Read this, and chances are you’ll have no idea what I’m talking about

The signal:noise on this #instapo­et ker­fuf­fle has sum­moned the chron­i­cal­ly lame “poet­ry is/was dying” revenant art takes.

Poets: your cho­sen art has nev­er been & will nev­er be pop­u­lar. This is fine!

You can­not argue whether some­thing is or is not art. There is no pla­ton­ic form for this abstrac­tion. You may choose to dis­cuss the phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy of a work of art, but once wrought, it is immutable, warts & all. I might even argue that life begins at con­cep­tion for art & sim­i­lar abstrac­tions.

I once had a spir­it­ed dis­cus­sion about Crime & Pun­ish­ment with a pro­fes­sor. We were dis­cussing Raskol­nikov’s guilty con­science & the pro­fes­sor asked me to iden­ti­fy the moment that this guilt man­i­fest­ed. After a bit of study I deter­mined that it occurred before he even com­mit­ted his crime.

He gave a sud­den start; anoth­er thought, that he had had yes­ter­day, slipped back into his mind. But he did not start at the thought recur­ring to him, for he knew, he had felt before­hand, that it must come back, he was expect­ing it; besides it was not only yesterday’s thought. The dif­fer­ence was that a month ago, yes­ter­day even, the thought was a mere dream: but now… now it appeared not a dream at all, it had tak­en a new men­ac­ing and quite unfa­mil­iar shape, and he sud­den­ly became aware of this him­self.… He felt a ham­mer­ing in his head, and there was a dark­ness before his eyes.Crime & Pun­ish­ment, Fyo­dor Doesto­evsky

Art has nev­er had any­thing to do with taste. Art is descrip­tive. Taste is pre­scrip­tive. If you are argu­ing whether some­thing should be “con­sid­ered art” you are gate­keep­ing via taste, and you are not talk­ing about art, or poet­ry, or punk music. You’re talk­ing about how cer­tain peo­ple are worth less to you. That’s cap­i­tal­ism, not artistry.

Will his­to­ry care what hill you chose to die on when it #instapo­et­ry came knock­ing at the gates? Should you?

“The time of get­ting fame for your name on its own is over. Art­work that is only about want­i­ng to be famous will nev­er make you famous. Any fame is a by-prod­uct of mak­ing some­thing that means some­thing. You don’t go to a restau­rant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.”
Banksy