Episode 104, 'Art and the Future' with Vid Simoniti (Part II - Further Analysis and Discussion)
The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast
Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane
4.8 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2022
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Introduction
If we want to improve our public discourse, we must aim to be as objective as possible. When we raise our consciousness and work towards clearing our minds of personal interests, political affiliations, and the sophistry of art, we grow closer to rationality and knowledge. Art, on the other hand, is nothing more than the overly excited offspring of objectivity: films, paintings, music, and dance contribute nothing unique to our understanding of the world. At worst, art muddies the waters of our discourse; at best, it merely reflects the insights of political philosophy and science.
Opposing this view – and championing the cognitive advantages of artworks as political discourse – is Dr Vid Simoniti, Lecturer in Philosophy of Art at the University of Liverpool. As well as being a rising star in the worlds of academic philosophy and art history, Dr Simoniti's work as a BBC New Generation Thinker – and his collaborations with public-facing projects such as the Liverpool bi-annual – is bringing conversations about art and philosophy into the public square.
When we enjoy a play at the theatre, rock our heads to a song on the radio, or wiggle the joysticks on our PlayStation controllers: does it leave us more attuned to how the world is? For Simoniti, in the context of art as political discourse, the answer is unequivocally 'yes'.
This episode is produced in partnership with the Philosophy and the Future project at the University of Liverpool. For more information about philosophy at Liverpool, head over to www.liverpool.ac.uk/philosophy.
Contents
Part I. Public Health
Part II. Further Analysis and Discussion
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Pan |
| 0:02.0 | Psychist |
| 0:04.0 | Part two, further analyses and discussion. |
| 0:23.6 | So in the previous instalment bid, you argued that political art can weaken the subject's overconfidence in their own position. |
| 0:29.6 | But is this true in everyday life? |
| 0:31.6 | Many of us consume political art that already reflects our beliefs and values. |
| 0:35.6 | I, for example, do not listen to music or watch |
| 0:38.9 | films which preach views I disagree with. You know, to take a silly example, why would I watch an |
| 0:43.9 | anti-Nazi movie if I'm a Nazi? Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think that the weakening of political |
| 0:51.8 | position, of your own political position that I spoke of, precisely comes |
| 0:56.0 | through artworks that don't necessarily preach the opposite position. I think that that is actually |
| 1:02.5 | very rare, it's very rare for someone to be convinced if they have very strong views, either by |
| 1:08.3 | an artwork that explicitly preaches the opposite view or even a person |
| 1:12.0 | that argumentatively, objectively preaches the opposite view, right? That's where I think satire |
| 1:17.5 | comes in, because satire doesn't really necessarily preach the opposite view. It just undermines |
| 1:22.9 | all the views that are available, right? So that's how it can begin to weaken your own confidence |
| 1:29.8 | in your own position or just make you assess it more critically. An example which came to mind when |
| 1:34.0 | I was reading your paper was Simon Amstall's Carnage, the mockumentary set in 2067 where |
| 1:40.8 | everybody's vegan and the film focuses on the guilt that future generations will |
| 1:46.1 | inherit from us. And it's a satire. It's very silly. People are crying about eating bacon. |
| 1:51.6 | You might not think it's too silly. But it's supposed to be a type of satirical mockumentary. |
| 1:57.1 | When I watched that and I watched it with Ollie quite a few years ago and we spoke it afterwards, and I thought, I wonder if people would react to it any differently than if they were to read Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, for example. They get the general gist of what Simon Else was trying to portray there, even though it's satire, and compare it to an objectivist text, which is like, here are the arguments |
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