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Can Cutscenes be Art?

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Unread postby icycalm » 16 Oct 2009 18:58

What he is effectively asking me to do is to define fun. I have already sort of done this here:

http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php?t=2789

and will be doing it again in greater depth, as well as drawing all the conclusions that follow from this definition, in my upcoming books.
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Unread postby icycalm » 16 Oct 2009 19:19

I'll give those who are still struggling with the concept "art" a little more help as they await for the revelation. Here goes nothing:


Art is representation.

Videogames are simulation.

But representation itself is also simulation -- just a very primitive kind of simulation. And virtual reality, which is the ultimate goal of videogames, is nothing but the highest stage of simulation. There is therefore a linear connection between reality, thoughts (which are a representation of reality), painting, writing, poetry, theatre, cinema, and videogames. And what is the next step after videogames, then, if not a return back to that reality from which the cycle started?


Everything is destined to reappear as simulation. Landscapes as photography, woman as the sexual scenario, thought as writing, terrorism as fashion and the media, events as television. Things seem only to exist by virtue of this strange destiny. You wonder whether the world itself isn’t just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world.
-Jean Baudrillard, "America"


People should really stop bothering me with questions on these subjects, for none of you is educated enough to understand the answers. I have already provided a reading list to help you redress this failing. Only after you are through with it will the things I say perhaps begin making perfect sense.
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Unread postby EightEyes » 11 Feb 2010 05:16

It's refreshing to see not everyone in game development is completely confused about this issue:

http://www.next-gen.biz/features/interview-frank-lantz

Frank Lantz is being interviewed at what looks like an unbearably pretentious event, and yet manages to give a thoughtful and articulate answer when asked about games and art.

I’ve always felt that whole debate just isn’t that interesting or useful... Once you let go of separating which example belongs and which don’t, then you can get down to the interesting part of aesthetics, which is just which ones we like and why. Like there’s good Dolly Parton and bad Dolly Parton. We can argue about that, and that’s cool. Those conversations are actually useful.


That’s why Doom doesn’t belong in the museum. It’s heavy metal. It’s rock and roll. You don’t put rock and roll in a museum, that’s just silly. We like going to the museum and we like rock and roll, we have both of those things in our lives. We don’t think of one as higher than the other.


People are contesting these things because everyone’s got something different at stake. There are also people who have careers, we have academic careers, careers in the industry, and we have to carve up terrain and make sure we’re defending our territory.


This stuff isn't earth-shattering, of course. It's just really nice to hear it from a respected game developer, many of whom tend to get a little carried away when put on the stage of an event like this, or a publication like Edge.

Last year at GDC, Fumito Ueda was asked a similar question, and said something along the lines that he doesn't waste his time worrying about whether what he's doing is art or not. He expends his efforts on making the best games he can, and lets others worry about what label to pin on them when he's done.

It seems to me that if you set out to make "Art", then you're pretty much fucked before you even start. (Unless you were Duchamp or Warhol, I suppose.)
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Unread postby icycalm » 13 Mar 2010 13:42

Dracko wrote:When will Go transcend Go and become A.R.T.?


http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopi ... 762#710762
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Unread postby icycalm » 26 Mar 2010 15:46

http://www.hardcasual.net/2010/03/17/re ... ose-plans/

“Every step of the way we’ve make concessions on this game,” the game’s designer said. “I remember way back at the start, when we said we wanted to make something that addressed our concerns with modernity and the impact technology has on our lives. Now we don’t even have sound effects for the level four ninjas when they get shot.”
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Unread postby icycalm » 08 Apr 2010 13:37

This whole misleading trope was put to good effect by Charlie Brooker, BBC 4's famously acerbic television critic, writing in his column for The Guardian, when he proclaimed the recently released Modern Warfare 2 to be 'the Citizen Kane of repeatedly shooting people in the face'.
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Unread postby icycalm » 18 Apr 2010 15:05

Moved all these posts here from the Ebert thread:

Peter wrote:Ebert has a new post on "games as art" over at his blog.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04 ... e_art.html

Video games can never be art

Having once made the statement above, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to be a fool's errand, especially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the error of my ways. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.

