There were many reactions – both in agreement and disagreement – to yesterday’s comment about the Olympic opening. Czech blogger Vidlák (a bumpkin) put it succinctly: “this was probably the first time I’ve ever been promoted at a big, planet-wide event where I was told basically from the first minute that they didn’t even need me to sit in front of the TV and watch commercials…”
Exactly. That’s why I’m so skeptical when someone claims that the elites are spending huge amounts of money to manipulate them, because by doing so they’re also saying, I’m important! They are forced to manipulate me! In fact, you are not important at all. They can ignore you, and if you oppose them, they can crush you. If millions resisted in a coordinated (!) way, it would be different, but you don’t have the organizational skills and the possibilities. They don’t care what you think.
But others have written that surely no one can have such taste, that no one can like it, etc. I’m afraid this comes from ignorance of the principle on which modern art is based. In the old days, for example, a painter painted a lovely bathing girls and it appealed to basically everyone. And that was the mistake. As the historian John Carey has well shown in his studies, modern art was invented to create something that the majority would not like. When you come across a painting with two orange triangles and a blurry smudge over them, you need years of special training to appreciate something like that. This reliably separates the aristocrats who have received such training from the working classes who can’t afford it.
In the Czech Republic, this has only marginally affected us, because Czech culture has been plebeian since the Czech National Revival in the 18th century. But in recent years, we have become fully part of the West.