like it seems fucking obvious, right? any medium that can contain degrees of symbolism, has the potential to provoke viewer interpretation, has the potential to contain specific or vague messaging from the creator, and just generally can be used for self-expression has the potential to be an art form.
Why the fuck is/was this a point of discussion? to the point of heated discourse, even! Was it just the most geriatric people they could find on the street? Weird snobs?
like, the second games started having narratives this should have been a moot topic. why the fuck did Kojima parrot it?
reading his statement, i feel there's two different discourses happening, the already solved (:lt-dbyf-dubois:) point of "can video games be art" and the more interesting question of "does the video game industry currently have a culture that promotes artistic endeavor over mass appeal"
to which my personal answer is 'no, but we're slowly getting there with the rise of auteurism (despite some of the problems inherent to it) in acclaimed development teams (:praise-it:) and the indie scene's entirety, and we'll see if it starts to push against the corporate board schlock in the future.'
but still, god damn, half of this debate comes from the same place as the video games cause violence bit and the other half is just people being annoyed with call of duty schlock, which, fair. but why is the former even a debate that happened/is happening. i'm genuinely curious.
The evolution of playing card art is actually like low-key fascinating though. Like before printing really took off playing cards were hand painted on to various materials up to and including Ivory. They incorporated all kinds of interesting themes from critiques of political and religious figures to pornography to natural scenes to whatever else artists could think of. Even today modern evolutions like Magic the Gathering churn out a vast catalogue of fantasy art.
It's kind of funny to see playing cards held up as a, "Obviously no one would call this art" example, especially considering Tarot decks and the many artistic variants people make of them. I don't think there's a meaningful difference between those artistic variants and the more standard art, or between a Tarot deck and standard playing cards. We're just more used to seeing the art on standard playing cards to the point that we often don't really notice it and see the cards more for their function. And the same is often true with Magic: the Gathering, but I also know of people who don't even know how to play MTG and collect the cards solely for the art, and obviously art does not stop being art when you print it on a card.
i'm too tired for this shit but it might be useful to differentiate the .psd or original painting. there's even less soul or whatever going into a printing of a magic card than in Warhol's soup cans and tcg "for the art" collectors are no better than funko pop dorks.
thousands of shitty tourist photos of the mona lisa probably aren't art
What a shit take. I'm sorry, but it's absurd and nonsensical to suggest that there's "more soul" in the original file of digital artwork than in a copy of the file when it's literally the same thing, pixel for pixel. If I see a picture of Starry Night in a textbook, am I not looking at art?
Most people engage with any piece of art primarily through reproductions. A very small percentage of people who have seen Starry Night have seen the original painting. This is just hipster shit of hating things because they popular and accessible, and doing arbitrary gatekeeping.
i was saying that the 2 inch print loses something in the process and context, not that identical digital copies are different. (although the exported png literally doesn't have the layers anymore)
if you make a copy of a copy of a copy... of starry night and look at a tiny and lossy printing of a painting that's larger than your book (73.7 cm × 92.1 cm) then you have lost a shitload of detail and it's not gatekeeping to say that looking at some trash tier low dpi cheap printing of something isn't good enough.
The art is literally designed for the purpose of creating the 2 inch print. The layers and original file are just part of the process of creating the finished product, which is the card. Cookie dough might taste better than the finished cookie, but that doesn't mean that the finished cookie isn't food.
Good enough to be considered art, you mean? Do you think that images have to be of a certain baseline quality to be considered art, or is it the loss of fidelity to an original image that disqualifies something from being art? If, hypothetically, the original Starry Night had been created at the same size and quality as it appears in my textbook, then would you consider that original work to be art, or not?
i think reproductions of art aren't automatically art. like a picture of me isn't me so why is a picture of some art that art?
I can't comprehend that stance, especially in the context of digital art. It's extremely bizarre to me. I have no idea what standard you're applying to determine if something is or isn't art or where you're getting that standard or what you mean when you say something's not art.
Do you apply this strange position to music, as well? Here I thought I'd spent countless hours over the course of my life listening to music and experiencing the artistic value of it, but it turns out the only times it had any artistic value are the times I've heard it live. That's probably legit like a millionth of the music I've heard in my life. All that time wasted because I was listening to a reproduction of it. They really need to crack down on album sales, because artists are trying to scam us and pass it off as the real thing, you know, just because it sounds the same.
music is more complicated than still images, i think it's more like a recording of a show isn't going to a show. like, the way sound works the sound is reproduced in the inverse of how it was recorded because microphones and speakers are the same technology so an unmixed recording is the same as what the mic heard, but also arguably the studio recording is some composite that didn't exist until it was mixed. If i rip up a painting it stops being that painting eventually. stops being art, eventually. If I compress the fuck out of some song...?
the way printing works the brush strokes or whatever aren't faithfully reproduced, my shitty textbook might put a page seam in the middle of it because CAPS didn't do their job and oops i literally can't see part of this thing because the binding ate it. if i look closely at the paper i see printing artifacts that aren't part of anyone's intent (certainly not at the textbook level, somebody somewhere probably created something with a thorough understanding of the printer adding texture), who knows if the color balance is correct, etc. you're looking at something there but you're not looking at starry night or whatever. maybe the derivative work is art but I don't see how it automatically is in all circumstances.
