Calvin: A painting. Moving. Spiritually enriching. Sublime. “High” art!

The comic strip. Vapid. Juvenile. Commercial hack work. “Low” art.

A painting of a comic strip panel. Sophisticated irony. Philosophically challenging. “High” art.

Hobbes: Suppose I draw a cartoon of a painting of a comic strip?

Calvin: Sophomoric, intellectually sterile. “Low” art.

This comic really shows how absurd it is to make divisions on what is art and what isn’t art. Just replace comic with videogame, painting with movie and you have the whole debate in a nutshell.

– Photography isn’t art, but movies, which are a serial collection of photographs (with or w/o added soundtrack), are? (Or are movies included in the hedge that photographs can, apparently, be incorporated into art? I figured that hedge was for collage…) Or is a movie considered to be a recording of an instance of theater? (What of the special effects, then, or of movies which aren’t recordings at all, like animations?) Why is it important to classify photography as not art? It totally defies many peoples’ experience of photography both as creators and consumers.

– Music apparently ‘re-creates reality’ by re-creating an emotional state (Man, is that a stretch by itself – how are emotions ‘reality’? Rand seems to be treating ‘reality’ as an object external to humans, so how can something as subjective as an emotional state be ‘reality’?), but abstract painting, sculpture, etc. don’t or can’t?

– According to this definition, it is possible for someone with an extremely exceptional life (i.e. one which travels a probabilistic path very different from the average) to create a great work of art which no one else will be capable of recognizing as art (as their ‘sense of life’ will be alien to everyone else). I actually don’t think that this is a flaw in the definition, but it does underline the subjectivity of art and the uselessness of the definition in real-world application.

Alex

Sorry to add to this thread so belatedly, but I was provoked by the other belated addition above by Ms. Snow.

I don’t know much about objectivism – philosophically I’m a pragmatist – but Rand’s definition of art seems to me to be hopelessly _unworkable_, contrary to Ms. Snow’s assertion that ‘it actually works’.

It rules out whole categories of what is widely recognized as art, e.g. photography, and, importantly, abstraction. The latter flaw is critical, especially to a sometime composer like myself: music is perhaps the most abstract of the arts. How is Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (or whatever musical work you consider art) a ‘re-creation of reality’?

The answer: it isn’t, for any useful values of ‘re-creation’ or ‘reality’ (which is a very loaded term for a pragmatist).

There are, additionally, serious problems with the concept of selectivity (artists _cannot_ control every facet of their work, especially when presenting it to the public), and with the idea that value judgements need to be embedded and/or can be extracted as intended.

My inclination as a pragmatist would be to look at how the definition functions for Rand – it seems like self-aggrandizement – because it doesn’t function in any useful way for me in differentiating art from non-art. (A project I’m generally suspicious of in any case.)

Alex

thread address: http://forum.objectivismonline.net/index.php?showtopic=9398

Note: I’m an admin on Oo.net. Do not post there unless you are actually interested in philosophy and you ACTUALLY KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT OBJECTIVISM OR ARE INTERESTED IN IT. I’m not telling you this because I plan to ban you or otherwise smack you around in some way. You will simply be laughed off the board and create more work for myself and my cohorts and I’m lazy.

Anyway, pursuant to this particular thread, I’d love to have someone come up with a rebuttal, but sadly I don’t think there are a bunch of professional estheticians hanging around so I’m not holding my breath. So:

1. Ayn Rand defined art as “a selective re-creation of reality in accordance with the artist’s metaphysical value-judgments”. She also defined what she considered to be the major “categories” of art: Painting, sculpture, music, dance, architecture, literature, theatre. There are also sub-types under these categories (or you can call the sub-types categories of their own): movies, poetry, novels, etc.

I think this is a fine definition by the only standard that matters: it actually works. However for anyone encountering it for the first time it requires some serious explanation of *terms*.

*Selective*: means that no work of art can or will or SHOULD capture every aspect of reality available to it. EVERY aspect of reality included in a work of art must be selected by the artist. This means that a photograph, even one produced by a professional using filters, time-lapse, whatever is not art. However, a photograph can be made into art by using it as a basis for further work.

As with most philosophical subjects there are gray areas that need to be further hashed out: I’m only touching on the black-and-white definitions here, the grey areas must be hashed out by individuals using principles as a reference point.

I should clarify that things that aren’t actually *art* can be very *artistic*. This is a term used to mean, among other things, that it displays *some* selectivity but not *total* selectivity or that the work has some other purpose than contemplation, which is the real purpose of art. Thus your photographs and wallpaper patterns and Warhammer 40k minis can be very artistic, but they aren’t art.

