(no subject)
Klosterman wonders where is the Lester Bangs of video games; why a gamer hasn't come along as articulate, passionate and insightful as Lester Bangs was about music. It's probably because they're too busy beating Halo 2 on Legendary or finishing up Oblivion. You can write about music while listening to it. Try writing about lighting effects, frame rates, or the social signifiance of NES Hockey making it so you always had to take 1 fat guy, 1 skinny guy and 2 average guys or about how Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl was the embodiment of the Overman while you're trying to close an Oblivion Gate. Impossible.
Anyway, two recent essays shocked me into the realization that I have been reading and concentrating on tech stuff entirely too much. They also reminded me that, while technical people can learn philosophy, like scientists a lot of us assume we know philosophy by default. This leads to a lot of pretty shitty writing.
First Graham posted the incredibly bad How Art Can be Good
Pure subjectivity about what makes art good is wrong...good so far, that is probably correct, but he claims (on reddit.com comments on the story) that he doesn't think the case for this position has ever been stated this way before!?
"One problem with saying there's no such thing as good taste is that it also means there's no such thing as good art. If there were good art, then people who liked it would have better taste than people who didn't. So if you discard taste, you also have to discard the idea of art being good, and artists being good at making it."
Don't people say all the time 'it's great, I just don't like it?' Or is that just me after every Kubrick movie?
"I think the key to this puzzle is to remember that art has an audience. Art has a purpose, which is to interest its audience. Good art (like good anything) is art that achieves its purpose particularly well. The meaning of "interest" can vary. Some works of art are meant to shock, and others to please; some are meant to jump out at you, and others to sit quietly in the background. But all art has to work on an audience, and-here's the critical point-members of the audience share things in common."
So, the purpose of art is to X the audience, where X can be ... anything? Unfortunately, he doesn't enumerate X. If X can be anything, then I guess Gallagher's art is good because it achieves its purpose of getting watermelon on the front couple rows of spectators particularly well (remember, all art has to work on an audience...what?)
"If good art is art that interests its audience, then when you talk about art being good, you also have to say for what audience. So is it meaningless to talk about art simply being good or bad? No, because one audience is the set of all possible humans. I think that's the audience people are implicitly talking about when they say a work of art is good: they mean it would engage any human
And that is a meaningful test, because although, like any everyday concept, "human" is fuzzy around the edges, there are a lot of things practically all humans have in common. In addition to our interest in faces, there's something special about primary colors for nearly all of us, because it's an artifact of the way our eyes work. Most humans will also find images of 3D objects engaging, because that also seems to be built into our visual perception. [5] And beneath that there's edge-finding, which makes images with definite shapes more engaging than mere blur."
So apparently, the opinion of Hegel or Picasso should be weighed equally with mine and with a 7 year old's. After all, we're all human right?!
"There are two main kinds of error that get in the way of seeing a work of art: biases you bring from your own circumstances, and tricks played by the artist. Tricks are straightforward to correct for. Merely being aware of them usually prevents them from working. For example, when I was ten I used to be very impressed by airbrushed lettering that looked like shiny metal. But once you study how it's done, you see that it's a pretty cheesy trick-one of the sort that relies on pushing a few visual buttons really hard to temporarily overwhelm the viewer. It's like trying to convince someone by shouting at them."
Not a word about intention, meaning or history....instead, be sure not to be misled by techniques the artist uses...what?!? I think we should correct for this whole 'perspective' gimmick...I mean, the canvas is NOT REALLY in 3 dimensions.
"The way not to be vulnerable to tricks is to explicitly seek out and catalog them. When you notice a whiff of dishonesty coming from some kind of art, stop and figure out what's going on. When someone is obviously pandering to an audience that's easily fooled, whether it's someone making shiny stuff to impress ten year olds, or someone making conspicuously avant-garde stuff to impress would-be intellectuals, learn how they do it. Once you've seen enough examples of specific types of tricks, you start to become a connoisseur of trickery in general, just as professional magicians are.
What counts as a trick? Roughly, it's something done with contempt for the audience. For example, the guys designing Ferraris in the 1950s were probably designing cars that they themselves admired. Whereas I suspect over at General Motors the marketing people are telling the designers, "Most people who buy SUVs do it to seem manly, not to drive off-road. So don't worry about the suspension; just make that sucker as big and tough-looking as you can.""
So now we need to know both the technical means by which the work was created, as well as the mental state of the artist. Note to art historians: Duchamp is probably not a major artist anymore. After all, he played tricks! He made jokes! He had contempt for the art world. We've all been fooled.
"I doubt you could ever make yourself into a completely universal person, if only because you can only travel in one direction in time. But if you find a work of art that would appeal equally to your friends, to people in Nepal, and to the ancient Greeks, you're probably onto something."
Wow. Just wow. Apparently for Graham not only is all art possible at all times, but for all people as well. That's what we call a strong claim.
Then came Yegge, with his most recent blog post about The Pinoccio Problem, which is extremely longwinded....we will take this as an illustrative quote though: "In other words, I think that both consciousness and free will (i.e. nondeterminism) are software properties."
...
"But I think we've established that each invocation of your "Hello, World" program is creating a separate instance of a minute consciousness.
Well... sort of. A "Hello, World" program, which has no loops or branches, can't exhibit any nondeterminism (unless it's imposed externally, e.g. by a random hardware error), so you can think of it as pure hardware implemented in software. But somewhere between Hello, World and Hal 9000 lies a minimal software program that can be considered to possess rudimentary consciousness, at which point turning it off is tantamount to killing it."
Just...fuck me.
