A brief thought on art and culture

(This was supposed to be the basis for a poem, but out of laziness, I decided to just write it out as a rant.)

One idea that has been occupying my thoughts lately is how bizarre it is that arts can be seen as embodying culture. For example, when someone says that Katy Perry's music reflects some large segment of American culture, or that a community should do more to publicly fund the arts in order to "promote culture."

The reason that this strikes me as so odd is that, in most cases, nothing is more private and individualistic than art and the process by which it comes into being. Every step of the way, from developing one's style to determining subject matter to execution, is a display of individualism. And so at best, it seems to me that collective culture, as far as the arts are involved, is really a constellation of different, radical individualisms.

Or... if we say that American culture, for example, is defined, in large part, by diversity, then no particular works of art or music or dance could be called representative of it. It would be defined by the available spectrum, so to speak, not the individual works... which is a roundabout way of saying that there are no creators of culture, only contributors.

Joseph Brodsky's Nobel lecture

Nobel Lecture December 8, 1987
Translated from the Russian by Barry Rubin

I

For someone rather private, for someone who all his life has preferred his private condition to any role of social significance, and who went in this preference rather far - far from his motherland to say the least, for it is better to be a total failure in democracy than a martyr or the crème de la crème in tyranny - for such a person to find himself all of a sudden on this rostrum is a somewhat uncomfortable and trying experience.

This sensation is aggravated not so much by the thought of those who stood here before me as by the memory of those who have been bypassed by this honor, who were not given this chance to address 'urbi et orbi', as they say, from this rostrum and whose cumulative silence is sort of searching, to no avail, for release through this speaker.

The only thing that can reconcile one to this sort of situation is the simple realization that - for stylistic reasons, in the first place - one writer cannot speak for another writer, one poet for another poet especially; that had Osip Mandelstam, or Marina Tsvetaeva, or Robert Frost, or Anna Akhmatova, or Wystan Auden stood here, they couldn't have helped but speak precisely for themselves, and that they, too, might have felt somewhat uncomfortable.

These shades disturb me constantly; they are disturbing me today as well. In any case, they do not spur one to eloquence. In my better moments, I deem myself their sum total, though invariably inferior to any one of them individually. For it is not possible to better them on the page; nor is it possible to better them in actual life. And it is precisely their lives, no matter how tragic or bitter they were, that often move me - more often perhaps than the case should be - to regret the passage of time. If the next life exists - and I can no more deny them the possibility of eternal life than I can forget their existence in this one - if the next world does exist, they will, I hope, forgive me and the quality of what I am about to utter: after all, it is not one's conduct on the podium which dignity in our profession is measured by.

I have mentioned only five of them, those whose deeds and whose lot matter so much to me, if only because if it were not for them, I, both as a man and a writer, would amount to much less; in any case, I wouldn't be standing here today. There were more of them, those shades - better still, sources of light: lamps? stars? - more, of course, than just five. And each one of them is capable of rendering me absolutely mute. The number of those is substantial in the life of any conscious man of letters; in my case, it doubles, thanks to the two cultures to which fate has willed me to belong. Matters are not made easier by thoughts about contemporaries and fellow writers in both cultures, poets, and fiction writers whose gifts I rank above my own, and who, had they found themselves on this rostrum, would have come to the point long ago, for surely they have more to tell the world than I do.

I will allow myself, therefore, to make a number of remarks here - disjointed, perhaps stumbling, and perhaps even perplexing in their randomness. However, the amount of time allotted to me to collect my thoughts, as well as my very occupation, will, or may, I hope, shield me, at least partially, against charges of being chaotic. A man of my occupation seldom claims a systematic mode of thinking; at worst, he claims to have a system - but even that, in his case, is borrowing from a milieu, from a social order, or from the pursuit of philosophy at a tender age. Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal - however permanent it may be - than the creative process itself, the process of composition. Verse really does, in Akhmatova's words, grow from rubbish; the roots of prose are no more honorable.


II

If art teaches anything (to the artist, in the first place), it is the privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man, knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness - thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous "I". Lots of things can be shared: a bed, a piece of bread, convictions, a mistress, but not a poem by, say, Rainer Maria Rilke. A work of art, of literature especially, and a poem in particular, addresses a man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct - free of any go-betweens - relations.

It is for this reason that art in general, literature especially, and poetry in particular, is not exactly favored by the champions of the common good, masters of the masses, heralds of historical necessity. For there, where art has stepped, where a poem has been read, they discover, in place of the anticipated consent and unanimity, indifference and polyphony; in place of the resolve to act, inattention and fastidiousness. In other words, into the little zeros with which the champions of the common good and the rulers of the masses tend to operate, art introduces a "period, period, comma, and a minus", transforming each zero into a tiny human, albeit not always pretty, face.

