Bro you are going to lose the Mandate of Heaven

A woodblock print of the Deities of Mount Atago (愛宕諸神像) in northwest Kyoto, with the mountain deity protector against fire Atago Gongen (愛宕権現) astride a horse in the center, flanked by Jizō Bodhisattva (地蔵菩薩) of whom he’s held to be the local manifestation and the fierce guardian Bishamonten (毘沙門天) on the left, and by a rosary-counting tengu goblin (天狗) and the wrathful Fudō Myōō (不動明王) on the right, and by the pioneering mountain ascetic En no Gyōja (役行者) along with his rough-looking minions below

obviously this specific situation shows my printmaker bias, but i think it does demonstrate how the artistic communities on tumblr (and many social media spaces in general, with the exception of instagram) are dominated by digital artists. i believe there's a connection to the industry arts you mention--the vast majority of socmed-focused digital art is illustration, and the pipeline from illustration into animation + comics + concept art is by now very established, thanks to the current state of art schools. and now that digital art is so common, artists in these fields work almost exclusively digitally and rarely explore traditional media, and then only as side projects.

many reasons exist for this division but resources and accessibility is probably the largest one. it costs a lot to practice traditional art--you need to purchase materials, you need space to store them and to work with them, you need access to specialized equipment and technical training, and that's before even getting into the challenge of trying to make a living from your practice. and while it's good to be honest about the difficulty of being a "successful" artist in the contemporary fine art world, and the very real ways in which capitalism has gutted and exploited that community, the current result is that we have a narrative about the fine art world that portrays it as the exclusive domain of the wealthy elite. little wonder that the industries geared towards digital art seem more appealing to younger artists, particularly those who are already disenfranchised/marginalized in ways that push them towards internet communities (eg. disability, poverty, queerness). and when you are in that arts industry pipeline, you are discouraged from branching out of it, both by the high starting costs of traditional art and because the industries don't want to lose their cheap art school graduate labor to less profitable fields.

so, when most of the userbase is more invested in these mass market artforms than the contemporary art world, any attempts at materialist analysis will be pretty skewed. tumblr leftists seem to have a poor understanding of art and creative labor in general, but you will at least see discussion of the exploitation that happens in the animation/comics/gaming industries, because people on here are more likely to be involved with them and discuss the conditions in those spaces. meanwhile, many contemporary artists and art institutions are very vocal about the politics and material conditions of the art world as it right now, but basically none of that reaches tumblr discourse because the separation between illustration-based industry arts and the contemporary art scene is pretty much complete at this point. so there are no challenges to the frankly reactionary and anti-intellectual idea that, as you put it, "modern art is all phony bullshit."

November 28, 2024

The Hong Kong government finally issued its verdict to the 47 members of the pro-democracy camp who have been detained for over three years—a long-awaited trial punctuated by multiple delays. The 47 were arrested in 2021 for organizing an unofficial primary to field pro-democracy candidates, so that the movement could consolidate candidates to maximize their chances of victory in the city’s Legislative Council elections in 2020. The strategy was intended as a legal way to continue Hong Kong’s democratic struggle, in light of the increasing repression of political dissent with the passage of the National Security Law (NSL) in 2020, which concluded a fiery, nearly-year-long mass movement between 2019 and 2020. 

Benny Tai, a key pro-democracy figure who also organized open mass assemblies that led to the Umbrella Movement in 2013, received the highest sentence—10 years, shortened from 15, as Tai pleaded guilty. Those charged come from a variety of ideological backgrounds, reflecting the political pluralism of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. Some are the most visible figures of the city’s labor movements and the progressive left. “Long Hair,” Leung Kwok-hung, the city’s most prominent left-wing and Marxist activist, received one of the highest sentences among those not considered as one of the primary’s official organizers. Leung has been a longtime participant in militant struggles since the 1970s, organizing actions against the British colonial regime as a member of the Revolutionary Marxist League and later, April Fifth Action; and as a convenor of the League of Social Democrats (LSD), demonstrating against multiple US-backed imperialist wars from Iraq to Gaza, neoliberal globalization, and other local progressive causes.

(...)