What stirs me to return to the subject? I was urged by a reader, Mark Johns, to consider a video of a TED talk given at USC by Kellee Santiago, a designer and producer of video games. I did so. I warmed to Santiago immediately. She is bright, confident, persuasive. But she is mistaken.

I propose to take an unfair advantage. She spoke extemporaneously. I have the luxury of responding after consideration. If you want to follow along, I urge you to watch her talk, which is embedded below. It's only 15 minutes long, and she makes the time pass quickly.

She begins by saying video games "already ARE art." Yet she concedes that I was correct when I wrote, "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." To which I could have added painters, composers, and so on, but my point is clear.

Then she shows a slide of a prehistoric cave painting, calling it "kind of chicken scratches on walls," and contrasts it with Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Her point is that while video games may be closer to the chicken scratch end of the spectrum, I am foolish to assume they will not evolve.

She then says speech began as a form of warning, and writing as a form of bookkeeping, but they evolved into storytelling and song. Actually, speech probably evolved into a form of storytelling and song long before writing was developed. And cave paintings were a form of storytelling, perhaps of religion, and certainly of the creation of beauty from those chicken-scratches Werner Herzog is even now filming in 3-D.

Herzog believes, in fact, that the paintings on the wall of the Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in Southern France should only be looked at in the context of the shadows cast on those dark walls by the fires built behind the artists, which suggests the cave paintings, their materials of charcoal and ochre and all that went into them were the fruition of a long gestation, not the beginning of something--and that the artists were enormously gifted. They were great artists at that time, geniuses with nothing to build on, and were not in the process of becoming Michelangelo or anyone else. Any gifted artist will tell you how much he admires the "line" of those prehistoric drawers in the dark, and with what economy and wit they evoked the animals they lived among.

Santiago concedes that chess, football, baseball and even mah jong cannot be art, however elegant their rules. I agree. But of course that depends on the definition of art. She says the most articulate definition of art she's found is the one in Wikipedia: "Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions." This is an intriguing definition, although as a chess player I might argue that my game fits the definition.

Plato, via Aristotle, believed art should be defined as the imitation of nature. Seneca and Cicero essentially agreed. Wikipedia believes "Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more concerned with the expression of ideas...Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction."

But we could play all day with definitions, and find exceptions to every one. For example, I tend to think of art as usually the creation of one artist. Yet a cathedral is the work of many, and is it not art? One could think of it as countless individual works of art unified by a common purpose. Is not a tribal dance an artwork, yet the collaboration of a community? Yes, but but it reflects the work of individual choreographers. Everybody didn't start dancing all at once.

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

She quotes Robert McKee's definition of good writing as "being motivated by a desire to touch the audience." This is not a useful definition, because a great deal of bad writing is also motivated by the same desire. I might argue that the novels of Cormac McCarthy are so motivated, and Nicholas Sparks would argue that his novels are so motivated. But when I say McCarthy is "better" than Sparks and that his novels are artworks, that is a subjective judgment, made on the basis of my taste (which I would argue is better than the taste of anyone who prefers Sparks).

Santiago now phrases this in her terms: "Art is a way of communicating ideas to an audience in a way that the audience finds engaging." Yet what ideas are contained in Stravinsky, Picasso, "Night of the Hunter," "Persona," "Waiting for Godot," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?" Oh, you can perform an exegesis or a paraphrase, but then you are creating your own art object from the materials at hand.

Kellee Santiago has arrived at this point lacking a convincing definition of art. But is Plato's any better? Does art grow better the more it imitates nature? My notion is that it grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might call the artist's soul, or vision. Countless artists have drawn countless nudes. They are all working from nature. Some of there paintings are masterpieces, most are very bad indeed. How do we tell the difference? We know. It is a matter, yes, of taste.

Santiago now supplies samples of a video game named "Waco Resurrection" (above), in which the player, as David Koresh, defends his Branch Davidian compound against FBI agents. The graphics show the protagonist exchanging gunfire with agents according to the rules of the game. Although the player must don a Koresh mask and inspire his followers to play, the game looks from her samples like one more brainless shooting-gallery.

