In the art world something is "edgy" if it might well shock ordinary folks, but of course not in-the-know folks. The idea seems to be that ordinary folks are shocked too easily by things that should not really be shocking.
The problem in this prompt is that it divides shock value into two mutually exclusive groups: that which shocks the public and not artists, and that which shocks artists but not the public. The goal of most artists that aim for edginess is to shock everyone. The problem is that most fail to shock the desensitized artist population but can still cause a stir among the general population. There are some, however, that have succeeded in being truly edgy (eg Manet, Miro, Picasso).
The following well-known Bohr quote seems relevant: "If you are not shocked by quantum physics, you don't understand it". Mediocre popularizations often make it seem like the big QM surprises are indeterminism and an obesrvation-changes-reality effect. Both ideas are rather banal and much less shocking that the accurate statement of the theory. I think quantum mechanics is the perfect example of the anti-edgy theory
To skip the comments and reply directly to the question of the post:
Because most people do not like to be shocked. Anti-edgy is more likely to shock those who created it. A simple conclusion is: anti-edgy shocks yourself, edgy shocks others. It is more fun to shock others.
Pete: I think laughing at lectures (and poetry readings, which I attend a lot of) is almost always just signaling of "insider" status. It's obnoxious, but also very difficult not to engage in.
The first way to do something anti-edgy that come to my mind is: a straight ripoff of a historical work, or a subtle ripoff of something contemporary, people who know the norms of the medium will notice the lack of originality.
And now I'm wondering if there's a name for things that seem obvious to non-experts but shocking to experts... and it's the experts who are wrong. Some areas that come to mind are:
economics, genetics of intelligence, immigration, child rearing, ethics...
The "whatever you like" lyrics represent a rather orthodox evol-psych view of asymmetric human mating strategies. I'd have to go with edgy...I really like that Brian Micklethwaite quote, Stuart. It reminds me of a lecture I attended in San Francisco, by Slavoj Žižek. A very entertaining thought-provoking lecture as usual, but I got the distinct impression that for a large part of the audience the point was actually to play the I'm-not-shocked game: to laugh at certain moments (dealing with the topics of the holocaust, incest, cannibalism, etc), not as a reflection of genuine amusement, but precisely to signal "I am the kind of person who can laugh at this content, instead of being shocked by it." I wasn't shocked, I tried to understand what Žižek was trying to say about it, but I didn't find it laughable (and neither, I suspect, did he.)
I'm 27, so I am pretty familiar with mainstream hip hop. I'll take back the "should", but not the "most". What I am really saying is that I am surprised that most square people aren't shocked by most rap lyrics considering how prude our culture is about other things. The highest charting hip hop song is currently T.I.'s "Whatever You Like" followed by "Can't believe it." Google the lyrics and tell me you aren't a little surprise that this is considered music for ordinary people.
Anti-edgy is pretty common, for example in environment and social justice type groups (yes, outsiders care a bit often, or take it as a vague source of virtue, but nowhere near as much as members).
The reason that there is no word 'anti-edgy' is that 'edgy' does not mean 'shocking to others but not me'. Sociopathic killers are not edgy. Edgy means something like 'purposely at the edge of shocking and non-shocking'. Edgy things are to push the boundaries of what the public accepts. Topics that are well within 'shocking' for the general public and not for some group are called 'shocking' and something like 'socially unaccepted' by those people respectively. Opposite topics are called the same things the other way round. People assume their idea of shocking is right of course, so there is little need to use terms that communicate how an average member of the species also feels about issues.
Edgy is a specific sort of in-between case. The opposite of it would be something just within the bounds of 'non-shocking', designed to pull those bounds inwards. But those bounds are not pulled inwards generally. Why is that? Practically, you can't get anyone's attention by doing things that are non-shocking, so if there were anti-edgy acts we wouldn't see them. Plus if such an act persuaded anyone, they would rightly be shocked. Instead you have to talk in way that doesn't shock anyone about such issues. Doing so is called 'thought provoking' usually, which can mean 'edgy' or its opposite. Also in practice it's harder for people to be shocked by something which is part of normality, than to be un-shocked by something that previously wasn't, so the former happens more.
