{"id":1371,"date":"2007-10-18T07:10:07","date_gmt":"2007-10-18T12:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1371"},"modified":"2007-10-19T10:38:56","modified_gmt":"2007-10-19T15:38:56","slug":"the-art-grid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1371","title":{"rendered":"The Art Grid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here is Steven&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/chizumatic.mee.nu\/art\">definition of art<\/a>:<\/p>\n<div class=\"quote\">My own definition: art is a creation intended to communicate something which cannot easily be communicated. As such, there are three dimensions to it, three scales on which any given piece of art falls.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What is communicated can be mundane or profound. (Or somewhere in between.)\n<\/li>\n<li>The idea is communicated effectively or not effectively.\n<\/li>\n<li>What is communicate can be understood by a broad audience or only by a few.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&#8220;Great&#8221; art is profound, effective, and broad. It says something important, says it extremely well, and communicates it to many people.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>This makes me think of a scene near the beginning of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0097165\/\">Dead Poets Society<\/a> where John Keating (Robin Williams) begins a lesson on how to judge the merit of a poem by placing within a two-axis grid.  I can&#8217;t recall what the two axis stood for, but they were not unlike the three-dimensional system Steven gives us above.  The movie then mocks the idea that you can clearly define the merits of art this way and Keating has the students tear these pages out of their books.  But I like what Steven has up there:  A thing <i>Is<\/i> what it <i>Does<\/i>.  Yeah, yeah.  I know: Engineers and their confounded  desire to quantify every dang thing.  Sue me.<\/p>\n<p>Later he says:<\/p>\n<div class=\"quote\">For instance, an impressionist landscape is (or can be) effective, broad, but also mundane; it tries to say &#8220;mountains are pretty.&#8221; But it delivers that feeling of entrancement with the beauty of mountains to many people and inspires that feeling strongly in them.<\/div>\n<p>Let&#8217;s drag this topic over to my favorite dead horse &#8211; <a href=\"?p=1090\">videogames as art<\/a> &#8211;  and give it a few more good thumps. It&#8217;s interesting to note that for an overwhelming number of games &#8211; first-person games in particular &#8211; the message is something along the lines of &#8220;You are a hero&#8221;, or perhaps better, &#8220;Heroes are good&#8221;.  Hero stories are the landscape paintings of videogames.  They&#8217;re an easy target to hit.  Most of us have a built-in appreciation of heroism just like our appreciation of mountain vistas, so the creator just needs to connect with the audience enough to tap into that.  <\/p>\n<p>(Futile attempt to intercept nitpickery: Of course there are also games which aren&#8217;t trying to communicate anything.  The Sim series of games is a good example of this.  Will Wright calls these &#8220;software toys&#8221;.  It&#8217;s not a chess set, it&#8217;s a box of Legos.   They aren&#8217;t games in the sense that you have to &#8220;win&#8221; and they are not designed to communicate ideas or evoke emotions.)<\/p>\n<p>Now, hopefully that isn&#8217;t <i>all<\/i> the game has to say, or it&#8217;s going to be very dull.  Letting you knock down bad guys for its own sake is an empty sort of self-gratification. Hopefully the game uses the hero concept as a starting point for bigger questions.  &#8220;What is a hero?&#8221; or &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/technopedia.info\/tech\/2006\/05\/18\/what-can-change-the-nature-of-a-man.html\">What can change the nature of a man?<\/a>&#8220;.  <\/p>\n<p>Okay, this is the eighth post on videogames in a week.  Man, I really need to get our D&#038;D group going again.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: <a href=\"http:\/\/literatrix.blogspot.com\/\">Jennifer Snow<\/a> makes a pretty interesting counter-argument <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1371#comment-80870\">in the comments<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here is Steven&#8217;s definition of art: My own definition: art is a creation intended to communicate something which cannot easily be communicated. As such, there are three dimensions to it, three scales on which any given piece of art falls. What is communicated can be mundane or profound. (Or somewhere in between.) The idea is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}