war of different wizards pt 2
The desecrators want to speak to their fellow countrymen and suspect that they won’t be heard unless they use something people are already familiar with as a jumping-off point. They are impatient, anxious about a rising tide of wasteful/toxic media that confuses and divides, and they feel personally offended by the inane products of companies locked in a tunnelvision pursuit of wealth. They see productivity and greed marching hand in hand and begin to consider producing something wholly original as being a luxury that will have to wait until the field is cleared of clutter and garbage. They aspire not to create but to destroy.
The biters are even more impatient and anxious but they think acknowledging these feelings is weak. Instead they channel the anxiety into a spirit of competition (reaction formation). They are either part of an organization or aspire to be, so they are able to remove themselves from the act of creation. They do not see the difference between desecrating something and imitating it. Their acts of creation are guided primarily by “models” and anything which is too difficult to define or measure is expunged from the process. Focusing on the experience of an individual during the act of creating is seen as extreme underachieving— one must focus on composites of hypothetical individuals. Groups create for groups, but ultimately everything in this world must be experienced on the individual level, which makes biter art worthless except as a momentary distraction or a point of reference. And so the biters must work faster and harder, must seize upon the right models before their competitors do, must be ready with another product as soon as their previous one is wadded up and tossed in the bin.
The more the biters bite, the more the desecrators desecrate, and vice versa as each side uses the other’s output as inspiration/excuse to diminish their expectations of originality even further, until all movies are remakes, all songs are covers, all concerts are recitals, biters begin to bite their own bittens, and distinguishing desecrators from their sworn enemies requires more effort than it would take to actually make something unencumbered and original on one’s own…
Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that making art should be left to psychos and visionaries instead of being a way for big cliques of little bourgee bastards to avoid doing manual labor. Maybe we have already decided this on some of level of the collective unconcious… maybe that’s the reason fakeass artists can’t sell as many millions CDs as they could ten years ago and their bosses are shitting all those bricks.