The recent (revival of and) passage of Article 23 further reinforces these legal ambiguities to enable this unprecedented state of repression. For one, the article strengthens the state’s prosecution of “seditious” acts, identified as “the intent to endanger national security.” Even before the trial of the 47, the state has shown great willingness to capitalize on the vagueness of such wording to indict people for what it considers national security crimes. In 2022, two people were arrested for committing “acts with seditious intention”—posting messages on social media that “promote feelings of ill-will and enmity between different classes of the population of Hong Kong.” Apparently, simply naming social antagonisms between classes in one of the world’s most hyper-capitalist and unequal cities, in other words, counts as “sedition.”

(...)

What these examples and this trial’s verdict show is that the Hong Kong government has abandoned any remaining semblance of democratic norms—even as the rule of law has never really existed in the first place. Even before the passage of the NSL[national security law], unelected professional business sectors composed nearly half of the city’s legislature (a colonial-era system pro-Beijing forces lobbied to retain in the final years of British rule), while the government in Beijing reserves the final right to interpret any laws or legal decisions in Hong Kong. Many of the laws used against opposition figures and protestors are also ones directly inherited from the colonial era: for example, prosecutor Laura Ng directly cited an 1868 British law used to quell Irish rebellions to justify her verdict of the pro-democracy media outlet Stand News as “seditious” in 2022. In the first comprehensive study of the NSL, legal scholar Han Zhu describes these laws as “an unprecedented experiment,” and “a bizarre mixture of elements from socialist civil law, Hong Kong common law, and British colonial law.” The NSL’s improvisatory nature demonstrates that legality only serves now as a poorly assembled set of fictions that barely mask the state’s naked rule by totalitarian force. 

(...)

However constrained Tai’s political horizon is, some of his organizing solutions inadvertently opened avenues for the everyday masses to participate in collective self-activity and democratic deliberation. Acknowledging this allows us to understand why the state gave the heaviest penalty to the proponent of such a toothless and moderate tactic. The state was not really threatened by what such candidates may do in the legislature if they win—but by the potential resurgence of a militant, possibly revolutionary, mass movement that organizes beyond the chambers of LegCo, which it had only just contained by force. In 2020, the primary turned out 600,000 voters, making it the most-participated one in the whole history of Hong Kong. This renewal of energy after months of uncertainty and fear wrought by growing repression and the early stages of the pandemic threatened to revive the mass movement anew.

Tai and others’ political repression shows that mass movements that expose and challenge the hypocrisies of sham legality, rather than confinement within participation in legalistic or electoral politics, threaten the ruling power. In this vein, the most effective avenue for international solidarity is not appealing to the sham “democratic” institutions of the West, which have been eager to co-opt critiques of China for their own imperialist designs. And so, in this particular conjuncture, we must contextualize our critique of China’s further crackdown on Hong Kong activists in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. Not merely gestural, it is a forceful recognition of the United States’ shameless hypocrisy that sees State Department officials condemning the kangaroo courts of Hong Kong while supplying an endless stream of arms and defensive technologies and vociferously shielding Israel from any legal consequence for its war crimes. 

Most economic histories were focused on whether other countries could ever develop into nineteenth-century England. For labor historians, Mike Davis recently wrote, the “classical proletariat” was the working classes of the North Atlantic from 1838-1921. These modular assumptions jump out when you flip through the classics of Asian economic and labor history, almost always focused on some sort of textile industry (silk, cotton, jute) and in cities such as Shanghai, Osaka, Bombay, Calcutta. By contrast, I was really inspired by a field pioneered by South Asia scholars known as “global labor history” — especially the work of Jairus Banaji — which has been critical of the centrality of urban industry in economic history. Instead, these scholars reconsider labor in light of our current world of late capitalism, including transportation workers, agrarian families, servants, and unfree and coerced labor. These activities have enabled global capitalism to function smoothly for centuries but were overlooked because they did not share the spectacular novelty of the steam-powered factories of urban Europe, US, and Japan.

