Again, The Art Institutes Are A Scam

As if to further advertise that they are a money-sucking scam of epic proportions, the Art Institutes recently fired a professor for refusing to force expensive, electronic, single-use books upon his students. First, this isn't at all surprising. The Art Institutes are a gigantic vampire of a corporation, vacuuming up huge amounts of money from desperate people. Second, the Art Institutes actually have good professors?

Thankfully, this diamond in the rough is suing the schools for wrongful termination. I relish the opportunity to see these succubi of the educational world get screwed in any way possible.

I've complained on a number of occasions about not only the Art Institutes, but about all for-profit institutes of higher education in the country. The data are unequivocal; you will not get a job. Well, obviously, you might get a job, but it will not be easy. These schools do not help people.

I repeat, the only schools worth attending are those schools which reject people! If you do not go through a rigid acceptance process, there is no point in going to the school. The only schools worth attending that do not reject people are Community Colleges. Those are worth every penny.

Two Ism's And Some Games

Where is Ai Weiwei, and why is the United States pathetically silent on his disappearance? How can armies for the past 2,000 years all have been retarded? And are video games from 15 years ago better than those today?

Is The Games/Art Debate Possibly Moot?

In my previous post, I simply uploaded a discussion thread from another website in which I argued that Roger Ebert was correct in saying that a game will never be art. I have perfectly defined what I mean.

A game is a rule set. That's all. It is a rule set applied to corporeal things. Checkers is a rule set applied to small plastic disks and a board. Checkers is not the disks and board themselves. Halo is a rule set applied to digital information and a controller. It's remarkable how this comes back to Wittgenstein so well, because he used this very example in Philosophical Investigations. But where Wittgenstein was concerned with the absolute meaning of the word game, I am only interested in the usage of the word that applies to the sorts of games that we're discussing. Video games must have rules. Truly, the very fact that they are programmed requires underlying rules for the programming itself to work.

So, in this sense, of course games can't be art of any kind, because that's all a game is: rules applied to something. Those rules can be part of art, but not art themselves. A decent example is the game A Force More Powerful, where you overthrow governments with peaceful demonstrations. The game is nothing amazing. It's essentially a real-time-strategy game where you use protesters instead of tanks. But the message the game carries is arguably art.

So now I come to the crux of my post; video games are a medium almost beyond comparison. As technology advances, the rules will always be there, but the experience will become ever-more immersive, allowing for art to come forward. The game is not the art, because the game is not part of the expression, but after awhile, does it become moot?

What I mean to say is, take a sculpture made of stone. Now take a sculpture made of polygons. One is a digital simulacrum, but is no less artistic. The process of creation is identical, only the material has changed. A virtual sculpture can be just as artistic as a real one. The same goes for music in a game, or paintings, or dialog. The rules, and thus the game are not art, but once we get to a point where everything in the game is art, does it become pointless to distinguish between games not being art and games being filled with art? Does it just become more efficient and more sensible to say that the games are art?

I am actually inclined to say so. I consider it beyond contest that rules cannot be art, and as such games cannot be art. But if everything to which the rules apply are art, we might as well not split hairs and just call the game art.

Of Games and Art

I recently participated in a comment thread on Gizmodo instigated by a post about Roger Ebert and his comments about games. Ebert said that games will never by high art, and unlike many of my internet-dwelling, tech-addled, male contemporaries, I agreed.

ME: I still support Ebert. He's right. High art is an expression of the artist. The demands of a game put limits on the artists expression separate from the inherent limitations of any sensory experience. That negates a game ever being high art.

I think games can get very close, but they have to take an increasing degree of control away from the player, reducing its status as a game. Like Myst, which was very artistic, but was nothing more than clicking through images.

HeartBurnKid: Agent of R.O.A.C.H.: Don't the demands of film put limitations on the artist? How about the demands of prose? The demands of paint on canvas? Any artist is limited by his medium; that doesn't make the final product not art.

ME: @HeartBurnKid: Agent of R.O.A.C.H.: That's what I mean by the inherent limitations of any expression. For example, I can't express sound with a painting. But INSOFAR as it is a visual expression of an idea, I as the artist have complete control. Even though a game has sounds and visuals, the angle of view, the course of events, the drama are all at the mercy of player control.

High art can be interactive, certainly. In fact many art installation involve interaction, but that interaction is an optional element that communicates something deliberate. The interaction of a game is a requirement, not an option, and as such the interactive element is a non-communicative part of the sensory construct.

KBlack: As Tycho from Penny Arcade said, consider this: how can a few dozen people make art for 4 years and the result not be called art?

Napilopez: You make interesting points, but it's such a difficult thing to assess, that at this point I feel like the argument has devolved into semantics, revolving around the essential question of "what is art?"

I have many ideas to elaborate on for this argument, so as to possibly take pages, but I will try to summarize as best I can while still remaining clear. I don't pretend to be an expert art connoisseur, but I have long thought about this debate. Forgive me if I am not so concise though, as I wrote this as a sort of stream of consciousness.

From my perspective, what I believe your definition of art is, is rather limiting. It limits the number of media through which art is allowed to be expressed, similarly to the way you say games are limiting to an artist's individual expression.

I currently prefer the definition of art as given by wikipedia. "Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging symbolic elements in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect".

