the bad art you don't want to see
Today we are going to talk about the bad art —
the art you're avoiding, the art you hate but can't get out of your brain, and the art that has become violent just to get your attention and make you feel uncomfortable. This happens because our world is a cruel place, and art will always mirror reality. So today is about the bad art, or maybe art - in this bad world.
I recently saw movies that many people hated, like Joker 2 and Kind of Kindness.
While some people liked them, and I did too, they were quite divisive. This inspired me to write and talk about it.
As you saw in my last video or in my old artist diaries, I like to do visual reviews—especially of movies, series, and books that I absolutely loved, or the ones that upset me and I think they are bad. Why? Because they stay with me, shock me, make me feel bad, and regardless of my taste, I consider them art because they simply touched me.
I think they can reach parts of me that "good art" can't. And when my consciousness can't deal with it, I end up saying "I didn't like it."
So I ask myself why art nowadays has become so violent, cruel, and weird. It creates this mind-blowing, panic-inducing feeling. It seems cinemas are challenging us. I go home questioning everything.
But that's the point: sadly, we live in a cruel and weird world and art will mirror the reality of our time. Cinema remains one of the most global art forms, reaching many nations in many languages. Through it, we can see the difficult world we don't want to see, the bad world—and then we call it bad art.
I studied art in school and discovered so much, and now I wonder: what is left to create? I didn't like everything I saw in my art lessons—I hate Cubism—and that's exactly what I mean. Why do I hate it so much? Why does it make me feel so intensely?
Art has been made for thousands of years, so how can I expect to like something created in my time? If I already disliked many art movements from the past, chances are I might dislike the art our generation is creating right now as well.
I don't even know what kind of art we're creating right now—post-contemporary? I'm not sure if art movements will still be a thing because we have something we never had before: social media
But social media thinks differently—the more content, the better. They try to create something specific for each of us, but I believe creativity has limits. Humans have limits, and we don't even know what we want—what we truly want. We love seeing the couple who started hating each other end up happy together. We love and hate, feel jealous and grateful.
Maybe we don't know what to do with these contradictions and feelings because our art education is so limited and our emotional intelligence also. We don't have the words to express ourselves, we don't process our thoughts—we just blurt them out: "I hated it, it's so bad, I didn't understand anything."
And what's wrong with that? With hating it, not understanding it? Why do you need to love everything? Who told you that you need to understand everything? Why not let art help you with all of this emotions and ignorance?
Art can do that. Art is not just entertainment. Social media - content - is making us hate and misunderstand art for two reasons:
It makes you more resistant to things you might not like—but these things exist anyway. This includes reality, the bad world, the uncomfortable stuff. So now you're blind to your own reality.
At the end of your scrolling, jumping between videos or podcasts, you don't really know what you're searching for or what you truly want. This affects our desires and how we would shape reality and create a better one.
So art, which for me means taking reality and making something with it, is ruined—because I don't see my reality and I don't want to do anything about it.
Every time I create, a little voice asks: "What do people want to see? Will they like it? Who are you making this for?" But these aren't the questions an artist should ask.
Artists shape and transform their realities. A better question for an artist today would be:
How is your reality right now? Which one you want to create? How do you create without caring what people think?
I see great directors doing exactly this with their "bad art." Dune, Joker, Poor Things, Kind of Kindness—these were major films this year and I can clearly see each director saying:
"I don't care what you think—this is the reality I see."
All the artists I studied in school did this: Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Munch, Frida Kahlo. Sure, they worked under pressure, but not like today's pressure. They created what they wanted to create. They connected art with science, politics, religion, feminism. They were influential and powerful because they believed art itself was that powerful.
art is: the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.
another definition says: a visual object or experience consciously created through an expression of skill or imagination.
So art is an expression made with imagination and some sort of skill - they are not even made to be liked by the artist itself, sometimes I create something that I dont really like and when I am working alone I will delete it, let it go, destroy it, dont show anyone. But when I am working now for example with my producer I tell him I hated this vocal and he kind of liked it. So
art is not a product or experience to be liked, is just an expression of the artist mind, which comes with it’s own dark elements and shadows that maybe not even the artist itself liked in the first place.
But it is powerful, it is human, is what can make we fell again integrated in our society and our own humanity, as Marina Abramovic once performend already “art must be beautiful, the artist must be beautiful”
for those who dont know who she is, she is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist. In this performance she is combing her hair very strong and desperatly while repeating: art must be beautiful. artist must be beautiful.