*Re-creation of Reality*: this means that an actual work of art must DEPICT things. Paintings must depict people or objects. Music must depict emotional states. You get the idea. So, Picasso paintings are art. Paint splatters on canvas aren’t art, they are a *con job* by someone seeking to gain the title of “artist” without actually having to do the *work*. I don’t care if your smears are “angry”. It’s not art.

*Cough* This is going to be a feature-length article if I don’t condense this a little better.

Last term: “Metaphysical Value-Judgments”: now, this is something that everyone has, it is in essence a subconscious evaluation of the nature of reality and the things in it formed by the various experiences you have during your life. Ayn Rand also referred to this as your “sense of life”, which is an unfortunately vague term but she didn’t like neologisms because they’re even harder to explain and use than vague terminology. Anyway, your sense of life is how you feel about the universe. Do you feel that the universe is a realm of inevitable suffering in which your only hope is eventual escape? Or do you feel that the universe is a realm in which the good will *necessarily* triumph over evil if it doesn’t give up? These are basic, fundamental value-judgments that affect your entire outlook on life and, thus, what kind of art you will produce.

So, now that I’ve given a (I hope) decent definition of art, I will attempt to explain why I think video games don’t meet these requirements.

A. The category of “video game” is so broad in an *esthetic* context as to be virtually meaningless. Everything from Pong to Internet Hearts to Jade Empire is a “video game”. The term is meant to distinguish one type of *game* from another type of *game*, it does not take into account the *nature* of the game. Thus the statement “Video Games are Art” will necessarily fail at the door.

B. If you narrow the category of video games you are talking about to, say, only story-based games where the plot is the driving focus of the game (excluding even games with a plot where the story is an add-on not really relevant to the meat of the game) what you end up with is something that is not readily distinguishable from a movie that contains numerous puzzles.

Now, a new art form that adds on to an existing art form is possible: look at dance. Dance as an art form would not exist without music, but music does just fine by itself as an art form. However, with CRPG’s what you are adding on is not a new *artistic* element, it is a discrete element with a different purpose than contemplation. You are adding a *game*.

If you take a glorious painting and turn it into a jigsaw puzzle you have not created a new art form: you have created an extremely *artistic* puzzle. If you take a novel and turn it into a bunch of pages where you have to make decisions about where you will go (Choose Your Own Adventure books), you have not created a new art form, you have created an entertaining diversion for children with ADD that can’t read a book all in one go.

So, there’s my definition AND why I think Video Games are not Art. And I think politicians making decisions about what individuals are and are not allowed to see is evil.

April 17th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Why is it important whether games are defined as art ort not?

No, seriously.

would game designers get some form of grant if it were? Does it give games some sort of status i’m ubaware of? I just don’t understand why you would get riled up about it.

On various levels, many forms of ecpression have been derided in their own time, from mozart to jazz to rock. Comic books are another good example. Please enlighten me.

—
There is reason that it is very important when a judge makes a call such as: “[There is] no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything else that could possibly amount to speech. The court finds that video games have more in common with board games and sports than they do with motion pictures.” The greatest of these reasons is that if a medium/industry has no virtue that “could possibly amount to speech”, then the First Amendment does not apply to it, giving it little if any Constitutional protections. Once those are removed, it is very easy for governmental groups to regulate what is allowed in a game, *any* game. Governmental groups can easily decide games such as ‘Grand Theft Auto’ are offensive, and without First Amendment protections, they can be censored and distributors can be held criminally liable. This seems to be a very great danger. What movie critics think of computerized gaming is somewhat less relevant, other than it shows the attitude of many within the critics’ generation, including those held by lawmakers.

AJ made the comparison to the Louvre – is the building art without the content? My answer would be yes, because it’s designed to be beautiful as well as functional. A multi-storey car park of the sort we Brits threw up all the time in the 1950s isn’t: it’s purely functional, with no thought given to its aesthetic qualities at all, and any artistic interpretations you might have of it are going to be scraping the barrel at best. That’s not to say they can’t be made, more to say that you can only take them so seriously and there’s only so much you can say about plain grey concrete.

The point I’m trying to make is that “video games” are just a medium, not inherently works of art. What makes something a work of art (as opposed to a work of craft) is the quality of work and the degree of aesthetic intent evident therein. Art happens when you stop worrying about what the thing has to do and start thinking about how it looks while doing it.