Over in the Pit, we’ve been discussing (or at least I’ve been discussing) whether you may dislike rap without being exposed to a hell of a lot of it. It seems to me a pretty elitist position to set the standard very high for how much of an art form you must have been exposed to before you may present a thumbs-down on it, and it seemed to me that there are plenty of art forms that we all dislike without giving them what their advocates consider a fair chance.
Can you name four of your own?
For me, it’s hip-hop, British murder mysteries, science fiction, and cubist painting. I’ve been exposed (to my mind, way over-exposed) to each, and just don’t care for them, but I’ve also experienced their fans insisting that I haven’t given them a fair chance, that I haven’t heard or read or seen the right examples, or some other specious reasoning. Maybe they’re right. Maybe if I saw a lot more of them I would change my mind, but I don’t see that happening in this lifetime.
Hip-hop/rap (what’s the difference anyway?), opera (it’s not that it’s never beautiful, it’s that it never seems to get anywhere, it’s like hours and hours of foreplay and then no orgasm), almost any pictorial art where you can’t see what it’s supposed to be, and the kind of modern symbolic poetry where nothing makes any sense and doesn’t rhyme and it’s not supposed to and if you don’t get it you’re a bourgeoisie Philistine who doesn’t understand me and you’re destroying my life and I’m RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME!
But I’m really not quite as prejudiced as I seem. I enjoy Eminem’s Cleaning Out My Closet (this is where the hip-hop aficionados laugh at me because that isn’t hip-hop but “industrial gangsta-strut” or something) and there are more than a few opera pieces I don’t mind listening to. I still haven’t seen any non-representative art or heard any non-sense-making poem I’ve liked, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility, I guess.
1.) Ballet. There are people who are tone-deaf, and there are people who are color-blind. I am ballet-insensitive. It does nothing at all for me. Yes, I appreciate the incredibly tough training that goes into it, the years and years of practtice. The ingenuity that tries to make human motions seem effortless and light. But it doesn’t work for me. I’m bored by it.
2.) Rap music – I don’t care if it’s cousin to “patter” music and can be related to much poetry. It’s not its roots that bothyer me. It’s the damned thing itself. I do find its rhythms infectious, but not in a good way. I’d be happier if it didn’t exist. And parodies of rap are even worse tha the original rap.
3.) Organized Sports – Even for sports that I like to participate in mmyself, I don’t see th point in watching. I don’t like Major League anything. I don’t watch the SuperBowl. I don’t watch the World Cup. I don’t like to watch The Olympics.
4.) Soap Operas – I never could stand these slow-moving , Earnestly-acted, Overexposed dramas. Not even when they featured Vampires, Werewolves, and James Bondesque plots.
“Contempory dance” - just does nothing for me, I’m afraid
Likewise modern R&B… I can see why people like it, but doesn’t float my boat. I’d include rude-bwoy gangsta rap in that as well.
Opera too - certain arias are nice, but overall I’d rather see a play and then go listen to a choral concert. Opera somehow feels like it’s achieved neither terribly successfully.
Any **gymnastics / ice-skating ** with an “interpretative” element in the scoring… I can appreciate the physical skills, but the marks for artistic impression require pointless trills and frills that add nothing to the performance (IMO)
This is not a blanket opinion - there are some R&B songs that I like, for example, but they are very few and far between.
Any kind of painting, picture, sculpture, and such. I don’t really get it. It doesn’t give me pleasure, I don’t learn anything from it. What’s the point.
Wine tasting. I know that it is just my ability to taste the difference that is undeveloped. To me they all have the taste “I would rather have a beer”
Soap Operas - just could not and will never understand the fascination of them.
Romance novels and western novels. Worked in a library and shelved god knows how much of this drivel with never an inkling of desire to open a page.
Manga - (I shall duck now as there are clearly a lot of manga fans around here).
Modern/post modern/contemporary Dance - I blame it on the advertising blurb, my pretentious twaddle alarm bell starts ringing away in my head and I can’t hear any reasoned thoughts above it. Said alarm may be set a little too sensitivly and probably gets in the way of enjoying lost of valid art forms, but hey ho.
[ol]
[li]Performance art. Not that I’ve really seen much, and what i’ve seen might just be parody. but it still seems silly.[/li]li poetry. The guy who’s the current poet laureate (Bill something…) was on NPR. He read a poem that didn’t seem very poetic. The NPR reporter gushed. I didn’t get it.[/li][li]Comic books. Again, not much exposure, but it seems a tad silly at times.[/li][li]Opera. I undersand that there’s years of training in the singing, in the set design and it all looks gorgeous and lush and whatever, but I like my music in 2-4 minutes of fast rock ‘n’ roll. I know, I’m such a common person.[/li][/ol]
Non-Anglo/Celtic ethnic music. I live in a neighborhood that is 90% Mexican, and if I have to hear one more mariachi band at full volume I’m going to go postal.
Ballet. I’ll be in the bar.
(Defered) I’ll wait to see if somebody else can think of something, because most of the stuff listed above I either really like or at least understand and can get something out of.
Virtually all rap/hip-hop. No-talent hacks in my opinion, with few exceptions.
Reality TV shows. All of them. They are stupid beyond words and are anything but real.
So-called Modern Art. I can crap in a bag, too, or I can paint a wall blue. Where’s my NEA grant?
Country music. If I had to listen to that every day I’d kill myself. I will say that some of the women look really good when the TV is muted, though. The fake, pretentious cowboy hats and boots look like clown suits to me.
In descreasing order of importance:
(1) American television. I pretty well never watch any of what they offer, though when I’m in Australia, or visiting Canada or the UK, I do watch some programs. For me, American TV ranges downwards from the bland to the atrocious, and I never find it worth watching. (But my wife does watch a lot).
(2) Ballet. I like pretty well all other classical musical stuff, including most opera, but ballet does nothing for me. No matter how technically brilliant it is, telling a story with formal dance routines just seems a waste of time.
Well, those are my really conspicuous gaps in my cultural appreciativeness, and I really can’t think of another two quite a big as those
b) Wince humor. Sitcoms where the main characters paint themselves into awful corners by inventing really stupid lies or otherwise doing astonishingly stupid things, and then somehow it’s supposed to be funny to watch them cringe their pathetic way through the results. WTF??
c) Broadway musicals with a handful of trite overused motifs: the production number where towards the end the tempo slows down and the singer starts kind of growling out the words very dee lib err att leeee; and the Fosse stuff where the women (it’s always women) get choreographed into these awful poses where it looks like they’re trying to take a shit onstage
d) Big fat beer-bellied men dressing up as women with huge balloon falsies, wigs, and Clementine+ sized high heels and a purse, with their hairy arms and legs and stubbly face hanging out and we’re supposed to find it hilarious
e) Scatology masquerading as humor. Wasn’t funny in 3rd grade, hasn’t improved. And no, actually, I didn’t run out to see the Aristocrats.
f) People who can’t fount to four. What’s with that?
People, people. What’s that percentage of everything which is crap? Righto–90%*.
There is crappy opera. There is crappy ballet. There is crappy rythmic gymnastics. There is really crappy anime. There is crappity mccrappous death metal.
Of course the very existence of genres as marketing tools makes it necessary that there be a continous supply of product in such genres–a recipe for mediocrapity.
Here are 4 genres that, upon my sampling, have generally yielded disappointing results:
heavy metal
short stories (!)
basketball
modernized Shakespeare productions
But never say never–there ARE things in each of these genres that I like–the problem is finding them.
Natural Blonde Guy–to answer the OP’s question, I think that if you have never read a single one, you have not given these 2 genres a fair chance.