The great Baratynsky, speaking of his Muse, characterized her as possessing an "uncommon visage". It's in acquiring this "uncommon visage" that the meaning of human existence seems to lie, since for this uncommonness we are, as it were, prepared genetically. Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one's task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one's own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends. It would be regrettable to squander this one chance on someone else's appearance, someone else's experience, on a tautology - regrettable all the more because the heralds of historical necessity, at whose urging a man may be prepared to agree to this tautology, will not go to the grave with him or give him so much as a thank-you.

Language and, presumably, literature are things that are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature towards the state is essentially a reaction of the permanent - better yet, the infinite - against the temporary, against the finite. To say the least, as long as the state permits itself to interfere with the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of the state. A political system, a form of social organization, as any system in general, is by definition a form of the past tense that aspires to impose itself upon the present (and often on the future as well); and a man whose profession is language is the last one who can afford to forget this. The real danger for a writer is not so much the possibility (and often the certainty) of persecution on the part of the state, as it is the possibility of finding oneself mesmerized by the state's features, which, whether monstrous or undergoing changes for the better, are always temporary.

The philosophy of the state, its ethics - not to mention its aesthetics - are always "yesterday". Language and literature are always "today", and often - particularly in the case where a political system is orthodox - they may even constitute "tomorrow". One of literature's merits is precisely that it helps a person to make the time of his existence more specific, to distinguish himself from the crowd of his predecessors as well as his like numbers, to avoid tautology - that is, the fate otherwise known by the honorific term, "victim of history". What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called "cliché".

Art is a recoilless weapon, and its development is determined not by the individuality of the artist, but by the dynamics and the logic of the material itself, by the previous fate of the means that each time demand (or suggest) a qualitatively new aesthetic solution. Possessing its own genealogy, dynamics, logic, and future, art is not synonymous with, but at best parallel to history; and the manner by which it exists is by continually creating a new aesthetic reality. That is why it is often found "ahead of progress", ahead of history, whose main instrument is - should we not, once more, improve upon Marx - precisely the cliché.

Nowadays, there exists a rather widely held view, postulating that in his work a writer, in particular a poet, should make use of the language of the street, the language of the crowd. For all its democratic appearance, and its palpable advantages for a writer, this assertion is quite absurd and represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case, literature, to history. It is only if we have resolved that it is time for Homo sapiens to come to a halt in his development that literature should speak the language of the people. Otherwise, it is the people who should speak the language of literature.

On the whole, every new aesthetic reality makes man's ethical reality more precise. For aesthetics is the mother of ethics; The categories of "good" and "bad" are, first and foremost, aesthetic ones, at least etymologically preceding the categories of "good" and "evil". If in ethics not "all is permitted", it is precisely because not "all is permitted" in aesthetics, because the number of colors in the spectrum is limited. The tender babe who cries and rejects the stranger or who, on the contrary, reaches out to him, does so instinctively, making an aesthetic choice, not a moral one.

Aesthetic choice is a highly individual matter, and aesthetic experience is always a private one. Every new aesthetic reality makes one's experience even more private; and this kind of privacy, assuming at times the guise of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not as guarantee, then a form of defense against enslavement. For a man with taste, particularly literary taste, is less susceptible to the refrains and the rhythmical incantations peculiar to any version of political demagogy. The point is not so much that virtue does not constitute a guarantee for producing a masterpiece, as that evil, especially political evil, is always a bad stylist. The more substantial an individual's aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer - though not necessarily the happier - he is.

It is precisely in this applied, rather than Platonic, sense that we should understand Dostoevsky's remark that beauty will save the world, or Matthew Arnold's belief that we shall be saved by poetry. It is probably too late for the world, but for the individual man there always remains a chance. An aesthetic instinct develops in man rather rapidly, for, even without fully realizing who he is and what he actually requires, a person instinctively knows what he doesn't like and what doesn't suit him. In an anthropological respect, let me reiterate, a human being is an aesthetic creature before he is an ethical one. Therefore, it is not that art, particularly literature, is a by-product of our species' development, but just the reverse. If what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature - and poetry in particular, being the highest form of locution - is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.