"Waco Resurrection" may indeed be a great game, but as potential art it still hasn't reached the level of chicken scratches, She defends the game not as a record of what happened at Waco, but "as how we feel happened in our culture and society." Having seen the 1997 documentary "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," I would in contrast award the game a Fail in this category. The documentary made an enormous appeal to my senses and emotions, although I am not proposing it as art.

Her next example is a game named "Braid" (above). This is a game "that explores our own relationship with our past...you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there's one key difference...you can't die." You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game. She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.

We come to Example 3, "Flower" (above). A run-down city apartment has a single flower on the sill, which leads the player into a natural landscape. The game is "about trying to find a balance between elements of urban and the natural." Nothing she shows from this game seemed of more than decorative interest on the level of a greeting card. Is the game scored? She doesn't say. Do you win if you're the first to find the balance between the urban and the natural? Can you control the flower? Does the game know what the ideal balance is?

These three are just a small selection of games, she says, "that crossed that boundary into artistic expression." IMHO, that boundary remains resolutely uncrossed. "Braid" has had a "great market impact," she says, and "was the top-downloaded game on XBox Live Arcade." All of these games have received "critical acclaim."

Now she shows stills from early silent films such as George Melies' "A Voyage to the Moon" (1902), which were "equally simplistic." Obviously, I'm hopelessly handicapped because of my love of cinema, but Melies seems to me vastly more advanced than her three modern video games. He has limited technical resources, but superior artistry and imagination.

These days, she says, "grown-up gamers" hope for games that reach higher levels of "joy, or of ecstasy....catharsis." These games (which she believes are already being made) "are being rewarded by audiences by high sales figures." The only way I could experience joy or ecstasy from her games would be through profit participation.

The three games she chooses as examples do not raise my hopes for a video game that will deserve my attention long enough to play it. They are, I regret to say, pathetic. I repeat: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."

Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care.

Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, "I'm studying a great form of art?" Then let them say it, if it makes them happy.

I allow Sangtiago the last word. Toward the end of her presentation, she shows a visual with six circles, which represent, I gather, the components now forming for her brave new world of video games as art. The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management. I rest my case.


icycalm wrote:He fucking demolished her, lol. We should get him to review all the artfag games: "[Braid's story] exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie", lol. If I ever review Braid this quote is going in the review.

But yeah, all of this does not change the fact that I can demolish him, and will soon enough be doing so. It's basically like most other things in life: people are divided into three groups. The first, and lowest, group consists of the fagots. "Games are art, games are art, etc. etc. yadda yadda yadda" -- with a bunch of pathetic arguments that are all false. Then you have the second level, which includes very few people, including Ebert, who go "Games are NOT art, at least not in the way YOU (i.e. the fags) understand the term" -- which is fundamentally correct. But there is ANOTHER way in which games are art, a way which the fags are incapable of conceiving. Those who CAN conceive this way belong to the third group -- the badass correct group -- which at this point in time includes only one person, and that person is me lol.


icycalm wrote:But don't worry, soon enough many of you will also belong to that group, and then we can all hang out together, enjoying the hell out of and making the most of our hugely superior status and shit.


icycalm wrote:It's really depressing how uneducated all these people are, though. Even ignoring the dumb cunt, Ebert's reasoning (-- if one can call it that at all; it's more like a random collection of smarmy ripostes --) is full of giant fucking holes -- not even potholes, really: genuinely gigantic fucking holes. Take this one for instance:

Ebert wrote:She begins by saying video games "already ARE art." Yet she concedes that I was correct when I wrote, "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." To which I could have added painters, composers, and so on, but my point is clear.


The amount of pure BS contained in this paragraph is staggering. "A game worthy of comparison with the great poets"! What the fuck DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? Even ignoring the retardation of comparing A GAME to THE GREAT POETS, instead of A GAME DESIGNER to the great poets, it's still retarded, because NOTHING is "worthy of comparison to the great poets" EXCEPT OTHER GREAT POETS. Or at the very most POETS IN GENERAL. By what criteria are we supposed to be comparing them with filmmakers or painters -- let alone game designers? How can you go on and on about this stuff without bothering to sort out at some point the criteria you use for your comparisons? Zero reasoning, basically -- both of them are just two retards defending their prejudices with random assertions that basically do not make any sense.

