The “Art World” is simply the Church built to sanctify those desires.
the gap between the Creative Visionary and the Genocidal Tyrant is zero.
your favorite song isn't healing you — it's colonizing you.
Sounds like someone independently discovered memetics, but doesn’t fully understand what they discovered, and is unnecessarily frightened by the implications. In a nutshell, a “meme” in the original sense is any sort of information which tends to promote its own propagation. A memeplex is a complex cluster of memes which are linked together and tend to promote each other. Your favorite Simpsons quote is a meme. A whole song is a memeplex. Languages and cultures are particularly large memeplexes built partially of other memeplexes, so meta-memeplexes, essentially. You need lots of self-spreading information to function as a person in a society.
And then there are memetic hazards. These are memes or memeplexes which change your thought processes for the worse, with “worse” being relative in some cases. Propaganda can be a memetic hazard. When people used to say “religion is a mind virus” they were expressing the same general idea. (Note: lately I’ve seen people use “infohazard” or “cognitohazard” as a synonym for memetic hazard. The original meanings of those two terms are different. An infohazard corrupts or destroys information, a cognitohazard disrupts the capacity to think at all.) But a key thing here, memetic hazards aren’t universal; propaganda, for example, does not work on everyone, both in the sense that any particular piece of propaganda won’t work on everyone (or even most people), and there are probably people who are largely immune to propaganda in general (note: the more confident you are of this, the less likely you are broadly immune).
This person has apparently identified *all* art as a memetic hazard for all people, which… no. Most of the time it’s neutral, occasionally positively transforming in the opposite way (I checked “hazard” in a thesaurus, and found no antonym which really captures the essence of that, maybe something exists in psychology). These positive transformations are specific to the individual, again there’s nothing which affects people universally. Some art makes you a little better in a way that lingers, some art fucks you up in a bad way which sticks with you, most of it is just interesting (or just doesn’t feel like “art” to some people).
And ironically, this person may have very well created their own memetic hazard in their discovery and incomplete understanding of memetics. And now they’re trying to spread it…