glampersand:

997:

janemba:

Screw art!

Hate

Janemba

Performance, tumblr text post on screen, 2014

… And here we see the crucial element of the shitposting dialectic; it is the criticism, the creation of commentary, which creates the artwork. Without the tongue-in-cheek addendum, the OP would have remained a simple grumble of frustration; now the observer is forced to recognize that they are a participant in performance art, simply in the act of observing.

TS Eliot’s “Waste Land” contains perhaps the pithiest and most erudite form of this dialectic when he breaks the fourth wall to address the reader: “Hypocrite lecteur! Mon semblabe, mon frère…”; (in english: hypocritical reader – [you are] my double, [and] my brother).

Surely this is the pinnacle of post-postmodernism; a rejection of the aesthetics of postmodernism that nonetheless utilizes the tools and techniques of the modernists, for the purposes of self-expression and shared ironic humor. It should come as no surprise that the finest of shitposters are the disenchanted youth – the embodiment of sincerity and genuineness, clothed in a self-defensive irony that is the product of an inescapable awareness of the brutality of the world, an awareness that jades them a little further every moment. Ours is the internet generation, and we possess our own unmistakable genius.