Ruminations of a Plebian (Post 3)

What is Art?

What defines aesthetic appeal? I have always wondered whether material beauty can be absolute or universal. Another question that is eerily plaguing: can beauty be replicated, and if so, is it true beauty; and therefore, a true form of artistry?

Replication is of the utmost significance; it provides the opportunity for shared conceptual ideas to be utilized in economic exchanges and thus implemented into the physical world. But where does replication start to supersede and purportedly debase artistry? Is the cover band not involved in an act of performing arts? Is the band that is heavily influenced by two former artists, who synthesizes their idol’s tendencies, and creates a musical presentation that is slightly familiar, not an act of artistry? Or is the completely unique band, the only example of the pure artistry within the musical realm? I have two comments about the previous foundational and modern philosophical question: first of all, no sentient being is uninfluenced by the empirical; and secondly, art is created in many forms outside of the conventional, nominally recognized art industries. The former axiom–the denial of natural impressionability–seems to be dismissed by the “modern” artist who is often blinded by his/her false claim of originality. This mind set is predicated by insecurity veiled as egoism. In all fairness, this mentality is usually shared by younger artists who at a certain age realize the influence of the outside world; hence, they acknowledge the many artists, non artists, as well as the natural world which unintentionally provide material for them to form into hybrid and abstract creations. Henry Kissinger once eloquently proclaimed, “Art is man’s expression in his labor.”This quote supports the argument that art comes in many forms: that it is personal, not categorically understood on aesthetic terms, and stems from one’s passion and pride.  

How could a trade worker be recognized as an artist? A skilled artisan has a specialized skill set; they exude passion and expertise to his/her carefully crafted creations. The reason a modern trade worker–or more broadly speaking, an artisan–does not receive acknowledgment of their artistry is because they manufacture utilities and not hybrids and abstractions. Hybrids and abstractions are the creations of the filmmaker, musician, and painter–the “modern” artist. But what is lost in the conversation is that the modern trade worker often incorporates aesthetics additional to the utilitarian purpose of his building.

Furthermore, the construction of the physical infrastructure, i.e., roads, bridges, or buildings, is mostly taken for granted by the modern technologically advanced individual. The trade worker–be it an electrician, plumber, or carpenter–provides necessary utilities that are the bedrock for a modern and functioning society. The practical application of the trade workers occupational output is unequivocal; the aesthetic appeal of the trade workers societal offerings are often disputed, or just plain ignored. Architectural and design elements in building have long been recognized as providing the aesthetics to physical and material constructions. The architect trumps the builder when considering the artistry involved in comparing each vocation. But without the trade worker, i.e., builder, whose occupation entails replication, interpretation, and practical application of what an architect drafts, there would be no utility or physical aesthetic. Thus, the architect conceives, the trade worker both conceives and implements.  

Kelly Walker, Decorative Painter and documentary interview subject of the film, The Tradesmen: Making an Art of Work, summarizes art as “anything done without haste”. That is a description that coincides with the pride in ones work philosophy–a philosophy that is pervasive in modern society, but is sadly ignored for its artistic underpinning.  When an individual immerses him or herself into the moment and focuses on achieving the highest possible value of the action or work being performed, this is, at its core, true art. We are teleological creatures with the fortunate ability to create purpose and meaning in our work, hobbies, and relationships. As long as there is pride and genuine enjoyment in the processes of one’s actions, that individual is involved in an act of artistry. 

By: Richard Yeagley

Ruminations of a Plebian (Post 2)

By Richard Yeagley (26 Years old)

“The digital revolution is eradicating many of the experiences I used to have with the physical world.”

