{"id":11410,"date":"2019-10-13T22:15:09","date_gmt":"2019-10-14T02:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/?p=11410"},"modified":"2019-10-13T22:15:09","modified_gmt":"2019-10-14T02:15:09","slug":"having-too-many-opinions-isnt-that-great","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/2019\/10\/13\/having-too-many-opinions-isnt-that-great\/","title":{"rendered":"Having Too Many Opinions Isn’t That Great"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been thinking a lot more deeply about how I think about art, and a sad realization I\u2019ve come to is that I categorize the works I love by whether they are good or bad. At some basic level, this doesn\u2019t seem too bad, but it\u2019s throwing me back to a time in my elementary school journal where I would make T-diagrams for all the binaries in my life, splitting things into good and bad categories: friends, school subjects, books, TV shows. It helped me crystallize my thoughts and make a definitive opinion about a wide range of things in my life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I think I carried this habit into my high school years, determinately debating why I fiercely loved some books and hated others in Enlglish class, my beliefs settled in their ways. I wanted to have an opinion about everything, and in order to do that, you either have to truly know a lot about a lot of things, or simply scam your way through arguments and loopholes and binaries in order to appear to know things. I\u2019ve seen this happen in many classes at Michigan (specifically political science classes, though you didn\u2019t hear it from me) where people label themselves in a way which shuts many doors to other possibilities of thought. Students label themselves \u201ccommunists\u201d or \u201cmarxists\u201d or \u201cdemocratic socialists\u201d (which I think\u2026 I might be–); they say they only listen to Indie music, that pop songs are trash, some Kpop music is okay; we \u201ccancel\u201d each other, call each other out, try to stay \u201cwoke\u201d about anything and everything, interjecting ourselves in conversations about climate change and intersectional feminism and genocides and the perils of capitalism and sustainable fashion with our Twitter-fed knowledge. We have watered down the meaning of knowledge in order to appear informed. In so many college spaces, I\u2019ve seen the performance of global understanding. In reality, most students have a superficial understanding of the world\u2019s problems, though a robust set of unshakable opinions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The more I learn, the less I realize I know. This has grounded in me a deep humility, and also a sense of inadequacy. I am not good enough, I don\u2019t know enough, I don\u2019t deserve to be here– and yet, we all keep faking it. Why? Why can\u2019t we accept the fact that the search for knowledge is a continual journey, one that never settles, and that is constantly reaching for the higher ideal? I want to have good opinions, well-informed opinions, that can be subject to change– not opinions that I will debate until I\u2019ve won over those that disagree with me. That undermines the entire process of acquiring knowledge, of developing ideas.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

More specifically to art: I\u2019ve realized I\u2019ve been doing this same thing with TV shows, books, movies, poetry. I often cannot recall moments that touched me in particular and I sometimes forget the feeling the narrative left me with– but I remember, for some absurd reason, whether it is \u201cbad\u201d or \u201cgood\u201d and I materialize an opinion for it. I am tired of my own lazy systems of developing opinions to rack up my intelligence points. I want to stop looking at the world as good or bad, and simply <\/span>look<\/span><\/i>. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been thinking a lot more deeply about how I think about art, and a sad realization I\u2019ve come to is that I categorize the works I love by whether they are good or bad. At some basic level, this doesn\u2019t seem too bad, but it\u2019s throwing me back to a time in my elementary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2194,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11410"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2194"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11410"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11411,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11410\/revisions\/11411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}