Is a text description of a painting automatically art?
The thing is that even if you are looking directly at a painting, then you're not necessarily going to perceive the painting as it is because vision is imperfect, as all senses are. If I'm colorblind or my vision is a little blurry, then does that mean that it's impossible for me to experience visual art, period, because the image that makes it to my brain is an imperfect reproduction of the visual object? I would say, of course not. To look at an imperfect replica or reproduction simply means that there is a loss of quality that's external to my head, in addition to the loss of quality that happens inside my head. If someone with blurry vision looks at a painting in person, they may see roughly the same thing as someone with clear vision looking at a blurry photo of the painting. To look at a photo of a painting isn't really different than looking at that painting from a distance, or through smudged glasses, in a dim room, or so forth - you are still looking at the art. And note that the person making the art may have flawed senses themselves, as is speculated with van Gogh.
Is a text description of art automatically art? Yes, I would say so. It is simply transferring the image into a format that is accessible to people who might have trouble perceiving it. There is of course a loss in quality and fidelity - but this is also true of any written work that is translated into another language. There is no such thing as a perfect translation and the nuances and connotations of particular words and phrases may be lost. Does this mean that there's no artistic value to the translated version of a work? Of course there is!
This purist approach is just a denial of reality. Senses are inherently flawed an unreliable. You cannot demand perfection from a world that you can fundamentally only experience in an imperfect way. People primarily experience and interpret art through reproductions, and it is possible for art to be meaningful even if the format loses some of the original quality, or indeed, even if it's converted into a totally different format. I imagine there are people who would say, "This band saved my life," about a band they never saw in person. To think that a person is incapable of forming a valid opinion or getting meaning out of an artistic work simply because their experience of it doesn't satisfy your arbitrary standards of attempting to impose perfection on a fundamentally imperfect world is ridiculous.
faster than that, if the lighting in the room is weird it'll throw off the colors. This is also one of my objections to tourist photos and low quality prints. I know the shapes of the mona lisa, probably, I guess, but I don't know if the color grading is correct.
the mona lisa is a portrait of a slightly smiling white woman with brown hair sitting on some chair-like furniture.
I reject that the previous sentence is art. I reject that a list of coordinates and HSV numbers of it would be art. I accept that a description of it created with intention to be artistic could be art, but I contend that it would be art on the basis of that intent and craft rather than automatically inheriting artness.
when someone says "this band saved my life" they mean the creative product of the band, and again, there usually is no original of a studio recording because of how those are produced unless somebody publishes unmixed stems.
Having no standard at all isn't better than having arbitrary ones if the arbitrary ones can be applied with any consistency, maximalism is stupid and we all have a working definition of terms like "art" that doesn't include things that you end up having to consider as art if you're doing maximalism. Nobody means the file structure of a bitmap when we talk about art except when someone doing maximalism is pressed into a corner on it.
But they can't, because they're arbitrary. For example:
Which means, by your logic, that the art was lost. It existed only in the moment that the music was produced in the studio, and the moment it was recorded and copied it lost any artistic quality.
Unless you want to change the rules somehow to make it so that a copy of a studio recording is art but a picture of the Mona Lisa isn't. You're allowed to do, because the rules you made up are completely arbitrary, but if you change the rules whenever they apply to something they shouldn't or don't apply to something they should, you can't turn around and claim that they're being applied consistently.
Anyway this discussion isn't likely to go anywhere because I don't consider your position remotely reasonable, so I don't see much point in continuing it.
you're misrepresenting my point anyway, and I'm not even sure the comparison between a painting, which is a still image, and music, which is sounds over time, is legitimate.
plz watch Ways of Seeing
i'm not quite finished yet but the kid saying "i think it's a woman because she's got curls" while the host is right there with his curly hair is hilarious https://youtu.be/0pDE4VX_9Kk?t=1627
watch all 4 parts of the series for the full experience
i was not expecting the anticapitalism in part 4. that went pretty hard, especially for the beeb.
Hence why I said a deck of standard playing cards. As in, the mass produced corporate decks that are now fully commoditized games and not at all art (even if they contain art on them - containing art is not the same as being art, otherwise a crate holding a painting would be art).