Here’s something I wanna say real quick, while I’m feeling salty: Amazon has totally contributed to the devaluation of literature. Those prices you see, the $13 they’re asking you to pay for a hardcover book? Those are deep, DEEP discounts that they’re able to implement because they don’t collect sales tax if they can get away with it, they don’t contribute money to the communities where they have a physical presence, they have shitty labor practices, Jeff Bezos has more money than god, etc.
They’re so omnipotent at this point that they’ve normalized the discounted prices for books as the standard. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had someone come up to me and tell me what the price on Amazon is, expecting me to match it. The number of times I’ve been told, “Oh, it’s cheaper on Amazon, I’ll just get it there.” Even at author events, where book sales DIRECTLY CONTRIBUTE to whether or not that bookstore will be able to get more authors in.
So when you go into a bookstore, and you’re asked to pay $27 for a hardcover, remember: THAT IS THE COVER PRICE. Set by the publishers. The bookstore is not upcharging you. They are asking you to pay the value of the book. Amazon’s low prices come with a cost. Please, just keep that in mind.
(I made a post with options for buying books online that aren’t Amazon. Check it out!)
This is a great post, and I just want to point out: publishers aren’t upcharging you either.
The cost of the book is the advance for the author, it’s the salaries for all the people who work on it (including editors, yes, but also designers and marketers and publicists and lawyers and accountants and everyone else who makes sure publishing works). It’s the cost of printing the books and the materials to print those books on and the warehouses to store those books in.
It’s keeping the literal lights on.
No one in the book business, from the author to the publisher to the bookseller, is making themselves rich off your money. This is the cost to survive. Amazon is running at a deficit because they can make up the cost with other things they do, and because once they run everyone else out of business, they’ll be the only game in town and can charge whatever they damn well please.
And please, please do not ask a bookstore (especially an indie bookstore) if they “price match.” It’s so insulting.
Amazon routinely sells books at or *below* wholesale cost. Meaning that when you ask a bookstore to ‘price match’ Amazon, you’re literally asking them to give you the book for free, or even take a financial loss on it.
‘So how can Amazon do it?’ you ask? The answer is Amazon does not care about losing money. It sells goods at a loss continuously. (Don’t believe me? Just search “Amazon quarterly losses” and you can find article after article about this) Why? Because its goal isn’t to sell the most things, it’s goal is to be the only place where you CAN buy things. They gouge prices on goods to a point where brick and mortar retailers absolutely cannot compete and they do it with the singular goal of eliminating competition.
Things have value. They represent many people’s time and labor. For books, specifically, they represent tremendous cultural worth that extends far beyond the value of the paper they’re printed on. We have to appreciate the value of goods and be willing to pay a fair price that will support and nurture industries.
It’s ok to be upset that you can’t afford $26 for a new hardcover, but make sure that that anger is directed, not at the people whose labor makes books possible, but at the people on top (like Jeff Bezos) who have devalued your own labor such that you can’t afford it.
Take the National Geographic tour. It’s amazing. Turn the sound on too. And don’t forget to zoom around and look at all the little details on the huge panoramas like seeing people a mile away.
All art is literally just an attempt at grappling with the fact that we have no way of knowing if the minds of other people are actually real.
any and all attempts to translate your lived experience into something tangible to communicate with other people is an acknowledgement that your consciousness ends where your body ends and what you experience as truth must be translated so that what is instinctively known by you can be even vaguely grasped by someone outside of “you” and can enter into their truth
So somebody on my Facebook posted this. And I’ve seen sooooo many memes like it. Images of a canvas with nothing but a slash cut into it, or a giant blurry square of color, or a black circle on a white canvas. There are always hundreds of comments about how anyone could do that and it isn’t really art, or stories of the time someone dropped a glove on the floor of a museum and people started discussing the meaning of the piece, assuming it was an abstract found-objects type of sculpture.
The painting on the left is a bay or lake or harbor with mountains in the background and some people going about their day in the foreground. It’s very pretty and it is skillfully painted. It’s a nice piece of art. It’s also just a landscape. I don’t recognize a signature style, the subject matter is far too common to narrow it down. I have no idea who painted that image.
