Friday, June 17, 2016

The Opinion Hipster.

I don't know if these ideas will make their (not there as ideas are individuals and have rights too) way into my Art but there is a tendency in life which I might be seeing and it may actually be relevant as an idea to discuss in an art context.

It is somehow to do with having our opinions of what other people in other parts of the world, even if it's next door, should be doing... in our opinion, and doing petitions and what not in the hope that our opinion becomes a legislative force which in turn makes laws of our opinions... but then we turn round and have more opinions about how these laws, we ourselves condoned are taking away our freedoms.

It's like it's becoming a reciprocal of our ability to change, through the laziest form of doing which opinion might actually be, the world is turning around and making the world less changeable and more restrictive... and again the opinion monster rears it's head and legislation compounds that error by making even more laws... and then we blame government, which again is merely an opinion, as we all should of course know that government have long been pragmatic forces who's sole objective is to, without ideals, just condone and adjust, without morality, to public opinion.

And now we seem to have the worst, though logical, extension of these ideas which is the opinion hipster where that person, without conscious knowledge, will align their sense of identity in the world with the opinions which they feel most serve their idea of what they might be, not as a consumer of things, but as a consumer of pre-packaged seemingly on the edge societal moralities.

Okay, we're in New Zealand and we have Nuclear free legislation and in no small part it is because when a nuclear powered warship arrived in our waters all those years ago hundreds and hundreds of people risked their lives taking whatever boat they could lay their hands on and went out into the harbour and 'lived and breathed' the reality of their 'opinion'.

Now the same legislation which we all seemingly hold dear to our national hearts is being possibly shifted away from this heartfelt rendition of our sovereignty have the sales of small boat plans and the buying of plywood, hand tools and glues gone through the roof in anticipation of real and valid actioned proof of our opinions? No, this clamouring to be heard is at most the form of petitions, facebook posts and the odd semi radical newspaper article.

So what it is now isn't that we go out and make life fit us but that we create the opinion of what we hope to be and then fight, through opinion, to make the world fit what we aren't even yet willing to challenge within ourselves to be.

So this means that the age of the activist to which we all lay claim to as creating a simile of the world we wanted has actually become the age of the actorist - the word act, that descriptive pronoun (and excuse me if it isn't but it just popped into my head... so I'll use it and wonder if anyone will even be bothered to take me to task, equated, of course to my value as a rival opinionist), still has act in it, but the presumptive text that supports it isn't at all what it used to be.

It is learned lines, worry shrouded waiting for the vaunted opinion of the critic, the weigher of our ability not in being what we are but in hope that we are what we have defined ourselves to be by the opinion we stand behind.

And the irony of it all, IMHO, is that the World doesn't become what we think it should be... it becomes what we are most afraid of being. That means that the opinion counts for nothing beside why we might have it. But that's only my opinion and whatever you chose to do or be has my consent... not because you need it but because it's absolutely none of my business.

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