            -The Modern Day Luddite

I am ashamed because I cannot build anything in the physical world.  In witnessing me attempt an act of carpentry you would realize immediately that I was incompetent – and this knowledge has lessened my personal measure of myself, of my own manhood.  I have always thought of hands-on dexterity and physical agency as a universal image of masculinity. But I am not alone with my lame aptitudes for physical construction; rather, it seems to me that this is the embarrassing norm for the majority of men of my generation – and only my generation.  When I look at my father and his peers, only one generation removed from me, I see men who possess an innate passion and talent to work with their hands; even if their daily occupation is outside of the construction realm. It is quite funny but also sad for me to recall that my father personally built the deck on our house and renovated our attic into a finished bedroom.  I could not even consider such architectural endeavors – I, the man who struggles mightily trying to screw together an Ikea three drawer dresser.  For me it would be a day of immense pride if I managed to construct something with such utilitarian purpose; for my father, building his deck was simply something he wanted to do – and he could do.  My father is not a carpenter but he somehow learned the skills of building through experience and osmosis. It wasn't out of necessity, but out of a true love to synthesize the trio of mind, body, and hand into action to create a functional and physical element. But how did he and the men of his generation absorb the skills necessary to accomplish such a thing on their own and my generation generally did not? 

I believe that my personal experience with building in the physical world has been neglected because of the proliferation of digital technologies in my male life and the male lives of my generation. Not only do our toys operate in the digital ether but so do many of our tools and the very fabric of our social lives. Our experiences are increasingly less physical and more binary code.  In the bigger picture, with the ubiquity of commerce on the internet and its tangential technologies utilized as tools for enterprise, the gold rush is on to dominate the digital infrastructure: to monetize it offerings and possibilities. The big money is paid to computer programmers and IT professionals now. As more pecuniary and human capital is drawn into the new digital infrastructure, the obvious result is that less money will flow to the older physical infrastructure, i.e. roads, bridges, sewers and schools. Of course there shall never be a complete rejection of the physical infrastructure, but there are only so many private and public resources to spread around and the incentives have not been put in place to fuel a massive refurbishment.  President Barack Obama and Congress did invest a healthy amount of capital into construction, maintenance and rail projects in the stimulus package, but most assignments were slow to start and inefficiently executed. Additionally, a government infusion of this nature is only temporary.   Without private investment dollars into these types of projects and an acknowledgment of the importance of a solid and modern foundation, the physical infrastructure will not receive the sustained boost it needs. Individual investors fearful of cost overruns and high risk will look offshore to places where a stronger emphasis is put on large scale investing into modern infrastructure. The infrastructure is improving, just not in America. Incentives could be put in place so that private investing is more attractive. The American population should hope for an improved, productive, and "green" infrastructure. The reasons are numerous: costs reductions for businesses, the stimulation from innovation of construction and manufacturing, and the subsequent creation of many jobs. The amount of jobs that are created through construction and manufacturing initiates are immense: coupled with modern and innovative forms, they are also decent paying jobs – jobs for an "actual middle class." It is stunning to see the number of staff needed for a hugely successful modern tech company such as Facebook (2,000 employees) and then take a retrospective look into the 50's when General Motors employed nearly 600,000 people.

Although I am aware of my lack of manual competence, I still make no effort towards corrigibility. Why? Maybe I am perpetually grasping onto the hope that I will someday be one of the handsomely compensated few who are contributors to a modern company like Facebook – or, more generally, that I will find a permanent occupational place in the digital economic ecosystem. Most of my generation has hopes for such an opportunity. Even with that said, I still hope that a proportionate amount of motivated and skilled individuals of my generation find satisfaction and financial incentive to maintain the physical and mental desire needed to enhance and modernize the physical infrastructure. So as I type this Word document, peruse my social networking accounts, and edit video on a computer program, I often consider how many of my cultural and generational brethren are actually using a Sawsall or a hammer. I can only hope that in the future less hammers will be thrown at a wall in frustration­ when struggling with the most rudimentary of all building constructions, the IKEA product.

Ruminations of a Plebian (Post 1)

By: Richard Yeagley

The following words are based on my opinions, expressions, interpretations, and philosophies. They are rarely absolute fact. Hopefully my personal observations and inferences will produce thoughts of your own. Agree or disagree, like or dislike, hopefully this piece of writing will impel you to think about the topics addressed. Some may call it a diatribe written by an aimlessly meandering wannabe blogger. I would like to call it, Ruminations of a Plebian.