Many videogames nowadays do all of this.

Let me start with a rather vague and simple example that will hopefully convey my point. Say an artist wants to convey the theme on individuality and personal choice. Or fun? What better way to convey such a message than through a videogame?

You mention that things such as angle, course of events, and drama are at the mercy of the player in a videogame. Yet in a sculpture, the angle of view is often largely up to the person viewing. In some interactive art pieces, which you have acknowledged as existing, you can control the course of events.

Also, can a medium not be two things at once? Why can videogame not be both entertainment and art? Certainly, entertainment and interaction are necessary constituents of videogames, but the way I see it, those simply help define games as a category of art. And sometimes the inter-category distinctions can become hazy. We define cubism, surrealism, and impressionism by certain characteristics of their presentation or construction, and sometimes these categorical distinctions might seem blurry. As I think you would agree, sometimes art can have a function or role outside of solely being aesthetically pleasing. Is the Sagrada Familia more work of art or church? Furthermore, why does it even matter? That it is such an aesthetic beauty does not significantly remove from it's religious role. Nor form the fact that it is a building, a shelter, a gathering place, and whatever other roles it may play. It's eccentric shapes may not be the best form of for any of these actions, yet it is still regarded as having all the qualities I mentioned. Likewise, videogames can entertain and be aesthetically pleasing at the same time. I disagree with you and hold that a videogame does not by necessity become less entertaining or interactive for being more artistic.

You said that myst was "artistic", but yet was nothing more than clicking through images. In such a case, it's distinctions between art and game are becoming blurry, but I don't that makes it any less of either. Additionally Myst isn't just about clicking through images, it's about clicking through them in the right ways. You cannot complete the game, unless you click the correct images. Clicking through images alone would be nothing more than a slideshow. Additionally, I think there re games that are much more interactive that myst, such as shadow of the colossus or kingdom hearts, that are also much more "artsy" than myst.

Finally, I'd like to assess the point of "high" art. I don't know what your definition of high art is, but I think it's agreeable in a crude sense that it involves those works of art that are placed in the highest regard in a culture, perhaps as a sort of consensus. It might seem like a circular argument, but to me, the simple fact that the subject of this article is being displayed so prominently at MoMa, one of the most renown institutios for the display of modern art, demonstrates that videogames can be high art.

If art is indeed about using deliberately placing elements to affect the senses, emotions, or intellect, then I do not see how interaction takes away from that, and in fact I believe it usually strengthens it. Even though videogames are made to allow human interaction, all the elements the player interacts with are deliberately placed by the developers. In my opinion, a videogame, as art, is both medium and "synergistic container". Medium, by being able to affect emotions through the happenings in the game. What does it matter if it happens slightly differently for each player, if they will still generally be receiving the same themes, going through the same story? "Synergistic Container" in the sense that it brings together different kinds of art. In the way a movie brings together static images, kinetic ones, and music, videogames can do all this and more.

Wow that was much longer than I thought lol.

Joonbug: @napilopez: I will write more on this to address your points as I'm on a time constraint at the moment, but just a few things:

Art isn't just about the aesthetics.

High Art (think Velazquez' "Las Meninas" and the interpretations thereof, or Courbet's "The Painter's Studio", or even Balthus' works) is about the complexity and nuance of the works, as opposed to Low Art which is immediate, shallow (WYSIWYG).

As a container and medium, it's not that the elements that consist of 'video games' (which is an extremely broad amalgam of technology) cannot be used as "art" -- look at Nam Jun Paik's works in pushing the boundaries of performance/video art -- but that it has yet to break the mold of its own devising in narrative, interpretation, and experience.

Even though a painting only has two dimensions and by nature is limited in the way you physically view it, the fact that there can be multitudes of interpretation and understanding beyond the physical attributes (color, style, composition) into the metaphysical (theme, allegory, emotions) is what makes it so amazing (with that said, we as the public look at art with a very reactionary, immediate perspective which is a goddamn shame).

Games have yet to give that sense of awe or resonance in my soul.

True art is hard. It takes complete dedication from an individual to create something that speaks to the contemporary yet transcends the time, place, and culture.

CommanderK: @Joonbug: And this is why most movies, and most books are also NOT art.

They don't really transcent time and place.

Video games have the potential, but I think that too much has to be taken away from the player in terms of what we expect in a game, to make them more like art.

A game is primarily for competition. Art is primarily for reflection.

Boundaries are blurry, but you won't find Final Fantasy VII in an art museum. Hell, Final Fantasy VII hasn't even aged very well. It's slow, the graphics, like most 3D games, don't age well, and the story, as moving as it was to a 13 year old (my age when I played it) is really kind of weak compared to what we consider good literature or good cinema.

Video Games are amazing fun, but the primary reason for creation, is for profit these days.

HeartBurnKid: Agent of R.O.A.C.H.: @Aaron Martin-Colby: Prose has a similar element, as it's up to the reader to imagine the visual element from the description he's given. In fact, I'd say a video game is the opposite of a novel in that way; whereas a novel supplies the narrative, and relies on the reader to supply the visuals, a game provides the visuals and the environment, and relies on the player to move the narrative forward.

ME: @KBlack: I'm not saying that it isn't art. I'm saying that Roger Ebert was right in saying that it's not HIGH art.