Robin's post reminds me of one of my favorite quotes about art, from Brian Micklethwaite:
As for the endlessly repeated claim that art is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable, I don't buy that. And I don't believe the people who say that they do buy it are being honest. I think that a picture which they have no problem with, but which they believe makes other people whom they disapprove of uncomfortable, makes them very comfortable indeed, and that that is the kind of discomfort (i.e. not discomfort at all, for them) which they like, and are referring to with all this discomfort propaganda. They no more like being genuinely discomforted by art than I do.
retired urologist: yesterday's high-status fashion is always today's low-status fashion. It used to be that high-status people wore suits. Now if you're wearing a suit it's because your boss makes you wear one, and the high-status people wear slacks and polo shirts.
So do they really care more about the attention of ordinary folks than the attention of artsy folk?
They don't want the attention of artsy folk, but status among artsy folk. Actually shocking artsy folk will not contribute to your status. Selectively shocking non-artsy folk will appeal to the artsyfolk's common mythology of what makes them superior.
I think most big modern scientific advances are anti-edgy. The general public has an exaggerated idea of what cutting edge (if you pardon the pun) technology can accomplish-- they think we're capable of "genetically engineering" rabbits with wings, "reprogramming DNA" whatever that means, and are on the verge of human-level AI.
So when you announce that you've shown, say, that knocking out a particular gene confers resistance to oxidative stress in worms, flies, and mice the average member of the public will say: "Yawn. That's really fascinating. Why haven't you people reprogrammed teh DNAs to cure cancer already? After all the tax-money we gave you to sequence the damn genome, you'd think you'd do something useful with it instead of studying nasty little critters." Meanwhile, this is the kind of study that gets published in Nature, cited hundreds of times, and talked about for a decade at scientific meetings.
This may extend to other specialized fields. I don't know what cases lawyers consider to be the most important ones of the last decade, but I have a hunch the high-profile celebrity criminal trials that tend to make headlines would not dominate such a list.
Perhaps there hasn't till now been a word for anti-edgy because it's the default path for news in a given field. And any news that merits mention in the general press is probably already old news in the field that originated it, thus becoming edgy.
Alex Tabarrok has a paper on avant-garde vs popular art that can be found via his page if you have JSTOR access.
The problem in this prompt is that it divides shock value into two mutually exclusive groups: that which shocks the public and not artists, and that which shocks artists but not the public. The goal of most artists that aim for edginess is to shock everyone. The problem is that most fail to shock the desensitized artist population but can still cause a stir among the general population. There are some, however, that have succeeded in being truly edgy (eg Manet, Miro, Picasso).
The following well-known Bohr quote seems relevant: "If you are not shocked by quantum physics, you don't understand it". Mediocre popularizations often make it seem like the big QM surprises are indeterminism and an obesrvation-changes-reality effect. Both ideas are rather banal and much less shocking that the accurate statement of the theory. I think quantum mechanics is the perfect example of the anti-edgy theory
To skip the comments and reply directly to the question of the post:
Because most people do not like to be shocked. Anti-edgy is more likely to shock those who created it. A simple conclusion is: anti-edgy shocks yourself, edgy shocks others. It is more fun to shock others.
Pete: I think laughing at lectures (and poetry readings, which I attend a lot of) is almost always just signaling of "insider" status. It's obnoxious, but also very difficult not to engage in.
The first way to do something anti-edgy that come to my mind is: a straight ripoff of a historical work, or a subtle ripoff of something contemporary, people who know the norms of the medium will notice the lack of originality.
Any others?
And now I'm wondering if there's a name for things that seem obvious to non-experts but shocking to experts... and it's the experts who are wrong. Some areas that come to mind are:
economics, genetics of intelligence, immigration, child rearing, ethics...
The "whatever you like" lyrics represent a rather orthodox evol-psych view of asymmetric human mating strategies. I'd have to go with edgy...I really like that Brian Micklethwaite quote, Stuart. It reminds me of a lecture I attended in San Francisco, by Slavoj Žižek. A very entertaining thought-provoking lecture as usual, but I got the distinct impression that for a large part of the audience the point was actually to play the I'm-not-shocked game: to laugh at certain moments (dealing with the topics of the holocaust, incest, cannibalism, etc), not as a reflection of genuine amusement, but precisely to signal "I am the kind of person who can laugh at this content, instead of being shocked by it." I wasn't shocked, I tried to understand what Žižek was trying to say about it, but I didn't find it laughable (and neither, I suspect, did he.)
