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What you are about to read is not a joke. The following suggestions are completely serious and I legitimately think they are good ideas.
Recruiting and retaining members is a frequent, contentious DMS topic. Everyone has ideas about how to increase our core numbers, but I want to throw in another idea that I think everyone here should consider:
BRONZE AGE SPECIAL INTEREST CRAFTING GROUP (BASIC G)
Now I know what you are thinking right now: āKevin, this is another one of your stupid meme ideas. You have no volunteers and no one cares about the ancient world. Shut up and swallow a live grenade.ā
But you see, dear maker, that is where you are wrong. Not only is my mouth too small for any grenade in production, but also you have also failed to account for the fact that this is actually the greatest idea since the polio vaccine.
Why a Bronze Age SIG would meet DMSās needs
Letās take a moment to step back and ask ourselves a core question that lies at the heart of our membership problem: What makes art so hard?
I argue that two things make it hard:
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The tradecraft, or ācraft,ā of modern artwork has become so technical and so ubiquitous that it feels like you have to climb up a steep hill to do āproperā art. Everyone of every income level is constantly surrounded by highly technical artwork that probably cost millions of dollars to make. We can sit here and argue whether there is such a thing as āproperā art, but I think we are kidding ourselves if we say there isnāt in some sense. Yes, there is no argument I could make to convince someone who thinks my stick figures are the greatest drawings ever that they are wrong, but, in general, there are certain contextually-based parameters that have to be met in order for any art I create to be considered valuable. Thatās just how things are. Most people tend to agree on what movies are shitty and what movies are good. Strong deviations tend to only occur when movies become highly experimental, such as in art house films. Getting to the level of being considered competent in the eyes of the typical public and receiving validation for your work can be a long and grueling process.
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A misunderstanding of how inspiration and engineering actually works in practice. Lay people think that talented people try to be original. Thatās never been true in my experience. Truly successful talented people in any field, whether art or engineering, never have originality as their goal. A talented person only has two things: tradecraft and something they want to do. Iāll use @Vincent as an example. From a pure originality standpoint, thereās nothing particularly groundbreaking about the church windows he made; weāve seen windows like that before. But most people, including myself, consider Vincentās windows to be good art because he came up with a vision that met the needs and tastes of his clients and executed that vision with professional-grade tradecraft. If you are making art for yourself or to express yourself, then the only thing you should give a shit about are your tastes or what you think is cool. Fuck originality. Anyone who has originality as their goal is wasting their time. True originality is always organic and spontaneous; it erupts through trial-and-error by pursuing things you give a shit about. This is true for almost every invention and piece of art in human history.
Craft is the technical aspect of artwork. Art consists of two things: some idea or emotion that we want to express through some medium and an artifact that serves as the vehicle for that expression. A painter has an idea or emotion they want to convey through the painting, but they also need the craft to make that imaginary painting into a real artifact that other people can see.
When, say, @Vincent makes a stain glass window, he needs empathy and an artistic sense to know what doesnāt work, but he also needs to use the craft of cutting glass, shaping glass, putting in those liners, and so forth. It doesnāt matter how good his ideas are if he doesnāt have the craft to back those ideas up.
Typically, new people have problems with both aspects of art. They have trouble generating ideas that interest them because they have a lack of exposure to all of the different things you can do with the crafts and they have trouble developing craft because they lack experience and developing good tradecraft has gotten harder as the bar as risen over time.
What DMS needs to meet these challenges is a genre of art that encompasses most of the crafts practiced at DMS while meeting the following requirements:
- Interesting To A Lot Of Casual People
- Can Provide External And Internal Validation (Seen As Proper Art By Casuals)
- Low Bar For Quality
- Was Literally Created For (And Taught To) Dumb Barely-Literate People When Human Civilization Was At Its Very Dumbest And Is Therefore Perfect For Casuals
There is one genre that meets all of these requirements: Bronze Age Crafts
Why This Might Work Really Well
Over the past couple of months, I have spent some of my free time around people who are neither DMS folks or highly-educated engineers with a trillion hobbies. I integrated myself among different peoples and learned a great many things. Here are my two biggest takeaways:
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Many people seem to be bored-as-shit lost souls who are looking for some way to create meaning out of their life. Some try to address this by starting a family and focusing on that, but many people want more than just a family. They want some creative outlet for themselves to blow off some steam outside of work and child-raising.
