosion occur. This relates to my aesthetic erosion idea as a metaphor to describe the erosive forces of postmodernism on the arts--where it starts to erode your sense of aesthetics: what you thought was beautiful before no longer matters to you because you forgot how to appreciate beauty or appreciate something interesting to you before, but no longer does because it has eroded. But I like the idea of unconformity as a metaphor, in which rock layers over hundreds of thousands of years have their own erosion sequences. So it's okay if things erode and are buried; it's just the natural evolution of aesthetics in the rock record. In culture, there are similar forces that reshape the experience of art and making art. In music, I've gone back to a more modernistic approach. But pop music has always been postmodernist, even going back to the 50s (rock records literally), so there's no escaping postmodernism there, but in visual art, you can mix up your metaphors. However, you still have to choose them wisely: If it's the type of erosion that compromises your artistic integrity, then perhaps it's not a good one. I see postmodernism as an erosive force that undermines sincerity. Like Villem Flusser's "we work for the camera" assertion, "we work for postmodernism", or "we work for social media", not doing things of our own volition.