I am far from suggesting the idea of compulsory training in verse composition; nevertheless, the subdivision of society into intelligentsia and "all the rest" seems to me unacceptable. In moral terms, this situation is comparable to the subdivision of society into the poor and the rich; but if it is still possible to find some purely physical or material grounds for the existence of social inequality, for intellectual inequality these are inconceivable. Equality in this respect, unlike in anything else, has been guaranteed to us by nature. I am speaking not of education, but of the education in speech, the slightest imprecision in which may trigger the intrusion of false choice into one's life. The existence of literature prefigures existence on literature's plane of regard - and not only in the moral sense, but lexically as well. If a piece of music still allows a person the possibility of choosing between the passive role of listener and the active one of performer, a work of literature - of the art which is, to use Montale's phrase, hopelessly semantic - dooms him to the role of performer only.

In this role, it would seem to me, a person should appear more often than in any other. Moreover, it seems to me that, as a result of the population explosion and the attendant, ever-increasing atomization of society (i.e., the ever-increasing isolation of the individual), this role becomes more and more inevitable for a person. I don't suppose that I know more about life than anyone of my age, but it seems to me that, in the capacity of an interlocutor, a book is more reliable than a friend or a beloved. A novel or a poem is not a monologue, but the conversation of a writer with a reader, a conversation, I repeat, that is very private, excluding all others - if you will, mutually misanthropic. And in the moment of this conversation a writer is equal to a reader, as well as the other way around, regardless of whether the writer is a great one or not. This equality is the equality of consciousness. It remains with a person for the rest of his life in the form of memory, foggy or distinct; and, sooner or later, appropriately or not, it conditions a person's conduct. It's precisely this that I have in mind in speaking of the role of the performer, all the more natural for one because a novel or a poem is the product of mutual loneliness - of a writer or a reader.

In the history of our species, in the history of Homo sapiens, the book is anthropological development, similar essentially to the invention of the wheel. Having emerged in order to give us some idea not so much of our origins as of what that sapiens is capable of, a book constitutes a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page. This movement, like every movement, becomes a flight from the common denominator, from an attempt to elevate this denominator's line, previously never reaching higher than the groin, to our heart, to our consciousness, to our imagination. This flight is the flight in the direction of "uncommon visage", in the direction of the numerator, in the direction of autonomy, in the direction of privacy. Regardless of whose image we are created in, there are already five billion of us, and for a human being there is no other future save that outlined by art. Otherwise, what lies ahead is the past - the political one, first of all, with all its mass police entertainments.

In any event, the condition of society in which art in general, and literature in particular, are the property or prerogative of a minority appears to me unhealthy and dangerous. I am not appealing for the replacement of the state with a library, although this thought has visited me frequently; but there is no doubt in my mind that, had we been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. It seems to me that a potential master of our fates should be asked, first of all, not about how he imagines the course of his foreign policy, but about his attitude toward Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoevsky. If only because the lock and stock of literature is indeed human diversity and perversity, it turns out to be a reliable antidote for any attempt - whether familiar or yet to be invented - toward a total mass solution to the problems of human existence. As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine.

Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature - the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books - we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history. Living in the country I live in, I would be the first prepared to believe that there is a set dependency between a person's material well-being and his literary ignorance. What keeps me from doing so is the history of that country in which I was born and grew up. For, reduced to a cause-and-effect minimum, to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority: of the celebrated Russian intelligentsia.

I have no wish to enlarge upon the subject, no wish to darken this evening with thoughts of the tens of millions of human lives destroyed by other millions, since what occurred in Russia in the first half of the Twentieth Century occurred before the introduction of automatic weapons - in the name of the triumph of a political doctrine whose unsoundness is already manifested in the fact that it requires human sacrifice for its realization. I'll just say that I believe - not empirically, alas, but only theoretically - that, for someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens. And I am speaking precisely about reading Dickens, Sterne, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Balzac, Melville, Proust, Musil, and so forth; that is, about literature, not literacy or education. A literate, educated person, to be sure, is fully capable, after reading this or that political treatise or tract, of killing his like, and even of experiencing, in so doing, a rapture of conviction. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, so was Hitler; as for Mao Zedong, he even wrote verse. What all these men had in common, though, was that their hit list was longer than their reading list.

However, before I move on to poetry, I would like to add that it would make sense to regard the Russian experience as a warning, if for no other reason than that the social structure of the West up to now is, on the whole, analogous to what existed in Russia prior to 1917. (This, by the way, is what explains the popularity in the West of the Nineteenth-Century Russian psychological novel, and the relative lack of success of contemporary Russian prose. The social relations that emerged in Russia in the Twentieth Century presumably seem no less exotic to the reader than do the names of the characters, which prevent him from identifying with them.) For example, the number of political parties, on the eve of the October coup in 1917, was no fewer than what we find today in the United States or Britain. In other words, a dispassionate observer might remark that in a certain sense the Nineteenth Century is still going on in the West, while in Russia it came to an end; and if I say it ended in tragedy, this is, in the first place, because of the size of the human toll taken in course of that social - or chronological - change. For in a real tragedy, it is not the hero who perishes; it is the chorus.


