Epistemic Status: Not a cohesive theory of community art perception/criticism, just speculation that two or more things are related
For those who haven't seen it, Scott posted his latest piece on architecture, last night, a review of Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus To Our House.". The comments are pretty similar to past comments. I'm less interested in the question of why people do or don't like modern architecture (there's a lot of variation in quality, and tastes vary - of course it's polarizing) than the variation in discernment over McMansions, a type of architecture defined by qualities that are a) bad and b) to me, fall in to the category of "once you see it, you can't unsee it."
For our purposes, I'll use the guide from McMansion Hell (https://mcmansionhell.com/post/149284377161/mansionvsmcmansion, https://mcmansionhell.com/post/149563260641/mcmansions-101-mansion-vs-mcmansion-part-2), which includes simple heuristics like Relationship to the Landscape: Often, a New Traditional mansion carefully considers its environment and is built to accentuate, rather than dominate it. A McMansion is out of scale with its landscape or lot, often too big for a tiny lot. and Architectural and Stylistic Integrity: The best New Traditional houses are those who are virtually indistinguishable from the styles they represent. McMansions tend to be either a chaotic mix of individual styles, or a poorly done imitation of a previous style. This house in Texas invokes four separate styles: the Gothic (the steep angle of the gables), Craftsman (the overhanging eaves with braces), French (the use of stone and arched 2nd story windows), and Tudor Revival (the EIFS half-timbering above the garage), each poorly rendered in a busy combination of EIFS coupled with stone and brick veneers. (Follow the links for annotated photos.)
These criteria are really heuristics - part two includes a house that could go either way, with arguments on each side - but they aren't "rocket surgery" to apply, it's just a matter of discernment; why can't everyone learn to apply the criteria, whether or not they share the opinion that McMansions are bad architecture? The criteria of mixing styles can require more consideration than the others - it takes some scrutiny to determine if stylistic elements were mixed in a thoughtful manner - and whether or not the styles are complementary is a matter of taste, but most of it is pretty simple.
[Edit 1: I was thinking of this at the time, but too lazy to go back to the ACX post to incorporate it - this is similar to how an artist friend of Scott's discribed how she identified an AI-generated image as AI art and why she disliked it. Once you see it, can you unsee it? Does it change how much you enjoy the image?]
This reminded me of a video jazz musician and YouTuber Adam Neely made on the question of whether Laufey's music is within the jazz genre. TL;DW, no, he puts her alongside 1950s pop that borrowed from the same set of musical styles as jazz of the period, but applied those stylistic elements to pop songs, rather than a musical form defined more by improvisation (especially group improvisation) than aesthetic. One clip used in the video is someone asking why it matters if jazz musicians don't recognize Laufey's music as jazz - good point; why are we asking the question, in the first place? My speculation is that Laufey's fans want her music to be considered jazz, not pop that has stylistic elements in common with jazz, because jazz has cultural cachet and drawing a distinction between jazz and superficially similar pop music would be perceived as gatekeeping or snobbery. In light of the precedent of 1950s pop, this is rather silly - jazz musicians aren't turning their noses up at Sinatra and Bennett - but, in addition to being denied the cachet associated with jazz appreciation, I can imagine that being told you lack the discernment to tell jazz from non-jazz feels like being told you lack taste.
Discernment and taste are distinct phenomena; if Scott tells me that he agrees with the criteria for distinguishing McMansions from other architecture, we establish inter-rater reliability for this, but he disagrees that they're bad design, I'll accept that he is capable of discerning the style, while declaring our tastes to be different. But Scott writes that architecture buffs tell him about superior modern architecture he might like and he can't discern the difference. To what extent is the discussion of architecture unproductive because people are conflating discernment and taste?
If you can't discern the difference between two things and someone else says that they have strong opinions over their respective quality, do you question your discernment or their taste? In the absence of a prior that you need to cultivate your abilities of discernment, I would speculate that you are more likely to question the other person's taste and are liable to come to the conclusion that their discernment is arbitrary, from which it follows that they're engaging in snobbery. Counter-Snobbery would be to reject the "arbitrary" distinction or, if conceding that there is a distinction, embrace the supposed "lesser" of the two things.
If you can't discern the difference between two things and someone else says that they have strong opinions over their respective quality... what do YOU do?
[Edit 2: While this was in the mod queue, Scott published a new post on theories of taste. Some of the commenters are commenting along the lines of a causal relationship between developing abilities of discernment with changes in taste, without using those terms. Interestingly, neither Scott nor a commenter went back to that section of the AI art post, even though the new post begins "Recently we’ve gotten into discussions about artistic taste (see comments to AI Art Turing Test..."]
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Notes -
How can anyone say an entire medium isn't 'art'? There's no agreed definition for art, just feelings and status. After decades of 'modern art' visually indistinguishable from detritus it's far too late for these pretentious critics to start battening down the hatches and enforcing rigorous standards.