So to quote again - “producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power”- so, I almost called this definition BULLSHIT. But appreciation is not liking.
A like is what we do in social media so often that we not even know the last thing you liked there.
At the museum, a theater play, a movie theater, there… you are noone, if you dont get it, you try by yourself to find meaning, you apreciate, which means you just recognize.
We should all appreciate each other, this is a pilar of love and I did already another podcast about that, the author of that book “how to be an adult in relationships” proposed five As for love, for example: attention, affection… and aprecciation was there as well. To accept, to have respect, to recognize the work.
We seem, as culture, unable to love, we just like or dislike. Love requires more than this. To quote a brazilian author I love:
Love is when you are granted to participate a little more. Few people want true love, because love is the great disillusionment of everything else. And few can bear to lose all other illusions. (according to my own translation)
Tell me the place for discussing tabus in society now…
I guess we have to do it in art then.
Art needs conflict - to make you see with another eyes, to see the tabus, the make strange what got normal. To make you see the reality and want to do something about it.
I am sure everything you watch now, or read, has violence, sex, people screaming, crying, it has conflict - the conflict can be inside the caracter, struggling with mental illness for example, or the conflict can be outside, like climate change, aliens coming, other people.
We can’t avoid conflict in life, and in art is the same cause art is our expression - if we are living multiple wars in our world at this same time and we feel very bad inside - how art is supposed to be expressed now?
I wanted to end this giving my short reviews on two movies.
Kind of Kindness, by Giorgos Lanthimos. Here Emma Stone as Liz.
Kinds of Kindness - a review
is a movie that has 3 movies inside of it, all of them very absurd, schocking, weird, different, they show so much violence - like I had to cover my eyes, but I havnt found heavy, it was like I was used to it, some parts were also funny - so I was only able to process that the movie was indeed heavy weeks later. (it is now on disney plus)
This ironic titlte, Kind of Kindness, teached me one thing - if you have a story, people can endure any kind of violence, maybe a story that Arthur tells about himself as joker, maybe a story that a president will tell us, or maybe a story that a religion is telling we over and over again.
Maybe humans can cope with violence and trauma through story, to see the conflict inside also outside, that’s a relief, we should be grateful and careful.
Kinds of Kindness has tree stories and for me all of them are about abusive relationships, the first is work or a father, the second is a marriage, and the third is religion, like an institution that can be abusive.
The second one is my favorite: a woman sacrificying herself for her husband. But even there I ignored some elements I dind't understand, like the dogs.
This ignorance hits us, “I dont like it”, “is too weird” so I decided to search more about the dogs and I found this
from reddit
Certain things we only discover if we have courage enough to see the shadows, scare the dark, investigate our hate or our ignorance, what bothers us. And I thank “bad art” for that - the art we don't just like or dislike, so that we end up loving it.
Let’s finish with joker 2.
Joker 2 by Todd Phillips with Lady Gaga as Lee and Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur.
Well, expectation is a huge enemy of art, of appreciation. How much bad stuff we bring within us when we go appreciate art, we bring our shadow too, again, art needs your eyes, you will finish it by watching it, you will give the meaning and making your own impressions.
But gets more crazy - cause all what I told about social media at the beginning applies here perfeclty - Joker 1 was realeased in 2019, before the pandemics and befor what I feel was the boom of social media, tiktok, and the algorhitm we know now. Before we get even more used to streams and changing the video, stopping the movie, scrolling half an hour just to select which movie to see and then end up changing.
I left heavy the day I watched joker 2, is a movie made in a prison, there is no hope, no happy ending, there is just sadness, even in the moments when the fantasy take over and the musical starts, it seems fake, sad, I felt strange listening them, the love was not real. I was having my own theory that Lee, lady gagas role, was there as a doctor and not a lover. The reality started to lie to me, as well as it lied to Arthur.
As all fans get upset with him, Lee as well, me as well and the world hated it.
Joker 1 is a movie about putting a mask on, and Joker 2 putting this mask out. We will always upset a lot of people when we let our own masks fall.
We would love to see his fantasy in the world, to let our own sadness and frustation manifest in this movie we went to see. We would love to see him suffer more, we expect justice with his own hands, we want to see a revolution being played in the movie theaters and have noone activism in our daily life.
We want entertainment, and we are bad people for that and we hated seeing that in ourselves, so we tell we hated the movie.