But what I find particularly funny is watching all these little worms squirm. Because all of them are furiously squirming right now, and with good reason! The movie critics are seeing their trade (and consequently their status) in jeopardy -- indeed fighting a losing battle -- and all they can come up with is throwaway shitty articles like the above. And the gamefagots are on the receiving end of the intelligentia's ridicule and contempt, and will forever remain utterly incapable of deflecting it BECAUSE IT'S JUSTIFIED -- for what THEY call "art" is nothing more than trash -- by ANYONE'S standards. So both parties are going down, baby, you better believe it, and the only one going up is me, and whoever follows in my footsteps.

Given all the above, how could it possibly NOT give me great pleasure watching the little rats fight between themselves to get to the lifeboat room while their ships are sinking, all the while ignorant of the fact that I HAVE REMOVED ALL THE LIFEBOATS LOL.
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Unread postby Mathis » 18 Apr 2010 19:37

That blog entry of Ebert's is hilarious. Sure, he can easily critique a game's prose and cutscenes, endlessly pointing out weak, laughable parts of the story -- it should come naturally to him. I do it, too. Yet, it's apparent that, in other areas, Ebert's almost completely clueless.

From the "Games can never be art" blog entry (bolding and brackets are all mine):

Ebert wrote:One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game.


"One obvious difference between x and y is that you can z in y, except x is art, so I win."

There can never be a form of art you can win at? Works of art may differentiate from one another in other ways, but god forbid they ever do so in this way? No tenable reasons as to why?

Okay!

[A videogame] has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome.


Fascinating. Do go on.

Santiago might cite a[n] immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film.


Wow. The juxtaposition of "points" and "rules" in that sentence shows he doesn't know what he's talking about. It's easy to have a videogame without a point system -- just don't include one. And of course a videogame ceases to be a videogame when you remove the rules! You would say that, if you wanted to be right! But no, if you removed the rules of a videogame like Civilization you wouldn't get "a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film" -- you'd get a fucking mess.

Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.


Again with this "winning" thing. As if winning can't be part of an experience.
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Unread postby icycalm » 18 Apr 2010 21:23

Basically, what he will never be able to wrap his head around is that in cutscenes (i.e. in movies) you win by default. And the rules are "Sit there and stare at the screen for x minutes." Rules which you can, as in all games, break if you want to. By getting up and leaving the theater mid-cutscene, for example.

So cutscene-only games do also have rules and winning conditions. It's just that they are tailored for the clinically braindead.
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Unread postby MrPattywagon » 20 Apr 2010 16:52

The guy from IGN who wears stinky cologne, Mike Thomsen, wrote a response.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/108/1084661p1.html

Videogames are not games, and there is more in them than winning and enjoyment. The reason football is not art is because its rules were designed with the primary goal of competition. Competition is only one of a great many different experiences that a videogame can create. Games can also be about losing, and not competing at all. They can be about love, the impossibility of relationships, the beautiful indifference to our individual life choices, urgent intimacy in the shadow of death, sexual anxiety, and confrontation with life choices to which there are no right answers. There are games that, using the language of authored interaction, invoke all of these ideas, and many more beyond.


Ebert's article discussed a TED talk delivered by Kellee Santiago. She responded as well.

http://kotaku.com/5520437/my-response-t ... ideo-game-

But the final nail on this argument's coffin is the point that many, many of the hundreds of commenters have already made – it doesn't seem that Ebert has played many, if any video games. And if that's the case, then his opinion on the subject isn't relevant anyways. The title of my talk was "Video Games are Art – What's Next" because I felt it was time to move past the discussion about whether games are an artistic medium.. Similarly, it's time to move on from any need to be validated by old media enthusiasts. It's good for dinner-party discussion and entertaining as an intellectual exercise, but it's just not a serious debate anymore. As a rapidly growing medium, we game developers have so many other issues deserving of our attention.