But Ebert can't even do that, he can't even define what he's talking about. There is no reason given why player choice prevents art (and there are many games without player choice). There is no substance in his argument, just a vague assertion that it's unworthy of comparison with the great dramatists. Nor does he even know much about video games:
Literally everyone can say this. Selling pork chops at the supermarket isn't "art," no matter how many emotions it may make you feel to observe the process in action. This is a complete non sequitur. "Choice of medium" in fact has no bearing on whether an act can be considered "art," and, in truth, the correct question should be "how can anyone say an entire medium is art?" Art is defined by being an act whose principal purpose is creative expression of the creator (this is why video games fail to be art; once they're put in the hands of the player, the creator has no control over the creative expression. A "Let's Play" of a video game might be considered "art," depending upon the intent of the uploader; the game itself never can be). There are no shortage of films, television shows, and songs that are not, and do not aspire to be, anything more than commercial cash grabs. I am fully of the belief that, no matter how much I enjoyed The Transformers as a young boy glued to the TV set in the early 80's, those were 22-24 minute long commercials for toys, not art.
An artistic work being of poor quality doesn't change the fact that it's art; and in fact, pointing out how it's low quality is part of criticism.
Thank you for illustrating perfectly the point I mentioned in my post; that this isn't in fact a debate about whether video games are "art," but a completley confused, cargo-cult belief that if the skeptics can just be convinced that video games count as "art," then that means the hobby is valid.
Have you ever played a video game in your life? This is a serious question. If you have, then you would know that video games usually require the player to go through a linear series of challenges as designed by their creator. The creator controls the music, the art, they create the environment for the strategic and tactical choices of the player, they write out scripts and behaviours and scripted events. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure game but with more latitude. The creator has huge control over the creative expression their audience perceives. There are such things as horror games. There are such concepts as atmosphere and level design. Storytelling has been incorporated in video games for some years now!
Either you have not played video games, or you do not understand them at any significant depth.
And even in the more freeform games like minecraft, why does giving the audience more opportunities to do their own thing render it not artistic? Why have you arrived at this definition? Did you even know that this was the reasoning Ebert gave when he said that video games weren't art before I brought it up? I see no shadow of it in your earlier post.
It would be trivial to argue that because video games grant a higher and more expansive level of creator-audience interaction than lesser mediums like prose or sculpture, that they are a higher form of art, encompassing and surpassing all other mediums.
I also find it rather bizarre that you introduce selling pork chops at the supermarket - something that is clearly not a medium in the sense that I meant it. Any reasonable person would not consider selling pork chops at the supermarket to be a medium. A non sequitur indeed.
No, it is not a serious question. I will not entertain this discussion any further, as you are incapable of being reasoned with.
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(Emphasis added)
The bolded part just isn't true, though. The creator of a video game has complete control over the creative expression when the game is being played, because the creative expression of the game creator isn't in the playing of the game, it's in the structure and rules of the game. In Mario, the creative expression of Nintendo isn't something like "Mario moving from left to right to hit the flag" or whatever, it's "when A is pressed on the button, the pixels and audio coming out of the TV adjust such that the player character appears to hop in the air, when the right button is pressed, they adjust such that the player character appears to walk to the right, accelerating to a run if the button is held down," and every other rule that makes up the game, along with the images, animations, sound effects that accompany those. Those are all within the control of the game creator and outside the control of the player if modding isn't considered (modding would be a whole other case, akin to someone cutting out pages of a published novel and taping in new pages that they wrote themselves).
The fact that each individual player would - and usually should - interact with the rules of game in their own individual unique way based on their own personal quirks and idiosyncratic preferences doesn't change the fact that the rules they're interacting with is under full control of - in fact, it's the only creative expression of - the creators of the game.
I think one can argue that almost every video game doesn't have creative expression of the creators as its principal purpose or even a particular purpose and, as such, they don't count as "art," for whatever it's worth. But I don't see how game creators have any less control over their creative expression than a movie director or painter, just because they're working in an interactive medium. The players interacting with the game all have to interact with the same set of rules and audiovisual representations of those rules, which were set by the creators of the game.
It is, when taken in context with the rest of the statement. Part of the reason I resisted making the jump from the reddit to this site was precisely this sort of argumentative style, where a statement is plucked entirely from its context, and debated with assumptions not part of the original claim. It's a waste of everyone's time.
The claim is that creative expression cannot exist since the player interacts with the programming to create the "work." Therefore, the programmer cannot say what the creative expression "is" any more than the coder of tax preparation software can say his program has "artistic meaning" without the user inputing values, or any more than the designer of a car's ignition system can say his diagram is "artistic expression."
No, it's still false while taking the context of your statement and the entire comment thread here.
But this claim is, again, simply wrong. So what if the player interacts with the programming to create the "work?" The creative expression of the creator of the software is the boundaries that are set on how the player can interact with the programming. As long as the player isn't hacking the game, no matter what choices the player makes while playing the game, the player's choices are within the boundaries that are the creative expression of the game devs.
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That's like saying once a picture is out of the hands of the painter, it stops being art because the viewer might look at the right side of it first or the left, with no control from the creator. How can one ensure proper creative expression?
I don't see how the existence of options in a videogame takes away control from the creator. They literally made all that, and chose to make no more and no less.
No, that's not even close to being a valid inference from my statement. If I change the orientation of a piece of art such that it no longer communicates what the artist intended, then the piece does not cease to be art, but instead becomes my art, as it now expresses what I desire it to, and not the creator intended.
That you would jump to such an unfounded conclusion speaks volumes about the base assumptions on one side of this debate.
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