Tag: Consumerism

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The Unperformables
or Teaching to the Immovable

While I was writing my previous post I had a brief conversation with friend of the blog Gwen Coney, about aesthetic (one of my favourite topics).

She said:
Yeah there seems to be a thing that some magicians like to do where they will theme or perform a trick a certain way because they like the aesthetic but they don’t really examine deeper on why they’re going for that particular look or whether it fits with how they perform

See also: why everyone who tries to perform a Tobias Dostal trick looks like utter shit

I should clarify just in case that what she means by that last part is not that Tobias Dostal’s tricks look bad, it’s that other people look bad performing them because they rely upon a kind of audience headspace which other performers don’t take the time to cultivate. You cant perform liquidfy with the same flippant attitude as an ambitious card routine.

One second while I plumb the depths of my psyche for an appropriate tangential allegory…

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or Teaching to the Immovable”

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Degenerative AI
or You are not immune to Slopaganda

In 1937, in Munich, Adolf Hitler gave a speech about the arts. Specifically about what he, and the Nazi regime called Degenerate Art. He said that the art world was full of “swindlers” who showed an “absence of adequate manual and artistic skill”¹.

Actually, I’ve gone and done it again. I’ve started this post in the wrong place. It’s too soon for my Hitler hot take.

Lets wind back in to 2013, and the Blackpool magic convention.

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or You are not immune to Slopaganda”

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Cargo Cultists
or Dream Big, Buy Bigger

I recently had an argument in a pub with another magician who had a trick to show me. I won’t go into the trick, what you need to know is that it used a deck of cards with beautifully complex illustrations on them.

Oh wait did I say illustrations? I meant AI generated images. But this post isn’t about that. This post is about one of the things he said in the ensuing argument.

He said that without the AI he never would have been able to create 52 illustrated cards, that the art would have cost too much from a real artist¹, and so this wasn’t hindering any artists careers, since there was no version of this where he hired an artist. He either used AI or the trick never got made.

I said maybe if you can’t do something without the AI, you probably shouldn’t do it at all.

He didn’t like that.

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or Dream Big, Buy Bigger”

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Little Boxes
or They want you to be small

The joke goes:
Minimalism is a scam invented by big small to sell more less.

This post is only tangentially related to magic and was inspired by a thought I had while writing the last part of the previous post after watching an advert for a miniature watercolour painting kit. The thought applies to magic but is actually about hobbies in general. Actually, let me show you the advert first

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or They want you to be small”

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Flattening
or Beginners’ Pluck

When I first started learning magic I joined an online forum for magicians (no, not that one ). This was back in the days before Facebook swallowed the entire conversational volume of the internet simply by its membership ubiquity. As I understand it still exists so I could go back in theory but I no longer really want to because back then I gathered a reputation of arrogance. I knew nothing. Nothing. I was an idiot who probably only really understood one trick to any serious degree¹, but I spoke with great authority in many matters of opinion, and used my one year of study to argue with professionals who had many decades of experience.

And now not only do I understand why I did this, but I have earned the fate of having to encounter it from the other side.

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or Beginners’ Pluck”

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D.I.Y. or Make it till you make it

A short time ago I gave a lecture called Things to Make and Do, a title inspired by my childhood love of books and television programs with a similar set of contents, and sometimes that exact name.

Lots of people wanted the notes so I assume it was well liked. Some people even told me they thought it was good enough for a magic circle lecture but honestly as much as I’d like to make it my AIMC exam, I would find lecturing over a live stream like that to be too intimidating.

But I think the reason why people liked it was because I showed them how to make a few home made tricks, and in a world full of products, people are tired of being sold things by supposed teachers. It’s reminiscent of an inspirational quote I van barely remember and am about to butcher: We evolved to create but we’re forced to consume.

This is why in my magical girl post I included a link on how to make gravity defying socks when mentioning the costume.

When did we stop making things?

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Do It Yourself
or Sloppy Seconds

On October 15 2015 I attended a one day conventionette called Lost Patrons of the Mother Black Cap. It was hosted by Dave Forrest’s Full52, and was honestly the best magic event I’ve ever been to.

During that convention I saw Dave Forrest perform one of his signature effects REM. In REM a bunch of decisions are made by a spectator leaving an arrangment of items on the table, which is then revealed to match a photograph. When you buy the trick, you get a method and a photograph.

But when Dave Forrest performed it at the Lost Patrons of the Mother Black Cap, he had one extra prop which you don’t get with the effect as sold. That prop was a 2 foot by 3 foot painting of himself with the props arranged in front of him.

It was, after all, his signature effect and so while all the hobbyists bought it as trick number 237 to half heartedly perform in front of bored colleagues, Dave was closing his cabaret shows with it, and the painting was something so permanent, so hard to fake, that it left no doubt in the minds of his spectators that this prediction was as good as set in stone.

But now… I’m seeing a lot of these…

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or Sloppy Seconds”

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Acting Up
or Skills not Bills

I have to squeeze out some bile, and unfortunately that means it’s going to splatter all over you, my wonderful audience. Please forgive me, it is so hateful, so cathartic, to encounter something which is so diametrically opposed to your own internal calculus that it seethes from your every pore like steam escaping a boiler on the cusp of exploding.

I am of course talking about Alakazam’s regular YouTube segment, The Act.

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or Skills not Bills”

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Tortured Artists
or We don’t use that word here

This post sat in my drafts for a year, because I needed to work through some thoughts, which I did in these three posts.

A number of people have brought the following recent article to my attention:

Magicians Less Prone To Mental Disorders Than Other Artists

Given that the Magic Circle has a whole mental health programme to look after its members mental health I can’t help but feel that suggesting magic is a ticket to good mental health might be papering over some actual problems, but that’s not what this is really about.

Because everyone knows to be an artist you have to be nuts, right? You have to be so tortured by the delusional visions visiting you at night that the only respite is to capture them on canvas or in writing. The music of the damned plays in your head until you can share it with other people to alleviate the burden of being alone with forbidden knowledge.

Right? That’s what we all know about being creative, its a curse.

Right?

Continue reading “Tortured Artists
or We don’t use that word here”