ME: @napilopez: I agree that we're getting tied up with words. I am not referring to art. I am referring to HIGH art. The perfection of artistic expression. There's some stuff on this in Wikipedia under High Culture. High art is the communication of something through a particular medium, while being limited only by the nature of that medium, nothing else.

All aspects of high art are communicative. Every aspect says something that the artist wants to say. A good analogy would be an illustration for a book. It can never be high art because it must necessarily communicate what it is

illustrating. Compare this to the works of Jackson Pollock, which wildly explore the potential of the visual medium.

"your definition of art is, is rather limiting. It limits the number of media through which art is allowed to be expressed."

I completely admit to that. High art does have a limited number of mediums through which it can be expressed. For example, painting, performance art, and music can all be high art, but architecture cannot. Architecture must achieve some end, be it heat, shelter, defense, or acoustics. Architecture as high art simply becomes sculpture.

"Say an artist wants to convey the theme on individuality and personal choice. Or fun? What better way to convey such a message than through a videogame?"

You're right, but say an artist wants to convey loss of control. They cannot do that within a game, because control is part of the game. Imagine a game where people always lose. It ceases to be a game at this point. That boundary of expression, beyond which it ceases to be a game, prevents games from being high art. Moreover, the fact that the artist chose a game to communicate something means that the game is not iself art, but part of an over-arching artistc construct. The artist made the explicit decision to say something with a game, but it is the expression, not the game that is high art. In the same way that a wonderful painting is not necessarily high art, only if that painting is part of a statement. For example, if I copy, stroke for stroke, Leonardo's "Madonna of the Rocks," it is not high art, but Leonardo's original is.

"You mention that things such as angle, course of events, and drama are at the mercy of the player in a videogame.

Yet in a sculpture, the angle of view is often largely up to the person viewing. In some interactive art pieces, which you have acknowledged as existing, you can control the course of events."

This is an interesting point. PARTS OF a game can be high art, but that's because they are virtual analogs of high art in the real world. A sculpture in a game can be high art just as a sculpture in real life can be high art. But that is not the game. The gestalt of the game cannot be high art in the way that the gestalt of a movie can be high art, though.

I do acknowledge the existence of interactive art, but that interactivity is part of the art. The artist is saying something explicit with the art insofar as it is interactive. The artist can take the interactivity away to say something else and it remains art. Take the interactivity away from a game and it ceases being a game.

"As I think you would agree, sometimes art can have a function or role outside of solely being aesthetically pleasing."

I vehemently disagree. In fact, high art is the absolute antithesis of this. High art, by definition, exists for its own sake. It is in this way that I go so far as to say that many, if not most, movies do not achieve high art, because they are themselves beholden to the requirement of entertainment. When movies become completely artistic, they can easily turn into bizzare audio-visual contructs like "Un Chien Andalou" by Salvador Dali, or some of the works of early Soviet directors like Sergei Eisenstein, who in movies like "October," used the medium almost exclusively to communicate abstract concepts through images. More modern movies like David Lynch's "Eraserhead" fit this bill rather well, too. But this is beyond the point. We are discussing the inherent limits of an endeavor, and movies have proven that they CAN BE high art, even if most are not.

"Is the Sagrada Familia more work of art or church?"

It doesn't matter. It is certainly a work of art, but it is not high art. It has a purpose outside of the art.

"I disagree with you and hold that a videogame does not by necessity become less entertaining or interactive for being more artistic."

We do not disagree. I'm saying that as a game moves closer towards HIGH art, it must necessarily become less a video game because the transition to high art requires the perfection of the artistic expression. A game can be incredibly artistic, much like a building can have incredibly artistic flourishes, but the gestalt of the game, same as the building, cannot be high art because it does not exist for its own sake.

PARTS OF the game can conceivably be high art, much as a sculpture adorning the outside of a building can be high art, but we're not arguing about the textures, or the 3d models in the game, which are just virtual representations of things that are certainly high art, namely painting and scuplpting.

"I think there re games that are much more interactive that myst, such as shadow of the colossus or kingdom hearts, that are also much more "artsy" than myst."

I used Myst to illustrate that it was closer to high art than games with higher degrees of control. It is still NOT high art, but since the angles and positions were all pre-chosen and rendered by the programmers, Myst is closer to high art than a game like Halo, which provides freedom that exceeds the expectations of the programmer. For example, in Halo, I can break out of the game map and wander around in un-programmed nether space outside of the map. This is impossible in a painting or music. I cannot break out of what the artist intended me to see.

Even high art that is interactive, if I succesfully break out of the pre-programmed area, its status as high art is not lost because the very control that allowed me to break out is PART OF the art. In Halo, the control was required to maintain its status as a game.

"Finally, I'd like to assess the point of "high" art. I don't know what your definition of high art is, but I think it's agreeable in a crude sense that it involves those works of art that are placed in the highest regard in a culture, perhaps as a sort of consensus. It might seem like a circular argument, but to me, the simple fact that the subject of this article is being displayed so prominently at MoMa, one of the most renown institutios for the display of modern art, demonstrates that videogames can be high art."