Working Class Economics

For any economy to have true wealth and sustainability, a legitimate and robust middle class must exist. Not an enervated and struggling middle class, but a robust middle class that is able to consume without perpetual dependency on large scale credit. This description opposes the view of the  over-consumer who lives life with false wealth that is based on future production, production that is always based on uncalculated speculation. This model serves immediate gratification as an end and instant consumption as a means.

The middle class mentality is based on characteristics of diligence and duty. Is there an actual middle class in America? Of course, but it is reducing in size and clout. These individuals are the backbone of our economy. They are working class with familial or personal finances and are stable. Or, at least they were. They do not live pay check to pay check; they have limited investments, and assets in the form of mortgages and automobiles. If the middle class cannot save even a modest portion of their earnings, the whole system is distorted. If the middle class cannot live without overleveraging their personal finances and borrowing extensively, then they are not middle class but lower class, interminable debters living beyond their means. As much as social class is a difficult topic to address, there are current distortions in the tiers existent in American economic policy. These distortions thrive in an inflated belief inherent in many Americans that is founded upon the expectations of an entitled lifestyle. A lifestyle that is unattainable for most and unsustainable for all under our current economic system. 

I will repeat my point one more time, our system of lending is based not on the idea of borrowing against future production, but on the premise of excessive and additive consumption. As long as we intake, it doesn’t matter if the output is proportional. Americans are ingrained with a compulsory attitude towards consumption and our feeling of production and service are dismissed as secondary. Do you see the incongruity?
This one subsequent comment (although it currently seems out of place) will be the predicate for my next section; the idea of the utopian society is a fallacy and impossibility. Peace and harmony exists only in brief glorious moments but can never be realized.

Specialization

This brings me to an important point about the transformation currently taking place. Specialization in capitalist systems is absolutely imperative and was one of the factors behind the success of developing economies. Even on a teleological and epistemological level, man found a purpose for this structuring of his life. He would master a trade, profession, service, etc. and would find meaning and knowledge in his occupational arena. Our society is now creating a pervasive idea that this specialization is repressive and creates a life of deterministic banality. Capitalism in its very essence requires specialization in order to produce greater yields. When the working class is not specialized, capitalism will naturally transform into another form, a more unproductive one. We are currently at an intermediary stage between self-reliance and partial reliance. America’s economic pendulum is gradually swinging towards the latter position. This current cultural malady is caused by the reinforcement of the "academic college" for every youth attitude and the perpetuation of the utopian society which implies a collective and classless system. It is thought that the broader our understanding, the better off we will be, even if it is at the expense of producing economically unskilled citizens and even if it convolutes the understanding of the people. This idea is most salient in the shunning and vilification of the vocational form of schooling and the support and praise of the four year liberal arts college. Now let me state that liberal arts colleges and academic institutions are indispensable and do serve a purpose for our nation. There are several occupations that are specialized and functional in these environments, i.e., law and medical school, business and so forth, and there are plenty of individuals who obtain knowledge best within these models. The problem is that there has been an outpour of liberal arts colleges that exist in a paradigm that is helpful to many but inauspicious to the majority that are told that this is their best form of education. They are business schemes that have nothing to offer to its students except a degree which states their attendance to the four year college in exchange for huge amounts of debt. These colleges attract  students who have no interest or concept of philosophy or humanities. These students are convinced they will learn a great deal about the world in an open forum and will graduate with the skills necessary to enter a competitive workforce. But this is rarely the case. Many of these students sleep walk their way through college (also drinking and copulating) and others soak up all the knowledge possible from their professors with no clue how to implement it into a functional well-paying occupation. This is where the specialized trainees or tradeworkers are at a great advantage; they have the skills and knowledge which can be directly applied to an occupation and economy. 

These specialized workers have the satisfaction of knowing that they are on the path towards mastery of a particular skill. One needs to gain worldly knowledge through her own curiosity and self initiated experiences. Liberal arts professors are not the ones to force an inquisitive mind on their students. Students who enter liberal arts institutions should already have that curiosity and should be further exploring the arts, humanities, and philosophies. If a student enters an educational institution without the least bit of curiosity, they will be highly susceptible to the demagoguery of the unreasoned and didactic professors that are sometimes employed at colleges. This will not produce introspective and individualistic minds, but will in fact train our students to accept dogmatic ideas and will render their own personal convictions as invalid. This will prepare them to be the minions of the demagogues, dictators, bosses, and teachers, and will populate a society with a paucity of amount of thinkers, innovators, creators of ideas, products, and services.