Ebert asks me in the section on "Flower," "Is the game scored? She doesn't say. Do you win if you're the first to find the balance between the urban and the natural? Can you control the flower? Does the game know what the ideal balance is?" Well, it only takes you 2-3 hours to find out – about the same time you'd dedicate to a film! I'd be happy to send you a PS3 with a copy of the game installed on it so we can discuss in more depth.
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Unread postby icycalm » 04 Jun 2010 20:03

Image
Image
Image
Image

This theory is completely and utterly false -- art is merely one of the manifestations of the will to power, as are the instincts for survival and reproduction -- the doctrine of the "uselessness of art", of "art for art's sake", is merely nihilism talking. Yet all the subhumans are so frightfully caught up in it that at this point it is basically impossible to remove it from their brains without damaging them -- i.e. without blowing all of them up to bits.

Note that it would be easy enough to dismiss this comic strip as the ludicrous babbling of a mentally stunted comic book nerd, but the fact is that all the pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-academics in the world more or less subscribe to it -- only instead of expressing this in a single page they do so in thousands upon thousands. So I guess in this respect the comic is valuable, in that it condenses all that chatter into a single stupid fucking page, thereby making it easier to understand and ridicule. Which is why I am posting it here.
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Unread postby icycalm » 05 Jun 2010 16:15

I might as well take a moment to point out as many of the stupidities and absurdities in that comic as my remaining time (13 minutes) in this internet cafe will allow me.

The author of the comic basically belongs to that subspecies of subhuman that over the years has gathered a great deal of random (and mostly wrong) information from the internet (from blogs, forums, Wikipedia, random links to Geocities sites, etc.), and arrives at a point in his life in which he feels compelled to piece all of that fucking random junk together to create a theory that explains whatever profound philosophical problem has come at last to trouble him. In the case of random videogame-playing online-comic-drawing pricks one of those problems is clearly going to be that of art. And of course, God forbid that these little miserable fagots every bother to open a real philosophical book to see what the geniuses of the past have said on the subject -- no, the little scrawny retarded dingbats would not be caught dead doing that -- why bother with books and geniuses when you have the internet and all the rancid verbal swill of the uneducated subhuman masses at your fingertips? (And moreover all of it for free -- always a very important consideration for this type of subhuman.)

And that is how we get comic strips like the above, or blog/forum posts etc. which pretty much regurgitate random combinations of the above absurd ideas.

So, to get to the point, the retard starts off, as is only fitting, with a retarded definition of art: "Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn't grow out of our species' two basic instincts: survival and reproduction!" The number of mistakes he has managed to commit in a single sentence right from the get-go is fucking astonishing, because:

1. He assumes, without any justification, that our species has two "basic instincts", whereas in fact it has but one -- the will to power, which it has it in common with everything that lives (i.e. with everything, because everything lives), whilst all the other instincts we have created names for are merely its various manifestations.

2. Then he assumes that these "two basic instincts" are "survival" and "reproduction", whereas "survival" is in fact never a basic instinct -- the basic instinct is domination -- which, of course, in order for an organism to indulge it must first manage to surive. Survival is then merely a special case of the instinct for domination, and therefore could not by any means be called "basic". There are even countless cases in which, in order to reach for more power, an organism will willingly perish -- a behaviour which the "survival" theory is incapable of accounting for. So the little comic book nerd is here basically repeating Darwin's mistake which he no doubt picked up from TV or internet hearsay, and presenting it in his little learned dissertation as something like a profound fact.

3. But most absurd of all is the assertion that art is something which HAS NOTHING TO DO with man's alleged TWO BASIC INSTINCTS. But if these instincts are really "basic" then ALL HUMAN ACTIVITY MUST DERIVE FROM THEM! Otherwise WHAT THE FUCK IS SUPPOSED TO BE "BASIC" ABOUT THEM!? The little comic-book-drawing retard has simply defined art out of existence! He has entirely nullified it! and his idiotic comic strip is supposed to awaken us to the VALUE of art! Only Tim Rogers or Jesper Juul could come up with a more absurd logical procedure than this! I'd say Leigh Alexander too if she were't too dumb even to invent such absurdities! I mean JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!