High art is art that exists for its own sake. That is essentially the definition of high art. Cultural acceptance or recognition has nothing to do with it, since high art is frequently seen as trash by the culture that spawned it, and only recognized as masterworks years, or even generations later.

"It might seem like a circular argument, but to me, the simple fact that the subject of this article is being displayed so prominently at MoMa, one of the most renown institutios for the display of modern art, demonstrates that videogames can be high art."

Yes, but the fact that it is a game is saying something explicit. He could have said what he wanted to say in some other way, but he chose a game. That means that the control itself MEANS SOMETHING outside of simply being a game. It stops being merely a video game and becomes an interactive art installation. Ubisoft does not have the choice of making the next Splinter Cell as something other than a game, like, say, an enormous flip-book.

Similarly, I can take a game like Halo and present it as art, but it's not the game that I want to communicate. As the artist, I'm saying that something about this is art to me, and I am trying to communicate that. Perhaps it's the time in which the game was made. Perhaps I want to make a statement about agression. Regardless, the art lies above the game in this scenario where the game merely becomes part of the greater statement.

"If art is indeed about using deliberately placing elements to affect the senses, emotions, or intellect, then I do not see how interaction takes away from that, and in fact I believe it usually strengthens it. Even though videogames are made to allow human interaction, all the elements the player interacts with are deliberately placed by the developers. In my opinion, a videogame, as art, is both medium and "synergistic container". Medium, by being able to affect emotions through the happenings in the game. What does it matter if it happens slightly differently for each player, if they will still generally be receiving the same themes, going through the same story?"

The interaction can certainly strengthen certain things, but the fact that the interaction is REQUIRED negates games as a perfectly communicative medium. The fact that every person experiences the game differently, while seemingly innocuous,is actually the killing blow to games as high art. Unless that difference in experience is purposely put in, it's not high art. High art requires the, at least, theoretical perfection of an expression. Because games require interaction, that theoretical limit is negated.

Video Games and Art

Roger Ebert has recently apologized for saying that video games can never be high art. I have no idea why.

He's right, 100%. Video games can never be high art as a function of their nature as video games.

A good example of this is the Halo games and Halo books. I was a HUGE halo player back in the day, so I read some of the Halo books. In the books, the star, the Master Chief, also the character that the player controls, is a near-unstoppable juggernaut who can run 50mph, lift cars, and pull off Matrix-like movies. In the game, he can barely keep up with ordinary soldiers, and if he kills enough of his own guys, they turn into super-soldiers and kill him.

Why the difference? Because the perfect narrative of the book allows things that the game doesn't. This isn't a deficit that better game design is going to overcome. The game will always be limited by the interactive aspect, which necessitates rules and consistency. A purely artistic narrative allows things like Finnegan's Wake. Just imagine something like that as a game!

Games as far as the narrative goes can be high art, but that's not the game, that's the controlled narrative. Games can be artistic, but there's a huge difference between artistic and high art. High art is the perfected expression of the artist, something that rules and controls render impossible.

Roger Ebert Apologizes: 'I Was A Fool For Mentioning Video Games' (The Huffington Post)

Video Game Cover Designs

Kotaku has an incredibly interesting interview with a graphic artist discussing how crappy box art for video games are in the United States.

He laments how cover art for movies and books can be much more interpretive and abstract than the default "Hero + Logo = Box art" formula. And I agree with him; video game covers are pretty bad.

But I disagree with his assertion that movie covers are any better. The VAST majority of DVD covers and movie posters are the exact same thing. I didn't use his fomula, but I referred to them as facecovers. Pick up any DVD at Wal-Mart, or go to Amazon, go to the movie section and bring up a big-ass list of DVD's. It's all a bunch of faces. Hell, some are nothing but a giant face.

The only movies that break the mold are the special editions. The ones designed to look a little special. Take, for example, the recent release of Inglorious Basterds...


It's a well-designed cover, but it's just an exercise in wedging as many faces into it as possible. They did a good job of it, but, man. So, now, take the movie's two-disc special edition.


It's amazing! It's as though the box designers are totally aware that the default design looks like the default design, and they exploit that to make the special edition cover look better.

I suppose then, if that's the case, they're brilliant. Do something for so long it looks like shit, then sell the ones that don't look like shit for more money because people want it. I like this explanation better than the interviewee's, where they simply recognize that hard-core fans are more forgiving of odd images. I think that they're just more critical of crappy covers.

Judging The Covers Of Games, And How To Make Them Better (Kotaku.com)

Jackson Christ

This is absurd.

People claim that Jackson Pollock hid his name in a painting. I can't even begin to explain how silly this is. For one thing, after learning what I was supposed to be looking for "Jackson Pollock," I went through the image and found the name. I then clicked on the full-size image of the painting to see where it was and, lo and behold, none of the letters I had found corresponded to the letters that supposedly exist. More interesting, many of the letters I found are more distinct than the ones listed. That means that if I found the name in the chaos, and someone else found the name in entirely different lines in the chaos, it either means that Pollock hid his name many times, or there's nothing there.

An experiment: I will try and find my name "Aaron Martin-Colby," in the chaos. It took me less than two minutes to do it.

There was a window near my local Stop & Shop that had an image of Bozo the Clown in it at certain times to day.

People see Jesus in almost anything.