There is nothing more satisfying for a teacher than to galvanize her students to think for themselves. Lectures can be read. They are in a thing called books. Our college institutions are attempting to turn our young into uniform intellectuals by pithily disseminating social and cultural ideas that have no place in a classroom populated with so many disengaged students. How about this for an idea: students pay to go to school for practical knowledge that can then be incorporated in economic output and will produce financial prosperity and creative innovation. The accumulation of intellectual, philosophical, and social ideologies can be discovered through conversations, readings, and forums in the public sphere. Go to school to learn a specific skill set, train six hours a day as a musician or as an electrician apprentice, then go home and read the local paper or seek information from a trusted journalist. Then you can form your own inferences, questions, and judgments, and have discourse with your colleagues, friends, or relatives. Learn a practical skill and gain your own metaphysical and epistemological basis through personal experiences and self-reflection. Internal thought influenced by the senses produces personal ideas and unique philosophies. They can act as our own educational lectures that set up an individual's understanding of her own perceptions and thoughts.

Vocational Training

My aim is not to deride all departments at all major collegiate institutions. These institutions are infinitely valuable. But we should start to reconsider some of the antiquated structures and formulas employed in teaching and preparing our youth for a modern workforce. Potential students should consider the costs, risks, and return of their education. If you are going to work with a specific technology, get your hands on that piece of equipment. Work with it on a daily basis, hours and hours a day. Don’t just speak of the concepts and leave the practical usage of that technology for once you graduate from you schooling. That is major problem with the academic realm; too much talk, no application. Without the application of the concept, we are left with a philosophical void. This philosophical belief that is perpetuated unknowingly in our school systems is a renunciation of mankind’s desire for tactile experience, or as it is often referred to (in hopes of mitigating controversial connotations) "career and technical training," or CTE. CTE is a taboo for many inexplicable reasons. It implies a lack of intellect when a student mentions that he would like to focus on a particular vocation. This educational path creates a specialized worker and specialization is for whatever reason subordinated by general and esoteric forms of knowledge. But isn’t the surgeon a highly specialized worker himself? Secondly, vocational education often implies work that is done in the manual spectrum. This is grotesquely limited in its semantic interpretation of what vocational actually entails. Also, isn’t their skill involved in the manual realm? Isn’t the surgeon performing duties of manual dexterity? Thirdly, vocational training is thought to be inferior in occupational prestige and in potential wages. But how can that be true when fewer students specialize in an industry and therefore create a higher demand for workers in that industry? Will this subsequently produce higher wages for the unmet demand that is being produced by the void in unskilled workers? We, meaning society as a whole, need to break the barriers of what vocational training actually means. Is the film student not going to school for vocational reasons? Is the surgeon not an individual seeking knowledge for a particular vocation? But the so called intellectual, those who like to create and disseminate cultural ideas--when in reality most cultural sentiments are created from the progressives and entrepreneurs, would clamor that students don’t receive a rounded education in vocational schools. To which I would have two points. Firstly, as I have stated before, most majors in four-year colleges do not produce students who are specialized in any capacity and in any particular industry. This intense fixation with creating a society replete entirely with academics is in fact a nightmare, a dystopian society in which no one creates anything of utilitarian value but in fact creates an abundance of verbal diarrhea predicated on philosophical and political inanities. I would prefer to eschew the polishing of my rounded education and focus on my own inquisition and development and would much prefer to garner an education and training in a skill and industry that will produce both a gratification of personal agency and will allow for the cultivation of a successful and prideful career. Secondly, have our primary and secondary school systems failed us so diastrously to the extent that we have an illiterate and uneducated youth generation that needs further assistance with basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. Our public school system, as well as learning in the domestic arena, should be the place where our students procure a rounded education.