ArtiFact #13: NFTs, Kitsch, 90s Culture, Rap Music, R.W. Fassbinder, Censorship | Alex Sheremet, Ethan Pinch

Alex is joined by painter Ethan Pinch to discuss a variety of topics: growing up on the precipice of the Internet’s mainstreaming, the role that media censorship (and thus self-censorship) play in everyday decisions, the Golden Age of rap music, Alex’s rap-to-politics-to-art pipeline, NFTs vs. Abstract Expressionism, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s absurdist film “Satan’s Brew”, and Clement Greenberg’s classic essay on kitsch.

More specifically: is kitsch a legitimate part of artistic judgment, or is it merely an aesthetic object? Do Clement Greenberg and other Marxist critics fall into an anti-Marxist idealism trap? Is E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web” an example of kitsch, and if so, is every example of great children’s writing by definition kitsch? Do NFTs fall into the same category, and what does blockchain technology mean for the art world? Finally, Alex and Ethan go over some of Ethan’s abstract drawings.

You can also watch this episode on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4O594Rqu5w

Read the latest essays from the automachination universe: https://www.automachination.com

Subscribe to Ethan Pinch’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/AnthropomorphicHorse

Timestamps:

0:24 – The 1990s: growing up in the analog/digital transition, today’s Internet culture, & speech-policing
25:00 – Rap, artistic competition, Eminem, “conscious” hip-hop, UK grunge-rap, and where reflexive artistic genres fail
01:03:00 – Overlap(s) between art, politics, and meta-ethics: “art for art’s sake, and what that means politically”
01:26:15 – Origins of the automachination channel name; responding to Nietzsche’s “art’s purposive purposelessness” vs. Nietzsche’s “additive” morality
01:37:00 – Debating kitsch as an aesthetic concept; debating Clement Greenberg’s classic 1939 essay, “Avant-garde and Kitsch”; Greenberg’s “medium-specificity”; is E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web” an example of kitsch?
02:41:43 – Debating Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Satan’s Brew”
03:03:44 – Patreon & the balkanization of the art world
03:13:00 – Alex: NFTs are doing what the AbEx world once did, but with math, statistical parameters, and even more greed
03:23:18 – Assessing Ethan’s abstract drawings