After the DaVinci Code, people see secrets and codes in almost anything. If you're simply looking for patterns, post hoc analysis of anything is going to yield lots of crap that seems to make sense and be significant, but in all likelihood isn't. It's called pareidolia, and it's illustrated perfectly in this episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit.

Designing With Purpose.

I hate artists.

I have a lot of friends that are either currently in, or have gone to, art school. There is a strange prevailing notion that if you must survive by selling your art in a commercial sense, then you have failed. As though not getting people to part with god-awful gobs of money for your artistic flights of fancy which you have barfed onto paper, or clay, or stone, means that you are not a TRUE artist.

I think that this is entirely backwards. Art for art's sake is art, but it's also useless. Unless you attach a purpose to it, then you've achieved nothing. Is the purpose to inform? To entertain? To enlighten? Great books live on, enriching and delighting people generation after generation. There is value in that. A painting can have purpose, but the artist must know what it is. The artist must know what he is trying to communicate.

Art is best when it has that purpose. Art without purpose is aesthetic masturbation in the same way that the more esoteric aspects of philosophy are mere mental masturbation. Fun for the person doing it, but why should anyone else care?

I hate artists who think of themselves as geniuses. Andy Warhol, for all of the cool things he created, was not a genius. He was a self-centered twat who thought the absolute world of himself. If Warhol had never lived, the world would be damn near identical to how it is, now. And what have you done as an artist? Why is a painting by any of the manifold artists alive today worth a gajillion dollars? What value does it have that any other aesthetic production doesn't have?

You do not succeed as an artist by selling blowing an artistic cum load to people who are so puzzled by this strange thing whizzing past them called life that they need to reach out and grasp at experiential things to validate their own seemingly meaningless existence. Art critics, grand galleries, bah! It's all worthless.

From an economic standpoint, I cannot argue with the financial value of many of the paintings. They are worth what someone will pay. If someone is willing, regardless of whether I think them an idiot or not, that's how much it's worth. But the entire system built up around that process. The critics who give thumbs-up or thumbs-down, the rich fools who fall in line and purchase and re-purchase as though they have some fundamentally valuable resource.

I find it no surprise at all that all the hollow, ridiculous fools who populated Wall Street, donated such epic amounts of their money to the arts. They began to realize how inconsequential and pointless their little life of number games was. And what do fools without a sense of existential confidence do? The turn to art. Half of the museums in New York announced financial problems as soon as all the rich twits funding them went bankrupt.

There is no value to art for art's sake. It must do something. That end goal may be artistic, but the application must be understood. Some pompous shit can't just barf onto canvas and expect that someone will want it for $50,000. He must know what his art is for.

And that's the key problem. So many artists think that art is an existentially pure entity. They think that it can exist by itself, free of other things. I argue that it cannot. It must be attached to something. Whether it's a painting for a room, or a wall; or a sculpture to welcome people to a stadium. Art is the icing on the cake, but artists think that it's all that exists. A room without a painting is still a room that can be lived in. What is a painting sitting in a field? It's nothing. It's paint on paper in a pattern that is meaningful to only a few.

I love art. Flights of artistic fancy in architecture give a building character, communicate something about the architect, the time, the place, truly the zeitgeist of the building's construction. An artistic building is more valuable than a non-artistic building, but it must still be a building.

Even a great work of art like Starry Night. Once it is created, people enjoy it, they stare at it. But what do they do with it? They put in on their computer desktop. They get a poster of it for their bedroom. They get it on a credit card (like me). They enjoy it as art for its own sake, but they apply it to things. They apply it to the trappings of life, of which art is not a part. They use art to make life better, but art without that life is worthless.

Why am I ranting about this? Because I think that pestilence of opinion in art schools does a disservice to art students. Instead of encouraging them to find new and novel ways to apply their art to things, they are told that art as anything other than a mere expression is inferior. And if you fail at that, well youre' just not good enough.

In economic terms, you are making a product. It is your job to make people want your product. I got to the websites of artists who only upload low-res versions of their work, and then try and sell prints. No! No no no no! You should be doing your best to disseminate your work, get it out there. Give it away! If you don't know what to do with your work, let others see it and decide. You may get a commission to do a mural on a wall. Or a portrait of a family dog. Art was once like that. The great artists of the renaissance usually made their money appealing to the vagaries of the wealthy. They loved their art, but they knew what they made. They made a product that they damn well better sell.

By that useless art school paradigm, 99.9% of artists will fail. By my paradigm, you can become a world-renowned artist, or a great local one, and everything in between. There are many different levels of success in a world of art-as-product, but very few levels of failure.

What is art?

I've talked before about my belief that art is much more important than many "practical" or "scientific" people are likely to say. While the truth of the world, whatever that may be, certainly won't be found in art, people perceive the world in artistic, interpretive ways. Art is reality vis a vis the human. As such, I think art as far as humanity is concerned is at least of equal importance to more abstract, harder sciences like physics and chemistry.

As such, what we call art is pretty important. How do we define art and what makes legitimate art or ersatz art. Indeed, is it even possible to have ersatz art?

I've always felt that art as art is the opposite of poetry. Poetry is eliciting images with words, while art is eliciting words with images. While they could both be considered "art," I don't say a beautiful poem is artistic, I say it's beautifully poetic. Both poetry and art are forms of expression in a totally human way. Truly, art can only be human, since whatever we find communcative does so on an emotional level, and our emotions are an evolutionary construct unique to us. We have no idea what an alien species would consider art because we don't understand their condition.