III

Although for a man whose mother tongue is Russian to speak about political evil is as natural as digestion, I would here like to change the subject. What's wrong with discourses about the obvious is that they corrupt consciousness with their easiness, with the quickness with which they provide one with moral comfort, with the sensation of being right. Herein lies their temptation, similar in its nature to the temptation of a social reformer who begets this evil. The realization, or rather the comprehension, of this temptation, and rejection of it, are perhaps responsible to a certain extent for the destinies of many of my contemporaries, responsible for the literature that emerged from under their pens. It, that literature, was neither a flight from history nor a muffling of memory, as it may seem from the outside. "How can one write music after Auschwitz?" inquired Adorno; and one familiar with Russian history can repeat the same question by merely changing the name of the camp - and repeat it perhaps with even greater justification, since the number of people who perished in Stalin's camps far surpasses the number of German prisoncamp victims. "And how can you eat lunch?" the American poet Mark Strand once retorted. In any case, the generation to which I belong has proven capable of writing that music.

That generation - the generation born precisely at the time when the Auschwitz crematoria were working full blast, when Stalin was at the zenith of his Godlike, absolute power, which seemed sponsored by Mother Nature herself - that generation came into the world, it appears, in order to continue what, theoretically, was supposed to be interrupted in those crematoria and in the anonymous common graves of Stalin's archipelago. The fact that not everything got interrupted, at least not in Russia, can be credited in no small degree to my generation, and I am no less proud of belonging to it than I am of standing here today. And the fact that I am standing here is a recognition of the services that generation has rendered to culture; recalling a phrase from Mandelstam, I would add, to world culture. Looking back, I can say again that we were beginning in an empty - indeed, a terrifyingly wasted - place, and that, intuitively rather than consciously, we aspired precisely to the recreation of the effect of culture's continuity, to the reconstruction of its forms and tropes, toward filling its few surviving, and often totally compromised, forms, with our own new, or appearing to us as new, contemporary content.

There existed, presumably, another path: the path of further deformation, the poetics of ruins and debris, of minimalism, of choked breath. If we rejected it, it was not at all because we thought that it was the path of self-dramatization, or because we were extremely animated by the idea of preserving the hereditary nobility of the forms of culture we knew, the forms that were equivalent, in our consciousness, to forms of human dignity. We rejected it because in reality the choice wasn't ours, but, in fact, culture's own - and this choice, again, was aesthetic rather than moral.

To be sure, it is natural for a person to perceive himself not as an instrument of culture, but, on the contrary, as its creator and custodian. But if today I assert the opposite, it's not because toward the close of the Twentieth Century there is a certain charm in paraphrasing Plotinus, Lord Shaftesbury, Schelling, or Novalis, but because, unlike anyone else, a poet always knows that what in the vernacular is called the voice of the Muse is, in reality, the dictate of the language; that it's not that the language happens to be his instrument, but that he is language's means toward the continuation of its existence. Language, however, even if one imagines it as a certain animate creature (which would only be just), is not capable of ethical choice.

A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave - as he thinks at that moment - a trace on the earth. He resorts to this form - the poem - most likely for unconsciously mimetic reasons: the black vertical clot of words on the white sheet of paper presumably reminds him of his own situation in the world, of the balance between space and his body. But regardless of the reasons for which he takes up the pen, and regardless of the effect produced by what emerges from beneath that pen on his audience - however great or small it may be - the immediate consequence of this enterprise is the sensation of coming into direct contact with language or, more precisely, the sensation of immediately falling into dependence on it, on everything that has already been uttered, written, and accomplished in it.

This dependence is absolute, despotic; but it unshackles as well. For, while always older than the writer, language still possesses the colossal centrifugal energy imparted to it by its temporal potential - that is, by all time Iying ahead. And this potential is determined not so much by the quantitative body of the nation that speaks it (though it is determined by that, too), as by the quality of the poem written in it. It will suffice to recall the authors of Greek or Roman antiquity; it will suffice to recall Dante. And that which is being created today in Russian or English, for example, secures the existence of these languages over the course of the next millennium also. The poet, I wish to repeat, is language's means for existence - or, as my beloved Auden said, he is the one by whom it lives. I who write these lines will cease to be; so will you who read them. But the language in which they are written and in which you read them will remain not merely because language is more lasting than man, but because it is more capable of mutation.

