Are people kicking off here cos they don’t have the right mates or something..?
It seems that way.
Cliques are mostly imaginary, and that gives them an enormous amount of power in the minds of those who feel hard done by or excluded by them.
My job puts me in and out of various cliques of a fledgling scene, and I occasionally see people b*tching about it, or get passive aggressive emails about it for not selecting someone’s work for a show. There’s an enormous amount of suspicion and paranoia from people who want to be friends with the “important” people, and I’m sometimes perceived as one of those, sometimes not, which gets really weird and interesting. I’m mostly perceived as approachable, but if I don’t like someone’s work, then from that point it’s often “because I’m in the clique“.
I used to feel excluded from some of these cliques too, until I realised that they’re mostly imaginary, some of the people I thought were in them actually don’t get on with or hang out with each other, etc. There’s no committee voting on things. What looks like a clique from the outside is actually really loose knit and porous. I think most of us experience them at their worst in our teens, when kids actually commit to the idea and reinforce it with awful dissembling bullsh*t. Most adults don’t behave like that, but groups still happen as a natural part of socialisation. Clique is a label applied to that by people who feel like outsiders, for whatever reason, and usually based on evidence flimsier than an asymmetric thong. Seeing cliques is a flipside of the stupid tribal behaviour we all fall into sometimes.
I didn’t see it, but if Mark deleted an earlier and perfectly inoffensive thread, that’s bad forum etiquette, but still his prerogative since it’s his forum. It’s not a clique- or PR-driven conspiracy though, FFS.
Posted 10 years ago