AUTHOR: Sarab DATE: 11:55:00 AM ----- BODY:

posers.

I have very concrete images in my head of people who currently are, or who have a history of actively posing. Why is posing bad? It is important to articulate the answer to that question. Posing is like "con artistry".  Now a realist will tell you, appropriately that few people have survived very long without posing a little bit here and there. Posing is like "con artistry", because your goal is to become part of a particular "in-group". In attaining that goal, likely you will have to sacrifice at least some principles which have defined you up until that point. Why do you have to "sacrifice part of your identity" as a function of "posing"? Well, the answer is quite clear. If the identifying factors were the same for you, as they were for the "in-group" you so covet, then this whole goal would dissolve. Without the goal of changing your identity in some way, you lose the incentive to be a "poser".

Generally speaking, such as, say in the world of pop-culture, particularly in the entertainment arena, I think accusations of "posing" are taken to have a different meaning. In strict economic terms, or even Freudian terms, "posing" is a necessary aspect of living. In economic terms, you must do all that you can to present yourself in the best way, to get your foot in the door, so that you can get a job and pay your bills. In Freudian terms, you have to be a "poser" so that your animal instincts do not express themselves in socially unacceptable manners.

God damn it, this philosophical treatise and linguistic analysis, just goes to show the disastrous hole I have dug myself. This whole thought process is that which many posers attempt to escape. Fuck it, I don't mind. Anyhow, moving along from this digression...

"Posing" in pop-culture seems to be a different issue. I think the reason for that, is that things like Art, Entertainment, Comedy, Music and so on, are not rooted in the same orthodoxy of Economics and Freudian Psychology. Those modes of thought or whatever are not really "lucrative" endeavors. They are kind of the paths of modern day "prophets" or "saints" or "ascetics" or whatnot. People pursuing lives in those kinds of line of work, defy the common logic of ordinary economic participants. The function of the "fine arts" like the ones I listed above, are kind of like (I think I remember this next idea being incubated in my brain in some museum long ago) mirrors for the people. The people, the laborers, spend the majority of their lives grinding away, following the orders of people in power, living lives of "quiet desperation" and so on. Ok, so I just lost some of the logical rigor of this treatise, for some artistic melody. Back to the point: The function of things we call "the fine arts", things like Movies, Film, Music, Radio, Cable TV, YouTube, or whatever else, has historically (maybe things are changing with the introduction of Information Technologies) been a means of capturing the voice of some large group of people, say the Gold Diggers in San Fransisco in 1949 Gold Rush, or the Jews in Nazi Germany, and then relay that sentiment, that outcry, opinion, feeling, ideology, mentality to the world outside of that group, and to the group itself.

Like in the same definition I am laying out, a good fine art, would feel authentic to the people who the work was about, and it would be something people outside of that group could appreciate given their cultural context.

So, I suppose the Fine Arts would have 2 principle "functions". The first being to capture the sentiment of a particular group of people (or Penguins in March of the Penguins), the kinds of issues they were facing, what it was like to be those specific people, what consumed their attention, what problems mattered to them, what characterized them and so on. The second being to bridge the gap between that particular group, and other "voyeurs", with curiosity and interest to look into the lives of other people and see what it is like. In that sense, you could look at them, and hold no opinion of good/bad, preferred/not-preferred, dirty/clean, and so on; instead you could simple get a peak. See what life is like in another social world or "social reality".

I think from those two principle functions lies the problem of "posers" in the entertainment/fine-arts world. If you look at the industry as an "entertainment BUSINESS", then you would be more likely to be a "pop-culture poser", if you looked at the industry more as a "fine-arts system" then anything less than fulfilling the two aforementioned functions would be a contradiction and "posing".

More fundamentally, I think if you go further and further down the "rat hole", down the "ontologies", you will find that the problem is sort of the more general conflict that has been re-hashed through the ages of Pragmatism vs. Idealism; Conservatism vs. Progressivism; things along those lines.

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