One who writes a poem, however, writes it not because he courts fame with posterity, although often he hopes that a poem will outlive him, at least briefly. One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line. Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn't know the way it's going to come out, and at times he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected, often his thought carries further than he reckoned. And that is the moment when the future of language invades its present.

There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the Biblical prophets, revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished for. The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or on alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of dependency on language is, I guess, what they call a poet.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1981-1990, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993. [my emphasis]

(Copypasta from http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1987/brodsky-lecture.html)

Comments on the "video games as art" debate

      

Image source: Grim Fandango (1998)


      IN MANY WAYS, the word art is polyphonous. It has a large number of disparate meanings that we tend to invoke indiscriminately each time we use the term. It's not surprising, then, that when someone argues that so-and-such is not art, there is some kind of backlash, and the case of video games is no exception. Film critic Roger Ebert has kindled this debate over the years by arguing on various occasions that video games are an inherently inferior medium. “No one in or out of the field," he says in one interview, “has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists, and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized, and empathetic.”
      These and other statements of his have brought on a number counter-arguments—some good, some bad—from game critics, designers, players, and people with too much time on their hands. Many of them pointed to the artwork, music, and sounds in games while others identified storytelling techniques that are unique to the medium; some even gave offered examples which are personal favorites of mine like Shadow of the Colossus. But every refutation I've read seems to miss the point, as I see it, in one way or another.
      Recently, Ebert retracted his comments, graciously agreeing with numerous accusations that he didn't know much about video games in the first place and that he was wrong deny outright the artistic possibilities of a medium still in its infancy. Despite this, I find myself―as someone fairly knowledgeable about games―mostly agreeing with his earlier arguments. In truth, it's rare that any game comes anywhere near the mantle of “high art,” as haughty a notion as that is. But it's also rare that games approach the sorts of art that I consider to be the most valuable: art that opens up new conversations, that brings new light to the old and familiar, that has a profound impact on how we experience and make sense of the world. Of course, this sort of art is in short supply in other media as well (and, of course, it's partly because of its scarcity that it's so treasured). Yes, video games have no “Moonlight Sonata” (although the song appears in some of them), no Ulysses, no Ernest Goes to Jail. But, just as there are countless uninspired first-person shooters, there are countless uninspired mystery novels, love songs, and unexceptional paintings. Where I agree with Roger Ebert is with his argument and not with his irreverent use of the word art: that the core experience in video games, as a medium, is not an intuitive vehicle for art as he and I have defined it.
      In their early days, video games were thought of mainly as children's playthings. Grand Theft Auto and other titles have helped to change that perception over time, but the medium hasn't quite outgrown it. And despite the improved graphics and mature content, the center of today's gaming experience is still a kind of toy-driven exhilaration. Bioshock has some Ayn Rand inspired story elements, but they are ultimately a background for shooting things. Myst, Silent Hill 2, Shadow of the Colossus, and Braid are all excellent examples of subtle, evocative storytelling, but they are ultimately about exploration and puzzle solving. In the same ways that Chess is about warfare and Monopoly is about capitalism, their stories are lost in the “action,” so to speak―at best a host to their interactive elements. As Doom creator John Carmack once said, “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”
      As Ebert has noted, there is a basic conflict of purpose between the conventional experiences of video games and the works of other established mediums. Games are usually about overcoming obstacles or playing within the parameters of the game world, while novels and movies are more concerned with characters and storytelling. This is not to say that no video games have taken storytelling seriously. Interactive fiction (text adventures) of the '80s and graphic adventure games and interactive movies of the '90s made story the central focus and reduced game play to a series of decisions to advance particular narratives, with mixed results. The problem with these has generally been that player decisions are mostly superfluous. One path leads to the end, the rest to impasses or “Game Over” screens. Some games have multiple endings, but they are usually analogous to a different final paragraph at the end of a novel. All told, very few game story lines necessitate meaningful player decisions. Most are essentially movies broken up by puzzles, hazards, and errands. Even ambitious titles like Heavy Rain, which offer up more complex choices and consequences, are still far from being considered exemplars of an art form on par with film and literature.
      As eloquently or poorly as some stories are told, high-quality stories in video games are extremely hard to come by. I suppose Grim Fandango is a decent love story; Rez is an interesting experiment with A.I. in existential crisis; and Andrew Plotkin's Shade has its flaws but could not be told in any other way. I'm not suggesting by any stretch that my tastes are universal, but anyone familiar with video games up to this point has to admit that there is a very limited number of games out there which competently—much less masterfully—explore contemporary issues or manage to impart a lasting emotional impression. Simply put, most video games do not focus on these things. They have amusing mechanics with challenges to overcome, and they generally don't need the social commentary and emotional resonance to be successful as games. But in so doing they cannot be so easily classified as art (as I've been using the word).
      However, I may be getting ahead of myself in suggesting that good stories are the only ways to get at these qualities. Some exceptional games are able to achieve these through the game mechanics themselves. fl0w, for example, presents a stylized glimpse into the experiences of tiny organisms, and I can't help but think that Katamari Damacy makes some kind of commentary on consumerism and all of the objects and clutter in our lives. As always, the line between art and not-art is tenuous and ultimately subjective, but I still believe that art which breeds empathy, emotion, and understanding is perhaps harder to come by for games than for novels and movies—due, in large part, to the medium itself rather than shortcomings in terms of what has been offered so far.
      All things said, though, my favorite game to this day is still probably Super Mario Bros. 3. It may not engender empathy or count as "art" based on what I've said, but it's damned fun.