The art OF something is any non-quantitative analysis of an endeavor. The art of talking/flying/fencing/war. Anything that is quantitative necessarily becomes science or at least science-like.

I don't think there really is such a thing as bad or good art, only what underlies the art can be good or bad. Two books are fundamentally different, it's just that one book can be a hollow, inane story while another can be a complex masterpiece. The underlying message is what matters and how complex and well-communicated it is.

I guess to what degree skill allows the expression of those underlying ideas could be considered to be good or bad art. But that doesn't really make it better "art," it just makes it a better painting, and a good painting can have a great deal of, or next to no, artistic merit.

But the skill with which the former is exercised must always be taken into account, so in that sense, ersatz art can exist. But it's not specifically ersatz in its creation, since its creation might have had no artistic motivation at all. The art may exist in interpretation alone.

For example, I read two abstract poems. Neither is grammatically or syntactically coherent. It's chaos in words. But one is poetry, the other is nonsense. The first was written by a master of the language, who has proven in the past to write beauttifully coherent poetry. The second was garbled nonsense written by someone who doesn't even speak the language. Art and poetry are both expression, and if the artist or poet doesn't have the requisite tools for expression, than it can't be art.

But say I don't know the second poem was written by someone who doesn't know the language. I may read it and find it to be a powerfully moving poem. Even though the end result is the same, I don't think it's art. Art is expression, not interpretation. I can have a moving experience looking at a grand vista, but that's not art. It's not human. If we put the onus on the interpreter, anything can become art and render the label useless.

But back to assertion that art is the usage of imagery to elicit words. I say words as opposed to emotions because our world, truly our very selves, are constructed of words. While happiness and fear are both abstract emotions, we operate on our interpretations of them and application of words as labels to fully define each emotion. For example, fear and elation, physiologically, are very similar. Similar levels of neurotransmitters and hormones, but our interpretations of each emotion are radically different.

It is true there are underlying "truths" behind those words, but we don't operate on those. We operate linguically, with ourselves and with others. I don't deny that a human could operate roughly as a human without language, but the few examples we have of children being raised without langugage to structure their minds and worlds show them to be the proverbial wild children. Language allows us to construct a complex network if beliefs, apply labels, and then integrate new things into that system based on rules assocaited with the labels.





While we have vague emotions that may be difficult to apply words to, I think art's ability to communicate, and how good the art is, must be measured by how well words can be applied to it.

In the Wikipedia entry on art, it says that "a cup, which ostensibly can be used as a container, may be considered art if intended solely as an ornament." I actually think that this restricts art in such an un-needed way. Art is nothing more than communication, and in that sense, any human creation has an artistic element to it because no matter how rigid or objective the creator may try to be, they are still trying to communicate something with the creation.

That cup is artistic because all cups communicate something. For example, the cup on the left. It's highly ornamental. It is artistic. But why is it artistic? What words does it elicit? The closer we can get to a generally accepted set of words, the more effective the art has been at expressing what it's trying to express. I see "luxurious," "leisure," "wealthy," "decadent," "royal," and a multitude of other words. That's how I frame my interpretation of the cup. I use words. And whether I like the cup or not is super-subjective. If I want to feel rich, I may like it. If I hate rich people and listen to lots of Rage Against the Machine, I'd hate the cup, but it can't be denied what the cup communicates. It is, in that sense, perfect art. But it also highlights how incredibly subjective even that is. For example, why does the cup communicate those things? It does so because of a shared history. We all understand decadent European and classical history, which this cup elicits. For someone not aware of that, the cup may still communicate its being expensive, and detailed, and wealthy, but perhaps not the undertones of decadence and royalty, or of classical culture. As our culture becomes more global, the shared artistic language will probably allow greater universality of these artistic concepts.

Now let's look at the cup to the right. No grand details, or metal accents. It literally is just a cup. But think about the designer and what words the cup elicitis. Simplicity. Humbleness. Directness. An almost clinical level of cleanliness. This is the cup of a man who wears a perfectly pressed suit to work every day. That is the cup the designer wanted to make, or else they would have designed it differently. Even something seemingly simple communicates ideas when the human condition is applied to it. As such, there is art in every cup. If a cup is used as an ornament, like in the Wikipedia entry, then whatever artistic quality is in it insofar as it communicates words is added to its quality of being a cup. So its nature as a cup is now used to communicate something artistic in the endeavor. For example, I make a decadent cup like the first example and it communicates ideas like wealth and royalty. I then take those cups and glue them to a female mannequin, now, not only do the cups express wealth, they express being a cup. Now my art can be seen as expressing a woman's need to appear rich and able to entertain. This new usage of its nature as a cup to express art doesn't negate that it has artistic qualities separate from being a cup.