Moving on, the next absolutely hilarious mistake he makes is to depict the male prehistoric man as somehow CHASING the female in order to have sex with her. This is typical of comic book nerd psychology: because they have observed that women do not want to have sex with them, and run away whenever they approach them, they automatically infer that women do not like sex and will run away from ANY male that approaces them -- even non-idiotic, non-scrawny, non-smelly, fully functioning male humans. All of which is of course nonsense -- women like sex just as much as men do, and if you are good-looking enough they will even chase YOU around evem more than you chase THEM. All of which of course would sound like science-fiction to comic book nerds, but that doesn't make it any less true. If they had spent any time out of their basements they might at least have had a chance to observe women chasing attractive men, and -- however painful this realization might have been to them -- they would at least have had the chance to draw the appropriate conclusions.

Next colossal mistake: art is supposed to come in at times when we "just don't have a thing to do!" A "thriving art colony" (as if there could be such a thing, lol) is supposed to be comprised of "bored people". Again inferences that stem from the psychology of the typical contemporary comic-book-drawing and videogame-playing nerd. Because THEY engage with art whenever they are bored, it follows that prehistoric man, WHO AS EVERYONE KNOWS WAS BORED JUST AS MUCH AS THEY ARE LOL, also stumbled upon art when he was bored. All of this is the theorizing of the kind of person who does not even realize that history books EVEN EXIST.

The truth is of course entirely antithetical to what he is saying: art was never, is not, and never will be, "independent form our evolution-bred instincts", for if it were that it would be something completely random that no one would ever be able to analyze. Besides, our "evolution-bred instincts" are merely a theory WE have come up with in order to EXPLAIN ALL OUR BEHAVIOUR -- INCLUDING OF COURSE THAT OF ART. It is ABSURD to then turn around and EXEMPT part of our behaviour from the theory we have invented in order to explain. THE LITTLE FUCKING PRICK IS DUMBER THAN MANY 9-YEAR-OLDS I KNOW!

And then of course he goes on to say that art is the way we "assert our identities as individuals and BREAK OUT OF THE NARROW ROLES nature cast us in", lol -- again typical of the psychology of the miserable subhuman -- who hates himself and is always grasping about to escape his own skin because he can't fucking stand it. -- YOU CAN NEVER BREAK OUT OF YOUR "ROLE" YOU LITTLE SQUIRMING WORM, NO MATTER HOW MANY COMIC BOOKS YOU READ -- YOU WERE BORN A WORM AND YOU WILL DIE ONE!

Then, in the next panel, after his absurd theory of art being some random arbitrary impulse that has nothing to do with our instincts but which however magically allows the wretched and the miserable to stop being wretched and miserable, he makes a 180 degree turn and concedes that art has its uses "from an evolutionary standpoint" -- THUS COMPLETELY ANNIHILATING HIS DEFINITION IN THE FIRST PANEL THAT ART IS THAT WHICH HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.

lol, etc.

As for those uses of art he mentions:

1. Art as "sports and games" in "later centuries". -- Nonsense. Games existed EVEN BEFORE MAN -- even fucking BEAR CUBS play games, and certainly our monkey-like ancestors. Sports are merely an evolution and a ritualization of these games in a more rigid framework.

2. "Art as self expression" with the "artist as hero", lol. -- Again a retarded inference based on the psychology of the comic book nerd who, because he has drawn a superman, fancies that he himself is a kind of superman. But a Homer is not an Achilles, a Goethe is not a Faust -- an Achilles does not scribble about Achilles -- he lives, he acts, he is, he does not fantasize -- the artist, the fantasist, comes AFTERWARD, to sing the hero's life and deeds -- he himself is by no means a hero, for if he were he couldn't be an artist.

3. "Art as discovery", "as the pursuit of truth". -- Finally the comic book nerd raises comic drawing to metaphysical significance -- art finally replacing science and philosophy as the most important activity in the universe -- not to mention that ridiculous aside about MODERN art, "the soul of much modern art", AS IF MODERN ART ACTUALLY HAD A SOUL! AS IF BAUDRILLARD HAD NEVER EXISTED, AS IF HE HADN'T BEEN LAMBASTING FOR DECADES THE MODERN PSEUDO-ARTISTS AND PSEUDO-ART-LOVERS FOR "that shameful complicity in which creators and consumers commune wordlessly in the examination of strange, inexplicable objects that refer only to themselves and to the idea of art"...