Daniel,
I'm 27, so I am pretty familiar with mainstream hip hop. I'll take back the "should", but not the "most". What I am really saying is that I am surprised that most square people aren't shocked by most rap lyrics considering how prude our culture is about other things. The highest charting hip hop song is currently T.I.'s "Whatever You Like" followed by "Can't believe it." Google the lyrics and tell me you aren't a little surprise that this is considered music for ordinary people.
Correction: opposite topics are called equivalent things the other way round.
Anti-edgy is pretty common, for example in environment and social justice type groups (yes, outsiders care a bit often, or take it as a vague source of virtue, but nowhere near as much as members).
The reason that there is no word 'anti-edgy' is that 'edgy' does not mean 'shocking to others but not me'. Sociopathic killers are not edgy. Edgy means something like 'purposely at the edge of shocking and non-shocking'. Edgy things are to push the boundaries of what the public accepts. Topics that are well within 'shocking' for the general public and not for some group are called 'shocking' and something like 'socially unaccepted' by those people respectively. Opposite topics are called the same things the other way round. People assume their idea of shocking is right of course, so there is little need to use terms that communicate how an average member of the species also feels about issues.
Edgy is a specific sort of in-between case. The opposite of it would be something just within the bounds of 'non-shocking', designed to pull those bounds inwards. But those bounds are not pulled inwards generally. Why is that? Practically, you can't get anyone's attention by doing things that are non-shocking, so if there were anti-edgy acts we wouldn't see them. Plus if such an act persuaded anyone, they would rightly be shocked. Instead you have to talk in way that doesn't shock anyone about such issues. Doing so is called 'thought provoking' usually, which can mean 'edgy' or its opposite. Also in practice it's harder for people to be shocked by something which is part of normality, than to be un-shocked by something that previously wasn't, so the former happens more.
Robin's post reminds me of one of my favorite quotes about art, from Brian Micklethwaite:
As for the endlessly repeated claim that art is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable, I don't buy that. And I don't believe the people who say that they do buy it are being honest. I think that a picture which they have no problem with, but which they believe makes other people whom they disapprove of uncomfortable, makes them very comfortable indeed, and that that is the kind of discomfort (i.e. not discomfort at all, for them) which they like, and are referring to with all this discomfort propaganda. They no more like being genuinely discomforted by art than I do.
retired urologist: yesterday's high-status fashion is always today's low-status fashion. It used to be that high-status people wore suits. Now if you're wearing a suit it's because your boss makes you wear one, and the high-status people wear slacks and polo shirts.
So do they really care more about the attention of ordinary folks than the attention of artsy folk?
They don't want the attention of artsy folk, but status among artsy folk. Actually shocking artsy folk will not contribute to your status. Selectively shocking non-artsy folk will appeal to the artsyfolk's common mythology of what makes them superior.
I think most big modern scientific advances are anti-edgy. The general public has an exaggerated idea of what cutting edge (if you pardon the pun) technology can accomplish-- they think we're capable of "genetically engineering" rabbits with wings, "reprogramming DNA" whatever that means, and are on the verge of human-level AI.
So when you announce that you've shown, say, that knocking out a particular gene confers resistance to oxidative stress in worms, flies, and mice the average member of the public will say: "Yawn. That's really fascinating. Why haven't you people reprogrammed teh DNAs to cure cancer already? After all the tax-money we gave you to sequence the damn genome, you'd think you'd do something useful with it instead of studying nasty little critters." Meanwhile, this is the kind of study that gets published in Nature, cited hundreds of times, and talked about for a decade at scientific meetings.
This may extend to other specialized fields. I don't know what cases lawyers consider to be the most important ones of the last decade, but I have a hunch the high-profile celebrity criminal trials that tend to make headlines would not dominate such a list.
Perhaps there hasn't till now been a word for anti-edgy because it's the default path for news in a given field. And any news that merits mention in the general press is probably already old news in the field that originated it, thus becoming edgy.
josh:
Really? "Most"? .. and "should"?
You don't listen to much hip hop, do you? ;)