Moreover, my earlier example of a non-speaker using a language to write abstract poetry doesn't apply here. A designed cup must be understood be its designer. It's impossible to have an abstract cup. Because if the artist creates something abstract, like Barbara Hepworth, and I find I am able to use it as a vessel for storing fluid, it doesn't matter because the artist never called it a cup. Just because I can "interpret" it as a cup, as in use it to store fluid, that doesn't mean it's a cup. It can still elicit words. For example, a curvacious abstract piece can appear feminine and human, and elicit words like "sexy," or "relaxed." It's still art. It's just not a cup. And those interpretations requires a more basic understanding of the human condition. It requires an understanding of human form, as opposed to the trappings of more advanced human life, like dishes.

Still, the important factor in all of these is what words the art communicates. If the art can't be broken down into words, its effectiveness as art is limited. That's one of the problems with abstract art, and why we have comical cases of five-year-olds selling paintings for thousands. I'm not saying that there is no artistic merit to the works, it's just that when we obfuscate expression under chaos, it must be tightly controlled to be communicative. Moreover, only very broad concepts can be communicated. You can't hide details in chaos; they get lost.

Art is an expression of the human condition. The human condition is defined by words and labels; It's how we organize our world. Thus, art must be defined by words and labels. And so my defition of art as using visuals to elicit words.

S.O.D.

After posting about Adam Savage's elegy for American science, it got me thinking.

I'm an amateur scientist, but I'm a professional designer and engineer. I think about design all the time and read just about every magazine or book there is on the subject. I can bemoan the same thing about American design and ingenuity.

They were once the very best in the world. While other countries may build amazing things, they would always turn to the American design and engineering firms to actually get the job done. That's no longer the case.

I can pick out any area, any focus, and the number of excellent submissions coming out of America has nearly disappeared. While there are many publications that focus on the American market, the international magazines rarely feature our country. China's new creative class is showing us how it's done, and even Europe has left us behind.

I can't even remember the last time I heard something great about an American architect. Of the 11 Pritzker Prizes for architecture handed out from its inception in 1979 to 1989, a US architect won it 6 times. From 1990 to 2008, and likely 2009, we've won it twice. And one of those years was a win by dark horse candidate Thom Mayne.

And what about American industrial design, or consumer products, or clothing? We were fairly well-represented in the IDEA awards, but those skew American because, duh, they're sponsored by BusinessWeek. And even there, of the seven design schools represented, only one was from the US. We've got Apple, but we know their language. They did the original iPod and then, six years later, the iPhone. The MacBook Air was a breakthrough only to Apple fanatics.

I think one of our major problems is exactly what these major, entrenched companies adore, our draconian and ridiculous patent and copyright system. If a company dares innovate or break new ground, they are undoubtedly sued. Apple has been sued near countless times, and Nintendo with their innovative Wii, has of course been sued. I could go on and on and ON about our patent system basically needing to be shot, but the website TechDirt explains why our system is broken apparently beyond repair in much better fashion. When your reward for breaking ground is a lawsuit, there's not much motivation to do anything.

And yet, the East Asian market (which our American companies do nothing but bitch about as a no-mans-land of piracy, lax IP laws, and terrible, uninventive, outlaws who do nothing but steal our ingenious, American ideas) is exploding on the international scene.

Yep. Oh, and back to that list of design schools: Samsung Design Membership (Korea), Hong Ik University (Korea), Seoul National (Korea), Hanyang University (Korea), Royal College of Art (United Kingdom), University of Wuppertal (Germany). Those sad, wannabe schools of design. Stealing all of our ideas and winning awards with them. Tragic.

Another grand example, and by grand, I mean GRAND. Where are all the new buildings being built? Where are all the limits being pushed? Where do the structures look like they sprang from an imagination unhindered by reality? Oh right. Dubai. And China. And Taiwan. And Russia. Hell, even South America. Just not here.

I think a lot of that has to do with how expensive the US has gotten. It's SO pricey to do anything here, nobody is bothering anymore. We have unionized workers who get paid $40 an hour to lay brick (nothing against bricklayers, it's quite a skill). The other countries may have poor workers' rights laws, but boy do they get stuff done. There has to be a middle ground.

Or insurance costs. It costs more to insure an architecture firm, the construction, and everyone involved in the US than in any other country on Earth. You can be sued because your idea is cool, sued if idea takes off, and sued if your idea fails. Big surprise no one wants to do anything in our fucked-up country, anymore.

Architecture as Life

In my recent post, I discussed advancing design in various areas. I thought about Frank Gehry, who has done some of the more iconic work of the 20th century, such as the Bilbao Guggenheim. I then came upon an article at the Project for Public Spaces discussing how the Bilbao museum is a piece of shit. Not artistically, mind you. The author avoids discussion of that to focus on the practical problems of such a strange building and how it has actually damaged Bilbao as much as it helped it.

I agree with the primary assertion that the building sits not to be integrated, but to literally stand out. Obviously, that was the purpose, to stand out and put Bilbao on the international map, but the building stands out in an unfriendly and impractical way. It does not accommodate life, it accommodates itself, and that's it. It has no interest in being part of anything. It is an icon that stands on its own. It has no forums, no public spaces, no areas where people can gather. You go there to marvel and then move the fuck on because there is nothing else to do.

