Wisq said:
Therumancer said:
Basically an art grant is supposed to be used to support some guy, with the idea being that they will produce things of tangible value that will fill US museums and add to our culture as a whole. In reality it can be used by some dirty hippy to keep himself in weed, with him coming out and say peeing on a cruicifix and saying it took him the time and money to make that profound statement for the world. Which of course leads to fights over standards when say the people with these grants want to limit the definition of art, to not include things like this.
Or, instead of trying to (re)define art, they could just define criteria required to receive a grant. Especially since "art" has been in the eye of the beholder since long before we had grants anyway.
One, they can also define criteria required for a scholarship or grant. Or just judge them based on those criteria.
Two, video games will be taken seriously when the people who grew up playing video games become the people giving out the scholarships and grants. (Sure, some places are already trying to get ahead of that, but often with laughable results because they don't truly understand the subject matter.)
I mean would you risk giving say $50k to me (someone you don't know) to produce a video game under the current standards? For all you know I'll blow the money on garbage, take some pictures of my junk, and put them on the internet with a mouth-shaped cursor so the world can suck me off.
No, I wouldn't risk giving you $50k because a) that's a lot of money (to me, maybe not to some) and b) even if I 100% trust your intentions, there are an awful lot of terrible or never-completed indie games out there. It would have nothing to do with what I considered a "game" or not.
(Besides, if I were giving that much money, I would want to know exactly what the game was going to be, long in advance, so we wouldn't have the problem of definitions.)
Understand by current definition we might as well consider 4chan an artists commune
Works for me. (Although I'd be much less inclined to hang out there than in most artists' communes.)
and perhaps the greatest contributor of artwork to today's popular culture given the widespread influence it has.
Quantity is not quality -- nor influence. 4chan memes are directly used in many situations, but classic works have a much more subtle influence. In fact, the proof of their widespread influence is that we often don't even know we're invoking them, they've become so ingrained in our culture. Tropes, words, film techniques, etc.
Some 4chan memes might someday reach that status, but for the most part, they're fleeting and already feel dated within a few months or years.
Slightly trimmed.
Beauty has arguably always been in the eye of the beholder (or is that a flesh to stone ray? I always get them confused) art less so. It's mostly been in the modern day that we've been trying to define art in radical new ways through performance art and so on. Sculptures, paintings, etc... those are universally accepted as artistic mediums. The problem is that when you start defining things too broadly it means nothing. You cannot take "art" or an "it's art" defense seriously when technically a snapshot someone's dog taking a poop could be defended as artistic.
The defense that the definition of artwork must be inclusive is relatively recent, and exists largely because of how awful it is to exclude someone who might put a lot of time and effort into something. It's sort of like the whole idea of "self validation" in school without competition and where someone who barfs on the rug is treated the same way as someone who does something meaningful. When you give everyone a participation trophy what value does the trophy have?
Something being legitimate art should be praise that elevates it, and that can't happen when everything is considered
to be art when presented the right way.
Sort of like how I as "Evil Therumancer" oftentimes rag on certain "primitive" and backwards cultures out there. Aboriginals, certain Native American tribes (despite having worked for two of them), and a lot of the groups being preserved out in Africa and so on. I do that actually because I'm not a racist and believe that everyone can achieve the same basic things, there is no generic imperative among any type of human that prevents it. People defend protecting these cultures and not assimilating them because of how they have been around for "thousands of years" and based on their so-called artwork, music, and so on, and discouraging adaption in order to preserve these things. Actually I think keeping these people primitive in the long term is more cruel than the short term nastiness in forced assimilation. Especially when you consider this is literally in many cases because someone out there decided that people making necklaces and statues out of dried lumps of shit (and I actually am not kidding here) and things like that was a form of art that needed to be preserved as opposed to just being you know... gross and barbaric. Ditto for music and such "OMG look at this backwards guy banging rocks together and making a horrible racket, to them that's music, how lovely". I've kind of thought "indigenous rights" has long time been code for "crimes against humanity in the name of alleged artistic preservation" but I suppose that's a big aside.
I'm of the opinion that "art" should be limited to very specific art forms that many people currently consider "classic" mediums. Painting, Sculpture, Metal Crafting, etc... along with a certain level of technological development being needed before consideration, basically if your operating on a level so primitive and backwards the ancient Eguptians would have said "WTF man" then you don't count. I guess it makes me a horrible bigot, but basically if your stringing poop on a string and wearing it as a necklace that does not count as bloody artwork, that's just backwards and disgusting. Certain things like "performance art" might be entertaining but should not be considered art and really the people doing that should be left entirely to their own devices without societal wide support. Basically if you can find someone to actually pay to watch you take a whizz on a flag, more power to you, but by no means should this be defended or protected by the rest of society, or be something that can be used to justify grants and/or government assistance. The reason why I bring up the grants and such is that by definition they are prevented from discriminating, largely because the definition of art is so broad. Really the only time you can discriminate with a grant is if your providing it to an ethnic minority in a practical sense. This is why with government programs in particular there has been pressure for the government to stop supporting the "arts" because the lack of any kind of definition or the ability to define one means that it amounts to a lot of money literally being flushed down the toilet with nothing of lasting value being created.