But what is most offensive about all this fucking dribble is not really the IGNORANCE or the IDIOCY, but the SMARMISHNESS, the SELF-ASSURANCE and the POMPOUSNESS with which the little subhuman prick tries to pass off his randomly stuck together junk-knowledge as profundity. Ignorance and idiocy themselves do not bother me that much, but when they are found together with such blind self-satisfaction and conviction -- that is what I find unbearable.
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Unread postby Crow » 08 Jun 2010 21:31

icycalm wrote:2. Then he assumes that these "two basic instincts" are "survival" and "reproduction", whereas "survival" is in fact never a basic instinct -- the basic instinct is domination -- which, of course, in order for an organism to indulge it must first manage to surive. Survival is then merely a special case of the instinct for domination, and therefore could not by any means be called "basic". There are even countless cases in which, in order to reach for more power, an organism will willingly perish -- a behaviour which the "survival" theory is incapable of accounting for. So the little comic book nerd is here basically repeating Darwin's mistake which he no doubt picked up from TV or internet hearsay, and presenting it in his little learned dissertation as something like a profound fact.


Well, for what it's worth, Darwin brought the concept of sexual selection, in which individuals apparently handicap themselves in order to get a better stab at the opposite sex. This also includes competition between members of the same sex (mostly the males), so it can explain a very wide range of status-seeking behaviours. The mistake the cartoonist and almost everybody else makes is to think that sexual selection is only about copulation, although it's a crucial part of it. Sexual selection is all about fitness, which can be translated into social status or power. It's all about augmenting your own fitness, attracting the fittest mate possible and keeping track of the fitness of others, something which every sexuated living being does, consciously or not. That seems to fit pretty well with Nietzsche's will to power.

That was in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, except everybody at the time stopped reading after the first part, for obvious religious reasons. Plus, Darwin's ideas on sexual selection were widely ignored in favour of focusing on natural selection because, you know, talking about sex is icky for a scientist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection

Anyway, how can the guy think that art is not related to reproduction? Most poems are about love one way or another, half the paintings and sculptures are about nekkid ladies and big manly men full of virility... and pretty much every rap song is about getting it on with some 'hos. How much more obvious can this be?
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Jun 2010 00:08

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:Do you desire the most astonishing proof of how far the transfiguring power of intoxication can go? – "Love" is this proof: that which is called love in all the languages and silences of the world. In this case, intoxication has done with reality to such a degree that in the consciousness of the lover the cause of it is extinguished and something else seems to have taken its place – a vibration and glittering of all the magic mirrors of Circe–

Here it makes no difference whether one is man or animal; even less whether one has spirit, goodness, integrity. If one is subtle, one is fooled subtly; if one is coarse, one is fooled coarsely; but love, and even the love of God, the saintly love of "redeemed souls", remains the same in its roots: a fever that has good reason to transfigure itself, an intoxication that does well to lie about itself – And in any case, one lies well when one loves, about oneself and to oneself: one seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more perfect, one is more perfect – Here we discover art as an organic function: we discover it in the most angelic instinct, "love"; we discover it as the greatest stimulus of life – art thus sublimely expedient even when it lies –

But we should do wrong if we stopped with its power to lie: it does more than merely imagine; it even transposes values. And it is not only that it transposes the feeling of values: the lover is more valuable, is stronger. In animals this condition produces new weapons, pigments, colours, and forms; above all new movements, new rhythms, new love calls and seductions. It is no different with man. His whole economy is richer than before, more powerful, more complete than in those who do not love. The lover becomes a squanderer: he is rich enough for it. Now he dares, becomes an adventurer, becomes an ass in magnanimity and innocecne: he believes in God again, he believes in virtue, because he believes in love; and on the other hand, this happy idiot grows wings and new capabilities, and even the door of art is opened to him. If we subtracted all traces of this intestinal fever from lyricism in sound and word, what would be left of lyrical poetry and music? – L'art pour l'art perhaps: the virtuoso croaking of shivering frogs, despairing in their swamp – All the rest was created by love – (The Will to Power, 808)
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Jun 2010 02:08

