Some are saying things, some are just doing stuff because they can. I'm not convinced it's any less sane than, say, working in finance. It's definitely less harmful.

The thing about art is that it's whatever you can get away with. Sometimes that leaves room for powerful critiques of the system, sometimes it's just random stuff. In order to survive in capitalism, artists have to keep producing art. This means that they're incentiveized to produce things that are meaningless... Which is what most people in society do most of the time.

So these folks take some drugs and externalize the absurdity rather than fume in an office for decades before snapping and shooting a bunch of people or just offing themselves. Is it crazier to throw the absurdity of society back in it's face, or pretend that any of this is OK?

Edit: How many people reading this are pretending to work? You could be outside touching grass. You could be inside by a fire. Every minute you spend pretending to work is a waste of your life. Imagine if you threw your computer against the wall, walked out of the office, covered yourself in paint, and started flopping against a canvas like a fish. Would you experience more joy than you are experiencing right now, trapped at work pretending to do something meaningful? Yeah, I'm gonna go back to work but I'm also not gonna judge.

You've kind of hit the nail on the head, art is by definition anything the observer and/or the creator calls art and it creates some sort of emotional response in the observer.

Yeah it does, it makes me wanna look surprised and walk away. Does that make it art? No, at least not in my mind.

By all means do a shit, film it and book somewhere to show it to an audience and you have indeed created art.

See, this is why I stopped listening to alternative music. Cuz everyone just copy/pasted everyone else in the end, not to mention artists and bands, as old as time, just doing what they're doing for the income, drugs and nothing else. They really don't care about the music any more, some have even admitted that in public. So, am I supposed to listen to 100 albums on the off chance that I get to hear that one artists or band that actually made something new, interesting, not shitty, and different? No, thank you, I'm way past that point.

I agree that without any context, most of these clips look like ridiculous bullshit, but without understanding what the intention of the creator is and what the audience are getting from something you might as well just post clips of Star Wars without context and say "look how stupid this is LOL"

You know, I once went to this play called Solaris (there were movies made after the play as well, one English one Russian). Anyway, I was really excited because I really liked the movies (mainly the US version, the Russian one was somewhat boring, but watchable) and I was so pumped, I bought a ticket 3 weeks ahead.

So I go in and sit, the play starts and... it's 5 hours long, 2 pauses in between... OK, I was expecting that, as long as it's interesting, it doesn't matter, right? And the play starts and it's just... an hour and a half of slow motion movements, no dialogue, nothing... OK, I will be patient 😤. Oh, finally, some doaloge 🥳. 5 minutes, even that was in almost slow motion. Another hour passes with shit like in the clip, just people doing things that make no sense at all. That's it. I got up, walked away from the theater. Those 3 hours have to be one of the most pointlessly spent ones in my entire life.

My point is, I knew the context of the movies, I knew what they were about and I saw none of that in the play. What does that say about the director of the play? Mind you, I wasn't the only one leaving, the theater was mostly full, after an hour and a half there were like 30 people left, I was amongst the last ones to leave. How stupid can you be to think that 5 hours of that shit will keep people interested and trying to "decode" "what was the artists trying to say with this or that". It can be interesting if it was a dose of it, like 15 minutes, but 5 hours of that shut, fuck no.

BTW, I bet you whatever ammount you like, I post a short Star Wars clip and screen it to people that have never seen Star Wars... 90% of people will understand what that scene was trying to say. It's Star Wars, not Fight Club.

To be honest, I mostly just don't get extreme performace art, like in the clip. I can listen to "extreme" (as in non-mainstream) music and watch "extreme" movies (like, let's say Irreversible) and plays, but unless there is some dialogue... I'm sorry but, I don't get it. Some performance art is cool and I get what they're trying to say, but these extreme cases, no, I just don't. Like the guy in the mummy outfit screaming. I bet that's all there is in the performance... or a midget starts runnig half naked, also in a mummy costume (from top to half), or something like that... I mean, they're predictable if you ask me. The point is to shock, nothing else IMO. I don't think there is a point. The artist wants us to think there is one, so we wreck our brains "what was the artist trying to say 🤔", while in reality, he just did some extreme shit, left the audience 😱 and them thinking "wow, he's so artistic, he's really good, the message was so strong" but when you ask those same people what the message was, they start studdering 😒. It's all shenanagins, the artist stays all the wisers by not clearly stating what the message he was trying to say was (because there is none), the audience pretends like they understood what he was trying to say, but in fact didn't understand shit cuz... well, there is nothing to understand.

Oh yeah, totally! Just make sure to record it or it's not art.