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Many people seem to have a focus on getting laid and they are frustrated with the increasingly online and difficult dating market. Online dating used to be supplemental to dating people that you meet through friends or in community areas, but too many people want to just stay home and fuck around on Netflix or on videogames. They basically trap themselves in a loop and become incredibly boring, meaning that they not only make their number of opportunities worse but they also become less interesting and able to set themselves apart from others, reducing their ability to capitalize on any opportunities they do come across.
People are looking for an answer to these troubles; they desire a way out of the pit of boredom and despair. Ladies and gentlemen, I have that answer: the answer is being a BASIC G.
Let me show you how this works.
When you are starting out in a discipline, you are usually terrible. The first step to becoming good at something is being bad at it. In the arts, this usually means that you creating actual nightmare fuel. Now take a look at this Ancient Sumerian sculpture.
Imagine you are a brand new artist and you have just created this nightmare fuel. Some people will find it cool and some people will find it weird; however, doing art at all makes you more interesting to almost everyone. Even people who have no interest at all in art or the bronze age will find you interesting because you are so outside of the norm, but you know what everyone really loves? History nerds. History nerds are in; itās the fucking meta. I would go so far as to say that there are probably only a small handful of people on this planet who donāt have a weakness for someone with a passion for history.
Some of you are like ābullshit,ā but no, itās not bullshit. People really love history because people love stories. I have consistently gotten this critical advice from veteran toastmasters, CEOs, charismatic friends and other public speakers about business presentations, dates, debates, etc: tell a story. Narrative is the most powerful tool in a speakerās arsenal. Historians and people who are into history are weapons-grade story-tellers.
People only hate history when you just recite lists of facts to them or make them feel dumb, but not when you use those facts to weave a narrative. The people with the greatest game I have ever met, both men and women, are historians. They have a broad enough history background to talk about pretty much any subject with the person they are dating and enough writing experience to know how to craft interesting narratives that draw in the listener.
People with spouses: do not fear the UPS man, do not fear the milkman, do not fear the lifeguard, and do not fear the bodybuilder or the swimsuit model; fear the historian.
Doing bronze age shit gives you practice in developing several crafts in a genre where high degrees of error only make your work look more authentic. And, even more importantly, most people find the bronze age interesting (look at how well media about Egypt does).
To summarize, having an experience in crafting Bronze age shit is both interesting and makes you more interesting while being much easier than other types of art. You donāt need to worry about smooth uniform surfaces or symmetries or realism or expressiveness. Whatās the expression those sumerian statues are making? I donāt fucking know, but the bronze age factor makes it work. Got a heavily dented bike part? Bend that just a little bit, spray paint it gold, and now youāve got yourself a bronze age helmet for a bronze age style statue.
Bronze Age SIG Activities
Thereās a lot of pottery in the bronze age, so pottery will be huge. On top of that, the writing systems themselves relied on clay and reed styluses. I could see small cuneiform tablets being made in the ceramics area since cuneiform can be artistically interesting. The bronze age had a lot of art that was done by what we would today call blacksmiths and carpenters as well. There are even applications in science that I can think of.
Just imagine the potential folks.
Does this not look like the kind of art that would do well for beginners in sheet metal? @Mrholthaus
Iām excited to spend some of my free time developing and working on this idea and several committees will be seeing more of me in the near future. I know many of you will be skeptical, but, for now, I just want you to consider this and think if you might also take interest. Iām throwing this out into the air because I know there are already a lot of people who are into historical shit at DMS.