As far as how tea production worked: in simple terms, Chinese tea was a segmented trade and Indian tea was centralized in plantations known as ‘tea gardens.’ The Chinese trade relied on independent family farms, workshops in market towns, and porters ferrying tea to the coastal ports: Guangzhou (Canton) then later Fuzhou and Shanghai. By contrast, British officials and planters built Indian tea from scratch in Assam, which had not been nearly as commercialized as coastal China or Bengal. They first tried to replicate the ‘natural’ Chinese model of local agriculture and trade, but frustrated British planters ultimately decided to undertake all of the tasks themselves, from clearing the land to packaging the finished leaves. […] Indian tea was championed as futuristic and mechanized. […]

In India […] the tea industry’s penal labor contract became one of the original cause célèbres of the nationalist movement in the 1880s. The plantations later became a site for strikes and hartals, the most famous occurring in the Chargola Valley in 1921. But even though tea workers chanted, “Gandhi Maharaj ki jai” at the time, Gandhi himself had allegedly visited Assam and declined to see the workers, meeting instead with British planters to assure them they were safe. While Indian nationalists had politicized indenture in Assam tea, their main complaint was the racialized split between British capital and Indian labor. Their remedy was not to liquidate the tea gardens but to diversify ownership over them. The cause of labor was subordinated to the nationalist struggle.

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That's not the point, though? Personally, I'm the biggest advocate for piracy. BUT look at the message that it sends that a USAmerican company owns the distribution rights to a whole bunch of foreign films and does not allow these films to be distributed in THE COUNTRIES THEY WERE MADE. What does it say about how much they actually value these countries and their creators and their film industries? Let's not focus on the morality of piracy for a second, lets focus on the fucking optics.

And the fact is, a lot of these films are older. The people who watched them back in the day and might love to see it in 4K might not have the skills to pirate. My 72 year old, extremely offline father saw Picnic at Hanging Rock when it first came out. He's not gonna know how to use Mega. I'm not even sure he knows what Reddit is.

I don’t understand why people in the reblogs are blaming a US company for buying US distribution rights to foreign films, remixing said foreign films (with the consent of the IP owner from the country of origin) and not being allowed to distribute these US-versions in the countries of origin. If the US company didn’t buy the rights to distribute the films in their countries of origin, then they are legally barred from doing so. The domestic companies who own the rights to these films have the distribution rights to these films in their countries of origin!

Some of these old films may not be available in their countries of origin because the IP owner (usually a domestic company) chose not to distribute it or sometimes it’s because of censorship in the country of origin. But it’s not imperialism or even distasteful that a US company who bought rights to distribute a foreign film for its own domestic audience cannot turn around and start selling that film in its country of origin.

For example, one user in the reblogs on this post said they wanted to watch Spring Fever (春风沉醉的夜晚) a 2007 film made by Dream Factory HK and Rosem Films. If that film is not available in HK then it’s because these two companies or whichever domestic HK or mainland Chinese company that bought the rights to distribution in Hong Kong chose not to distribute it. And I suspect that whoever holds the mainland China distribution rights has not released it in the mainland because of censorship, since this is a queer film. If this film is available in the US, then it’s because the original production company sold foreign distribution rights to a US company to distribute it in the US. Lots of Chinese companies sell US distribution rights for their films to US companies for US-only distribution. It would be unfair and unlawful (and quite imperialistic, actually) for a US company to turn around and start selling the US version of the same film in the domestic Chinese market. That would actually be stealing from the domestic company that made the film!

@sunriseverse if you want to watch Spring Fever without paying money, search 春风沉醉的夜晚 在线看 and you’ll find multiple Chinese websites where you can watch it for free. Here is one. Here is another one from a Chinese website that focuses on queer media.

US companies buy rights to edit, subtitle, and show foreign films in the US so people in the US can watch a foreign film. Similarly, Chinese companies buy the rights to edit, subtitle, and show foreign films in China so people in China can watch a foreign film. A foreign company cannot (and should not) be expected to restore, subtitle, and curate one’s own cinematic classics for distribution in one’s own country. That’s something that only a domestic company or organization can do.

Also, some of the reblogs that blame a US company for not importing a more comprehensive library of cinema classics from around the world are stunningly US-centric. Why do you expect foreigners to compile a comprehensive library of your country’s cinematic classics when all they are trying to do is watch some foreign films?

This straits times article from the year of release appears to confirm spring fever indeed lacked approval from chinese censors at the time of its premiere, like several of lou yes previous films, tho no inducation is given this time as to the specific reason for the non-approval