Back to the wonderful world of web programming now. But really, I need to spend less time with books with animals on the cover and more with say, Gogol. Or maybe I'll write that essay I've been meaning to write about how the Ruby programming lanaguge is a Tolstoyan hedgehog while Perl is a Nietzschean fox.
Anyway, two recent essays shocked me into the realization that I have been reading and concentrating on tech stuff entirely too much. They also reminded me that, while technical people can learn philosophy, like scientists a lot of us assume we know philosophy by default. This leads to a lot of pretty shitty writing.
First Graham posted the incredibly bad How Art Can be Good
Pure subjectivity about what makes art good is wrong...good so far, that is probably correct, but he claims (on reddit.com comments on the story) that he doesn't think the case for this position has ever been stated this way before!?
"One problem with saying there's no such thing as good taste is that it also means there's no such thing as good art. If there were good art, then people who liked it would have better taste than people who didn't. So if you discard taste, you also have to discard the idea of art being good, and artists being good at making it."
Don't people say all the time 'it's great, I just don't like it?' Or is that just me after every Kubrick movie?
"I think the key to this puzzle is to remember that art has an audience. Art has a purpose, which is to interest its audience. Good art (like good anything) is art that achieves its purpose particularly well. The meaning of "interest" can vary. Some works of art are meant to shock, and others to please; some are meant to jump out at you, and others to sit quietly in the background. But all art has to work on an audience, and-here's the critical point-members of the audience share things in common."
So, the purpose of art is to X the audience, where X can be ... anything? Unfortunately, he doesn't enumerate X. If X can be anything, then I guess Gallagher's art is good because it achieves its purpose of getting watermelon on the front couple rows of spectators particularly well (remember, all art has to work on an audience...what?)
"If good art is art that interests its audience, then when you talk about art being good, you also have to say for what audience. So is it meaningless to talk about art simply being good or bad? No, because one audience is the set of all possible humans. I think that's the audience people are implicitly talking about when they say a work of art is good: they mean it would engage any human
And that is a meaningful test, because although, like any everyday concept, "human" is fuzzy around the edges, there are a lot of things practically all humans have in common. In addition to our interest in faces, there's something special about primary colors for nearly all of us, because it's an artifact of the way our eyes work. Most humans will also find images of 3D objects engaging, because that also seems to be built into our visual perception. [5] And beneath that there's edge-finding, which makes images with definite shapes more engaging than mere blur."
So apparently, the opinion of Hegel or Picasso should be weighed equally with mine and with a 7 year old's. After all, we're all human right?!
"There are two main kinds of error that get in the way of seeing a work of art: biases you bring from your own circumstances, and tricks played by the artist. Tricks are straightforward to correct for. Merely being aware of them usually prevents them from working. For example, when I was ten I used to be very impressed by airbrushed lettering that looked like shiny metal. But once you study how it's done, you see that it's a pretty cheesy trick-one of the sort that relies on pushing a few visual buttons really hard to temporarily overwhelm the viewer. It's like trying to convince someone by shouting at them."
Not a word about intention, meaning or history....instead, be sure not to be misled by techniques the artist uses...what?!? I think we should correct for this whole 'perspective' gimmick...I mean, the canvas is NOT REALLY in 3 dimensions.
"The way not to be vulnerable to tricks is to explicitly seek out and catalog them. When you notice a whiff of dishonesty coming from some kind of art, stop and figure out what's going on. When someone is obviously pandering to an audience that's easily fooled, whether it's someone making shiny stuff to impress ten year olds, or someone making conspicuously avant-garde stuff to impress would-be intellectuals, learn how they do it. Once you've seen enough examples of specific types of tricks, you start to become a connoisseur of trickery in general, just as professional magicians are.
What counts as a trick? Roughly, it's something done with contempt for the audience. For example, the guys designing Ferraris in the 1950s were probably designing cars that they themselves admired. Whereas I suspect over at General Motors the marketing people are telling the designers, "Most people who buy SUVs do it to seem manly, not to drive off-road. So don't worry about the suspension; just make that sucker as big and tough-looking as you can.""
So now we need to know both the technical means by which the work was created, as well as the mental state of the artist. Note to art historians: Duchamp is probably not a major artist anymore. After all, he played tricks! He made jokes! He had contempt for the art world. We've all been fooled.
"I doubt you could ever make yourself into a completely universal person, if only because you can only travel in one direction in time. But if you find a work of art that would appeal equally to your friends, to people in Nepal, and to the ancient Greeks, you're probably onto something."
Wow. Just wow. Apparently for Graham not only is all art possible at all times, but for all people as well. That's what we call a strong claim.
Then came Yegge, with his most recent blog post about The Pinoccio Problem, which is extremely longwinded....we will take this as an illustrative quote though: "In other words, I think that both consciousness and free will (i.e. nondeterminism) are software properties."
...
"But I think we've established that each invocation of your "Hello, World" program is creating a separate instance of a minute consciousness.
Well... sort of. A "Hello, World" program, which has no loops or branches, can't exhibit any nondeterminism (unless it's imposed externally, e.g. by a random hardware error), so you can think of it as pure hardware implemented in software. But somewhere between Hello, World and Hal 9000 lies a minimal software program that can be considered to possess rudimentary consciousness, at which point turning it off is tantamount to killing it."
Just...fuck me.
Back to the wonderful world of web programming now. But really, I need to spend less time with books with animals on the cover and more with say, Gogol. Or maybe I'll write that essay I've been meaning to write about how the Ruby programming lanaguge is a Tolstoyan hedgehog while Perl is a Nietzschean fox.