This reminds me of an article about Frank Gehry's supposed arrogance, and how that shows through in a building that is built under the assumption that people should be grateful to have the building, to look upon it, and nothing else. I frequently deride avant garde films because they are tragically self important and tearfully unentertaining. A movie is entertainment. If it is not entertainment, then it is a very long, moving painting. Art is fine, but do not create art under the guise of making a movie, because if you call it a movie, it damn well better be entertaining. Spielberg recognizes this and makes great films that are also great to watch. The self-important wannabe film makers than call him a sellout. I scoff in their face. There's a damn good reason he's rich and you're a loser. Do I sound venomous enough?

Architecture is the same thing. A building must be a building first and art second, or it sucks. I'm sorry. If it's not a building, it's a HUGE fuck-off sculpture that a few people can sort of stand in. Not a building not a building not a building. Any great architectural achievement must, by virtue of being great, be integrated with, be absorbed with, and augment the surrounding area.

Granted, any arrogance on Gehry's part would pale in comparison to Frank Lloyd Wrights supposed arrogance. And Wright was also guilty of architecture as art when he butted heads with an engineer/contractor over some trusses at Falling Water. The engineer said part of the house would collapse unless it was reinforced, Wright disagreed. The Engineer went behind Wright's back and reinforced the building, and today if he hadn't, that section of the house would have likely collapsed. When you're not an engineer, listen to one when he speaks. Jackass.

Seeing Life From a New Angle

Well, I'm not dead. I've been concentrating on my food blog. I think about cars a lot. I'm a man and I figure that this is genetic. One of the things that strikes me is the rut that automotive design is in. I'm not talking about concept designs, those are frequently amazingly inventive, but about actual production cars.

I actually hate concept cars for that very fact. The incredible ideas and designs almost never make it into production. No matter how avant-garde or on-the-edge a car company claims to be, the designs end up derivative. The production cars are always pale shadows of the wondrous concept cars. I also hate how there's this phenomenon is explained by company insiders as a result of fear, fear that a car will be ahead of its time. The examples they inevitably cite are the Cord 810 and Ford Edsel.

They talk as though the Edsel was ahead of its time. The Cord was too fancy-looking. The public just wasn't ready and highlight all these futuristic aspects of the cars to support their idea. Well, no. The Edsel failed because it was ugly, poorly built, and aside from the flying vagina on the front, was a thoroughly conventional car. The Cord would have been a success if not for some serious quality problems, poor funding and terrible dealer support.

No, they were not too tomorrow. In fact, I don't think there's such a thing. Actually, yes. I totally agree with myself. I declare that there is no such thing as "ahead of its time." I say that there are half-baked ideas that become prescient in retrospect, but they failed not because their time hadn't come. They failed because they were irreparably crappy in some important way.

I think the auto industry and industry in general is in desperate need of fresh eyes. People who look at a situation and come up with wildly divergent ideas about providing product to that situation. Imagine a family car with three wheels, the doors consist of the entire side of the car, two seats in front, one in back, and powered by electricity. Or imagine a car that starts life is something the size of a Mini Cooper, but allows for the purchase of modules that simply snap on to the base, extending utility.

And while I say that automobiles triggered this thought line, I mean to extend this to ALL areas of design and life. This is innovation in its purest sense. Apple did a good job of this with the iPhone, but they didn't take it nearly far enough. They completely rethought the cell phone and made their eventual product purely Apple. The iPhone is also a fabulous example of innovation because it was a monstrous success because, surprise, the company actually thought it out and backed it fully! My god! What a novel concept! If it had failed, people would have undoubtedly called it ahead of its time.

This is a cry out to major corporations, not the microscopic, poorly funded ones full of edgy designers fresh from RISD or IT. The little guys are great thinkers but they suck balls at doing business. That's why none of them are successful. Edison had it 100% right. You take your profits and plow them all back into making more inventions. You innovate and you never stop innovating. His electric light was certainly ahead of its time, but he knew business first and invention second. If you make something, figure out how to sell it. If you can't sell it, you're doing something wrong.

What the hell happened to that spirit? We have wide-eyed innovators who couldn't sell fire to Eskimos because the block-headed businessmen are too busy selling them ice cubes. We are in desperate need of a complete re-thinking of our design and engineering in pick a subject. Personal computers need it, rather badly I might add. Housing and architecture is in such desperate need of it the world is now aware of it.

The businesses that develop these technologies get into such ruts that, whether they mean to or not, they never seem to get out. They become locked into a particular rule set that forces them to continue making a product according to what has come before instead of injecting re-thinks into the equation. We're limited by what we can reasonably do, for sure, but even if we dance dangerously close to the limit of practicality, what results can be a reasonable success, foment future innovation, and build strength; e.g. the original Macintosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the self-parking Lexus. When innovation is applied to brutal practicality, the result can be so simple it's a wonder that it isn't applied to everything, such as the environmental advances done in the Bank of American tower in New York.

For an object that was not ahead of its time, just stupid, I look to the Segway Human Transport Device. This two wheeled badge of geekiness has been an utter failure. It was hyped to the point of pain and ended up being a complete and total let-down. It's not because Dean Kamen was living in the future, it's because he has a great idea that he just can't package correctly to make it important. It's interesting that two great salesmen, not engineers, were the ones to rip the Segway a new one well before its release: Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos.

To move the world forward, we need a massive meeting of salesmen, to figure out what to make, engineers to figure out how to make it, and designers to package it in a way that truly impresses. If we could do this once a year, technological advance would probably accelerate.