 

Update:

Journey is probably for the best argument I've seen yet for games as art. Absolutely incredible.

Poem 28

An art historian
approaches a
shipping pallet
full with shit
and snapped pencil
ends,

                    thinking:

          Post-gestural
scatological
post-minimalism with
valences of
positivist sociological
            optimism...?

Indeed.

Works of Love

Third essay for creative non-fiction writing. Not even close to finished, but not bad either.

1. Works of Love

---

ii. Creative non-fiction essay 2
i. A Wednesday in Spring

A Wednesday in Spring

My first essay for my creative non-fiction writing class, pre-workshop:

1. A Wednesday in Spring

The specific song I was listening to on my iPod at the moment I wrote of was "Vacant Sky" by I'm Not a Gun. I'm pretty sure it was immediately followed by "As Far As Forever Goes."


3/7 update:

Here it is again, without all those blatant, embarrassing errors.
2. A Wednesday in Spring (First Revision)


3/24 update:

Actually, don't read either of these. I'll have a revised version up before long.

Zezão

1. Lost Art - Zezão
2. Turning the spotlight on Brazil's hidden art

Four recycled essays

The fall semester is over, and I may as well give a few essays a chance to see the light of day. I'll point out, though, that all of these were written in a very short period of time—the first three more so than the last. While I'm not all that fond of any of these, I think that they are all informative. The fourth essay, I would say, is hands down the most insightful, with interesting discussions about multiculturalism, poststructuralism, and the history of literature in the educational system.

(Sorry in advance for the barrage of pop-ups from these links.. you'll get redirected to a PDF eventually. Use a pop-up blocker or, better yet, Firefox)

1. Chocolate in a Global Context (GEOG 100)
2. Realism and the Depiction of Domesticity in American Literature^* (ENGL 322: Post-Civil War American Literature)
3. The Military Industrial Complex in the United States (HIST 129: Post-Civil War American History)
4. The Shifting Canon of "American Literature" (ENGL 322)

* Essay cites course's anthology. William E. Cain's American Literature Vol. 2.

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i. Two recycled essays

Philosophical splurgings (aphorisms)

Something fundamental is left out with that which is poetry for the sake of being poetic, or that which is art for the sake of being artful.

There's nothing easier than philosophy. It ultimately boils down to the obvious or the dogmatic.

Ethics as an inquiry is strictly functional. You first ask what you want and then develop the best means to achieve them.

There is no such thing as "objective" ethics. It's a blatant contradiction.

We're in no position to contemplate ultimate ends; our vantage point won't permit it.

The question of Good and Evil is too reliant on ontological categories to be tenable. If you remove the ontology from our language, you'd soon wonder what it was that was ever being asked about it.

Subjectivity is simply a perspective on the world. (A microcosm.)

What separates ethics and wanton preferences is the articulation of reason. Mutually shared "ends" are the only things that lend ethics credibility.

"De gustibus non est disputandum." That's all you ever need know about aesthetics.

Education is necessarily biased. Constraints on time and subject content guarantee this.

Masterpieces of Modern Art

Robert Ryman. Twin. 1966.


Robert Rauschenberg. Erased de Kooning Drawing. 1953.


Cy Twombly. Untitled. 1970.


Ad Reinhardt. Abstract Painting. 1960-61.


Shigeko Kubota. Vagina Painting (Performance). 1965.


Yves Klein. Blue Monochrome. 1961.


Piero Manzoni. Artist's Shit. 1961. (Manzoni does a fantastic job of relating his work to that of his contemporaries.)

