bumble: post class 3/25

It is the end…

All good things come to an end, the fun has to end sometime. Why do we all find ourselves obsessed with the E.N.D??

Not only do we have this macro version of ending of the universe which is symbolized in practically every movie! Like even this new release “I am legend” which is about the last man on earth. Even on the discovery channel there is a “historical” search for the ending of the world. According to the ancient calendars of the Mayans and the Aztecs there is the ending date that we are trying to interpret. Sitcoms, and cartoons like the Simpsons also talk about the end.

Along with this macro analysis of the ending of the world in a dramatic way, we have the micro sense of the end. The greatest example of this is the idea that we all think that good things come to an end. My friends and I look back at the young kids today and say, gosh what happened to the childhood that we used to live. There is an end to running around outside, it is now a new generation of video games. This is a reoccurring notion, our grandparents look at the music of our parents and say, gosh what happened to the good old days and the innocent music. The era ended and then our parents look nostalgically into our music culture and shake their heads the same way. Boy, it’s a shame that everything ends… Ultimately though, isn’t it all the same? We are all analyzing the same thing, and humans are humans and we are simply re-living the same youth. The surface of it looks different but maybe they aren’t as different as we were.

Why do we emphasize this so much in the media? Perhaps it is because we are trying to deal with the human’s greatest fear of death. We are creatures of habit and when something ends it throws us all into SHOCK! So, we are trying to deal with our fear by making it a form of entertainment. By keeping it as a form of entertainment we have an easier time saying, “oh well its just in a movie… we have nothing to worry about.” We are all trying to convince ourselves that we are in the clear from the inevitable END.

Another scapegoat or denial of culture could be the idea that on the underside of culture is blood, death, and horror. No one wants to think about the horrors or struggles, just as no one wants to think about the end. So, we create forms of entertainment and a life full of distractions (like Adorno said) to cover up what is truly happening underneath.

In terms of the shift in art, it appears that the comparison between the donut hole and then artistic interpretive building is the simple matter of figurative language verse literal language. We use symbols to represent things all the time in different ways and depending on the context is how we will understand it. For example a word like BIG. The word can be like the donut hole and literally mean a large thing, or it can mean many different figurative things. It can mean an older brother, it can mean a great person, a giving heart, it can mean famous or popular. The museum is like the latter and the donut hole is the plain Jane… it is what it is.