coffeemig
Many of them did adopt some real wacky beliefs that they have held onto many years past their use. ‘Radicality’ of belief seemed proportional to volume of use. I’m talking Q-anon levels of delusion and beyond. They all felt they were in touch with greater truths and pitied me and my judgement; my self-restriction of perception. They have a lot of flowery language about how I can’t know what I can’t see that you have to be some sort of logician to parse.
In one case, I have watched this ‘enlightenment’ morph over the years from communicationg with beings from beyond the veil to potentially violent political extremism. The guy has been sober for years but low-key views all of his actions and work through a lens of ‘ultimate battle of cosmic good and evil’. Naturally ‘good’ cosmically aligns with whatever his interests at that time are.
If you’re a young person reading this: taking psychedelics a couple times is an interesting experience, perhaps worthwhile. But I’m real damn certain that the ‘enlightenment’ is basically being high. Drunk on a false sense of peace with the universe which exists only as a malfunction in your brain’s wiring. Beware people who tout those effects. They are out of touch with reality.
*I have read there is clinical potential to help PTSD sufferers. I’m not denying this. But 99% of usage is not happening is carefully, scientifically studied and controlled situations. Keeping a trip journal is not scientific, even if you have a chem phd.
They are not teaching aesthetics any more. They threw away the casts and teach ‘concept’. Students aren’t taught how to approach Michelangelo’s David, they’re taught how to approach Duchamp’s fountain. I heard a professor espouse that Twombly was some enormous departure from Pollock, an artistic revolution as great a distance as Picasso from Velasquez.
Twombly: https://www.google.com/search?q=cy+twombly&client=safari&hl=...
Pollock: https://www.google.com/search?q=jackson+pollock&client=safar...
The emperor has no clothes.
Out of curiosity, before modernism, what would an architecture curriculum have looked like? Are there any foundational texts?
*I don’t hate modernism, lots of it is pretty cool. However, I hate what it did to the pedagogy of painting. It set me back ten years because it was so hard to find anyone who knew what they were talking about. Western art departments figuratively and literally destroyed the basis for teaching representational aesthetics, which had been developed for thousands of years, and then celebrated themselves for doing so. Now, relatively, no one knows how to draw.
I suspect something similar happened in architecture, and in light of that, I don’t know who to trust or approach on how to start self-learning. I’ll never build cool buildings, but I can design them and use architecture to inform my painting.
I didn’t say I was excited about it. But, the way things have been going lately, it wouldn’t be a surprise.
The issue is that we’re verifiably living under a pervasive propaganda machine that has most well-meaning people, intelligent ones, fooled. That it’s supporting the lesser of two evils, is beside the point that the truth is being deliberately concealed.