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Unread postby movie » 09 Jun 2010 10:26

Great essay! As always, very well done. I found a few typos:

But do not despair, dear reader, if you can understand fuck-all of what I am saying here, since all this stuff will be explained in excruciating detail


kind of like how you hear about people who stuff tons of past down their throats in order to become the best "pasta-stuffing-down-their-throat" person in the world


(by this point I've lost more than 90% of the audience, which is why I am considering moving up this part of my little speech routine to the beggining)


the idea for which was that the players first went out and stuffed themselves with a large dinner, preferably gulping down a large quantity of alchohol as well,
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Jun 2010 16:17

I fixed the others, but the first one is not a typo. At least that's how I think "fuck-all" is supposed to be used...
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Unread postby BrianDawkins » 09 Jun 2010 16:34

Moving on, the next absolutely hilarious mistake he makes is to depict the male prehistoric man as somehow CHASING the female in order to have sex with her.


Do you have a link to the original source of the comic? I'd be surprised if even sympathetic readers didn't realize that the first three frames make no sense.
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Jun 2010 21:47

Dude, after I've explained everything in such clear terms, it is easy to say that you'd be "surprised", etc. And who knows, perhaps you really would have been even before reading my post -- I don't know you, so you may really be that smart. But the fact of the matter is that the absurd doctrine of the "uselessness of art", of "l'art pour l'art", of "art for art's sake", that this dude is basically sort of mangling and regurgitating in the first panel of his comic, not only is nothing new, but has been doing the rounds for centuries and has been propounded at times even by extremely intelligent and talented individuals, let alone by the frothing human scum who pick off their breadcrumb leftovers and try to pass them off as their own.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote:We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake [...] and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force: — but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem's sake.


So if even Poe was taken in by this nonsense, I would be surprised if even a single of that dude's readers found anything wrong with the entire comic -- let alone realizing the logical contradiction of dissociating art from drives he has baptized as "basic".

And here are some reviews of the book the comic is taken from:

"A landmark dissection and intellectual consideration of comics as a valid medium." -- Will Eisner

"McCloud is the McLuhan of comics." -- James Gurney, Dinotopia

http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Com ... 006097625X


In short:


l

o

l
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Jun 2010 21:51

Another thing, I have now linked Benjamin's "The Cutscene in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility" from my latest article. I had meant to do that but somehow forgot. I recommend that everyone read it.
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Unread postby BrianDawkins » 09 Jun 2010 23:54

I didn't mean to point to the definition of art. I was aiming for something much more simple: if reproduction is a basic human urge, why does the female run away from the male? A plot hole in three panels.

Thanks for the link.
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Unread postby movie » 10 Jun 2010 05:43

icycalm wrote:I fixed the others, but the first one is not a typo. At least that's how I think "fuck-all" is supposed to be used...


I was referring to the "can". I think "can't" is what it should be.

But do not despair, dear reader, if you can't understand fuck-all of what I am saying here, since all this stuff will be explained in excruciating detail.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 Jun 2010 15:57

movie wrote:I was referring to the "can".


No, you were referring to the fuck-all. And fuck-all means "nothing", which is why there's nothing wrong with my sentence.

BrianDawkins wrote:if reproduction is a basic human urge, why does the female run away from the male?


And not only that, but the female is supposed to be running away because she is concerned about her survival. Which goes to show once more what an absurd conception of sex comic book nerds have in their brains. They seem to think that women DIE during sex. Who knows what perverse pornography they got this idea from!
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 Jun 2010 17:26

Benjamin's essay is now on the frontpage (I placed it before my essay because it's a prerequisite for it):

http://insomnia.ac/essays/mechanical_reproducibility/

I think my layout is more readable than the other dude's...

I'll probably be commenting on it at some point.
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Unread postby icycalm » 11 Jun 2010 17:12

Fuck ME!

http://www.soundtrackcentral.com/forums ... hp?id=5671

I LOVE this thread's title. I love it so much I am considering replacing my current title with it. Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Fuuuuuuuuuck! Why didn't I think of it myself?!
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