"Wittgenstein's speculative aesthetics"

I read this not long ago in Beyond Liberal Education: Essays in honor of Paul H. Hirst. It was, in my view, the best essay of the bunch... but it really had nothing to do with education. (Not until the last paragraph is anything even suggested about it, and then only minimally.)

Seeing that it was so out of place (if I was searching for such an essay it would be the last place I would've expected to find it) and not enough people read this blog for me to worry about any copyright issues, I figured I would post it.

Here it is:

Aesthetics: scene or "music"?

Bougereau

Cezanne

Picasso

Duchamp

Matta

I'm still having somewhat of a problem with my understanding of visual aesthetics. I'm wanting to say that the sensory aspect of the visual is something that is strictly functional—and in this sense it must describe a scene where light is used to understand contour and positioning, color is used to differentiate objects and materials, and so forth... I still believe that these elements can be played with (color especially), but I don't think there would be any sense out of such playfulness other than a loose "musical" arrangement of shapes, values, and hues.

I'm not quite sure if I want to embrace this fundamentally arbitrary sort of visual "music", or stick with representing a scene that is in some way tied to a narrative. The latter definitely has sense; the former definitely doesn't, but it explores its medium more completely...


i. Journal Entry: Baya-baya-ba
ii. Journal Entry: Art and Indecisiveness


2/12 update:

For the sake of having this make sense, I'm going to put forward a (precarious) distinction rather than a choice between two alternatives.

Scene	"Non-Scene" (purely formal)
"Illusionistic" Refers to a perceptual visual vocabulary and emulates aspects of it, e.g. objects, lighting, etc.	Doesn't correspond to perceptual objects or vocabulary (at least in any recognizable way). Likely stresses "material-ness", e.g. paint on canvas, lines on a page, chiselled stone.

In actuality this distinction is a little troubling, as it would be unlikely that a given work would fall solely into either category. "Scenes" always have some aspect of purely formal arrangements in them, and formal arrangements, when viewed by a viewer, will almost undoubtedly have "retinal" presuppositions thrust upon them (e.g. this color pushes forward; these values show form).

In other words, there's some kind of odd gambit going on between the two.

Journal Entry: Art and Indecisiveness

Let me preface this by saying that I write even more eclectically in my journal than I do when I'm writing for an "audience". I just finished this entry and thought its content interesting enough to post. But since I have no desire to take the time to reorganize it in a more intuitive fashion, I've left it as it is. Further, because I generally find "personal" accounts more interesting than "objective" ones, I thought I'd try posting it in its entirety rather than in snippets. If it seems a tad melodramatic at parts I apologize... that's just how it ended up.

I've been thinking about this lately and I'm uncertain of my choices as they relate to what I am presently involved in. For too long, I have wasted my time in academia, learning things from others that I could have learned myself, or learning nothing at all. (Or more accurately, learning very little over a tremendous expanse of time.) I have little or no desire to remain in this state of affairs for much longer (and the small globule of remaining desire is that which resists change). Ever since I returned to college this semester, I have had the feeling of being an observer to the social and academic processes--as though I didn't belong here, and was introduced to an environment that I did not take refuge in--like an exotic fish introduced to a small foreign aquarium (though I am not so without humility to consider myself 'exotic'). In general conversations, and occassionally in classes, I feel as though I was that exotic fish among a native school or a visiting anthropologist... a tourist, really, that has grown tired of his vacation but finds himself both unable to leave and without a place to return to. I don't feel that I belong here. I'm making slow and introverted passes to incorporate myself into my general surroundings, but the passes too often don't accomplish enough. This may smack of a typical response to social exclusion or estrangement, but I really feel as though I should be somewhere else. Doing something else... rather than trying to find my niche within my existing surroundings. I feel the urge to go exploring and finding new social surroundings that I don't find superfluous or misled.

The experience of life is a longing, not a gratification.

Unfortunately, this "ideal" path is one that I am finding too distant to abandon my current one in pursuit of. I once felt that becoming an art teacher would be the "dream" career for me. I could teach art, life, and everything in between, and that would be my service to society. However, I've recently become weary of my previous fascination. The argument for my changing majors would go along two lines, the first practical (and ill-meditated), the second philosophical.

The first, as I have often mentioned informally (and perhaps once or twice within this journal), is that there is no merit in teaching the subject. The teaching of art would be the teaching of the uncertainties of what has come to be called art, of the inter-related ambiguities of life and psychological experience as they pertain to the activities of humankind. What could come of such instruction but the continued and perpetual teaching of ambiguity and uncertainty? That others may teach uncertainty and ambiguity and devote their lives to it? In what way does it benefit society to tease man's curiosity?