The painting on the right I recognized immediately. When I was studying abstraction and non-representational art, I didn’t study this painter in depth, but I remember the day we learned about him and specifically about this series of paintings. His name was Ad Reinhart, and this is one painting from a series he called the ultimate paintings. (Not ultimate as in the best, but ultimate as in last.)
The day that my art history teacher showed us Ad Reinhart’s paintings, one guy in the class scoffed and made a comment that it was a scam, that Reinhart had slapped some black paint on the canvas and pretentious people who wanted to look smart gave him money for it. My teacher shut him down immediately. She told him that this is not a canvas that someone just painted black. It isn’t easy to tell from this photo, but there are groups of color, usually squares of very very very dark blue or red or green or brown. They are so dark that, if you saw them on their own, you would call each of them black. But when they are side by side their differences are apparent. Initially you stare at the piece thinking that THAT corner of the canvas is TRUE black. Then you begin to wonder if it is a deep green that only appears black because the area next to it is a deep, deep red. Or perhaps the “blue” is the true black and that red is actually brown. Or perhaps the blue is violet and the color next to it is the true black. The piece challenges the viewer’s perception. By the time you move on to the next painting, you’re left to wonder if maybe there have been other instances in which you believe something to be true but your perception is warped by some outside factor. And then you wonder if ANY of the colors were truly black. How can anything be cut and dry, black and white, when even black itself isn’t as absolute as you thought it was?
People need to understand that not all art is about portraying a realistic image, and that technical skills (like the ability to paint a scene that looks as though it may have been photographed) are not the only kind of artistic skills. Some art is meant to be pretty or look like something. Other art is meant to carry a message or an idea, to provoke thought.
Reinhart’s art is utterly genius.
“But anyone could have done that! It doesn’t take any special skill! I could have done that!”
Ok. Maybe you could have. But you didn’t.
Give abstract art some respect. It’s more important than you realize.
Item: Shoes of Tentacular Clambering, with dextrous living tendrils that allow the wearer to walk as if wearing elegant heels on any terrain, plus a grappling-kick attack.
im feeling very sad for feminism today… i think where we went wrong was trying to commodify and commercialize feminism with these “girl power” and “the future is female” t shirts which were created by this minimalistic pastel aesthetic and kind of softened what previously was a very anarchist and rebellious movement (see early 90s feminist rock bands which glamorized the opposite of femininity with shaved hair, unshaved pits and legs, no makeup)
and now we have artists like ariana grande, nicki minaj, fifth harmony, daya, etc (this isn’t a callout post for them i don’t care about them as individuals i’m just commenting on a trend in pop culture perpetrated by the music industry) who put out music with feminist sentiments but absolutely no evidence of actively rebelling against societal expectations for women. “i don’t need boys i don’t need to be pretty i don’t need to be sexy” performed in scantily clad clothing with makeup sponsored by perfume and makeup companies is proof that capitalistic pressure has kind of destroyed the rebellious nature of the feminist movement.
so now we have a generation of girls raised on the internet convinced that performing femininity and caking their natural face in makeup in order to conform to unrealistic standards of beauty, placing their worth in their physical appearance inherently by paying money in order to appease some made up standard of what is acceptable for women, and they’ve convinced themselves that this, this conformity of expectation of feminist for women, is inherently feminist?
like it sucks like you guys know feminism is a counteractive movement right? like you know to be feminist is to rebel right? it’s not enough to consume pretty, neat, but wholly hypocritical ideals of feminism. it’s lazy. we have a generation of girls who want to adhere to expectations for women, who want to become that ideal that men have constructed, but now because they “reclaimed” it, that’s feminist?
like no sorry you Can do those things you Can put on makeup and shave and look pretty and girl you Can but don’t pretend that’s feminist it’s literally not. you’re not helping feminism the commodification of feminism is not helpful. men are not upset by you saying “the future is female” when you still look pretty and pink and non-threatening. we aren’t liberated by expectation just because you are now accepting of it. feminism is not complacency.
this post doesn’t apply to the reclaimation of femininity in the context of trans women which is a whole other discussion but generally i think the idea still applies. thanks
