We're arguing on the internet instead of doing real work. It may not be the place pedantry came from, but the internet is the best home it's had in decades.
Yeah, well…that's why I'm here, right? I hope I didn't offend anybody, though if I did, I'd probably either blame myself for not expressing myself clearly or them for not understanding art. One of the two.
The thing is that it takes a
lot less time to argue about gear than to argue about art, especially when you're arguing about someone else's expression. If someone posts a mix, then a lot of people have to spend probably an hour or so each listening to it and thinking about it…making notes…possibly listen again. It takes a lot of man-hours to evaluate art, especially when just experiencing the art takes each person an hour.
Gear pictures, complaints, arguments, and evaluations are
short. They're often heated, but it's just so much simpler. That's why there are so many more gear forums about art than there are forums devoted to actually critiquing people's art.
DJing is not the only art form that does it, not by a long shot…the number of gear sluts posting online about guitars, recording gear, photography, or basically anything else is staggering. Just look at Flickr…you'll see thousands of people debating the merits of some weird-ass lens or a post-processing technique that amounts to a couple of clicks in photoshop…it takes
days to find a legit discussion of the artistic merits of a photo, and it takes seconds or maybe minutes to evaluate a photo enough to at least comment on it.
That's why we talk about gear.
http://www.abletonlivedj.com/forum/i.../mixorstfu.gif
That's a smiley attached to one of the other forums I frequent (abletonlivedj.com), and I really like it. But mostly it just shuts down trolls. I remember receiving
one mix in almost seven years of frequenting dj forums in an attempt to settle an argument.
He was right. Absolutely. I was wrong in that argument. And the mix showed it very well, even though it took two listens to an hour-long mix for me to get it.
But it's still only happened once in seven years.