With things like video games and such it's a medium I suppose that could create art, but largely in the same way literature can be considered art (and frequently put into it's own category). That said it's not a classic form of art, nor is it one that has any definition, being overly broad in terms of what could be considered a game, especially given the way Jim wants to define it, which is pretty much to say that if it runs on an electronic device it can be considered a video game. By his standards I fail to see how playing a movie on a VCR wouldn't be considered a video game (after all you can interact with it by using the remote control). There is no point to anything being called a video game if literally everything is, there is no point to the label, just like there is no point to "Art" when by definition anything you want to call art can be art.
Of course at the end of the day the real issue of course, like always, is a resentment of authority. Someone has to pretty much lay down the law and say "this is what art and/or video games are" and then everyone has to abide by it, and of course nobody wants to be excluded, which is by definition going to happen. That doesn't mean that such laws and guidelines should not be laid down though, and what's more everyone is likely to benefit from them in the long term.
A big part of the whole "games as art" thing is that legally speaking one of the big things protecting video games right now is them being granted artistic protections, the same way movies and such are. Put into the existing context they are art, but overall chances are they should not be considered real art, nor should movies. Some people might appreciate them as art, but in the overall sense of things "Art" should officially refer to very specific classic mediums. Movies, video games, etc... should be protected under other protections like free speech and expression,
though I understand why people might think otherwise. One of the big problems I have with a lot of modern media being considered "art" is that it doesn't produce anything lasting. A movie, painting, or piece of metalwork can in theory survive for thousands of years if properly taken care of. Movies and video games are by definition dependent on the technology of the time, and people feeling they are worthy of bringing forward to new levels of technology. With each step things are lost. What's more in thousands of years it's doubtful if technology will still be compatible with what we have now, and indeed a lot of the concepts and such involved in current games and movies probably won't even apply or be relatable other than as perhaps an amusing anachronism showing how backwards we all were if they even survive. If say tomorrow some massive EMP pulse destroyed all the technology or whatever, paintings and statues could very well survive, in a hundred years it doesn't matter how emotional the works of David Cage were, chances are there will be no real trace of them left at all. I'd personally argue that real "art" is something that should be able to endure on it's own independent of a civilization or the need for supporting technologies. In a thousand years the Lincoln Memorial will still be there and future people will probably be able to marvel at it, almost guaranteed, heck if we all die out an aliens visit there will probably be traces of it for a long time to come. What will be left of say "Silent Hill 2"? Could they even get that to work, and what's more how could they relate to it? At least with Lincoln the basic idea... a memorial to a great leader, is communicated just by it being there. "Silent Hill 2" might have a lot to say about the human condition in it's own way, but a genuine work of art? Something lasting? I have my doubts. In a thousand years it's doubtful anyone will have any idea about that (though I could be wrong) no more than anyone will remember the dude who pisses on things as a form of performance art.
For the record I haven't been able to find it (I've been looking) but the whole point about pooping and peeing is that when I was in college there was a bit of a fiasco about someone who collected like $125,000 from the federal government and was being put up in an artists commune operating on a trust and providing food and lodging to people as long as they worked on art. When finally confronted his defense was "I'm a deep thinker and a performance artist" and his "show" was to fill a bucket with a US flag painted on the bottom and then drop a cruicifix into it and basically go "ponder my thoughts". It was news at the time, especially when I was hanging out with people in Drama Guild to an extent, and knew a few of those fringe arty types as I mentioned (and I also used to be a huge liberal). That actually seemed to be the point at which the federal government really decided to start pushing for not investing money in the arts anymore as well. For about 15 minutes I thought that was kind of cool and defiant, but in the long term I came to realize that it's simply the kind of thing that shouldn't be happening, it demonstrates why the definition of art needs to be strictly defined, and on a lot of levels the antics of the artistic community are to blame as well. As much as I defend video games and free speech, and can't blame people for using any weapon at hand, I see "games as art" as largely being a technical defense during legal battles, not as something that people should take too seriously. One day perhaps video games will become art, but right now I do not think they can be. Perhaps down the road if we say develop some kind of permanent shared VR construct that remains around forever in one form or another it will be possible for games to have some kind of permanence. Furthermore video games are also a huge business, with what they do and say being driven primarily by financial whims, even most indie games are at the mercy of market forces as they attract funding. The thing about artwork is that a lot of it wasn't known or appreciated in it's day, especially since the artists were not doing what was popular or accepted at the time. Video games are not really capable of this. Your not going to say see someone finding some indie game 100 years down the road (like people will be looking) and see it catapult into massive fame and influence. It's doubtful anything forgotten like that will have been preserved across platforms or that anyone would be using century old technology to go through obscure video games. Nobody is going to say "wow, this person was a brilliant game designer who is now influencing society in a massive way, too bad he died under a bridge during his life because nobody would see his brilliance".