The second, I suppose, is on almost equivalent grounds with the first, which is to say it isn't completely distinct. I've lately come to agree with Plato in some respects about the function of poetry (i.e. art in a broad sense), although not in the respect that I feel that it should be formally restricted. Rather, I believe that the proper way to express the understanding of the world is through language... whereas art expresses the world through the unintelligible, the ambivalent--and when it is clear it says nothing more than trite trivialities. (In more recent times, existential or meta-conceptual trivialities.)

In my first Art Since 1945 lecture, there was a video shown in which Jeff Koons made an effort to formally describe the implications of one of his works. (Spalding basketballs suspended in a small aquarium tank, I believe.) If anything, hearing his statements solidified my preconceptions that artists do not know shit about shit. Hearing Koons attempt to introduce imperious conceptual statements to justify his mediocre industrially-assembled piece, only proved to me that art can only say very little. There are, with the proper direction, arts that have a greater significance than what many aim to introduce, but there is still so little that they can express. In fact, art is simply not the medium of choice to express civil or sociological concerns. Why express the ever-important through the ambivalent? It's an exercise in nonsense.

And while I heartily admit that I enjoy art, and often find it quite amusing, I refuse to recognize it as seated on the pedestal on which it is so often erected. Art is a byproduct of interaction, of social processes... it should never have taken it's present formal chair and declared itself mighty, auspicious and sacrosanct. Is art a product of high-culture? No. It is a product of culture, and while I concede that it can often be interesting, its worth is often over-estimated, as is its significance. The poet claims to know what he does not know--what he is unsure of himself. The gut expresses very little but preference. What does art express? It expresses a filtered view of the world (albeit somewhat out of focus), a reductive concept, or nothing at all. What does it achieve? It provides new (albeit fragmented) contexts, although these contexts are themselves not always produced through or by account of its content, but by the responses of others to it. Therefore, meticulous and intentional schemes for "high" expression through art is a flawed trade. It is possible to express minor things, but not major things... the major things are extrinsic of the artwork. The major things, can be expressed much more fully, unabridged and in focus (though still not fully) through language. Visual and auditory phenomena can only convey what is auditory or visual... the lingual can express a concern--at best the visual or auditory can only entice a response (which it then has no control of directing beyond small trifles). I decry the "insight" into the nature of things that artists seem to proclaim; many even seem more arrogant than philosophers.

If I choose to reject philosophy as a major, so too will I reject art.

In my drawing class today, the class had a pseudo-intellectual discussion (it's not my intention to sound terribly derisive) about what makes drawings "good" and what could make them "better". Normative criteria for art is ridiculous. This is good, this is bad. This is aesthetically pleasing, this is aesthetically displeasing. Put an 'X' on the life-line:

Fear |-----------------------------| Love

That which is beautiful |-----------------------------| That which is ugly

For that matter, "non-representational" visual art is blasphemy. It's incorrect to look at aesthetics as a branch of philosophy: it is, more accurately, a subject of psychology. The nature of the sensory visual experience is to make sense of the world around you and to use that information to govern the interaction of your other senses and, consequently, your behavior. Thus when you see an image of something that appears unclear to you, the natural response is to try to figure out what it is. In this sense, it is ridiculous to consider art as "non-representational". It may be abstract and conceptual, but it would still represent a concept. The relationship of lines and forms in space represents just that, which is to say nothing: a confused visual arrangement.

Of course, in this case, the comparison to musical theory is tempting, but the two things seem too different in my mind to be compared. I imagine the comparison is unavoidable, and perhaps even fairly persuasive... at the moment, I reluctantly disagree with it even though I don't see anything wrong with it. Music isn't representational (or at least the vast majority of it isn't), yet there is something interesting in it. Why not, then, with non-representational visual art? Maybe it's just a matter of preference... I feel that music can be emotionally and psychologically provocative without being representational and that the same doesn't hold true with the visual arts.

And that's my disoriented rant with respect to art.

**Mitchel Edwards Klik Enters a Dreamlike State and It's Fucking Scandalous, De Facto**

8/24 update:

I think the reason that I don't like equating "non-representational" art with music is due to the nature of the two senses that experience those things. For the sense of sight, we are constantly and continually bombarded with sensory information and this includes a very broad range of stimuli. In the case of music, however, there is a sense of novelty in that it appeals to a sense that usually isn't stimulated in a very diverse way. In some ways, I think of listening to "good" music as analogous to tasting really well-prepared food. In everyday experience, taste and hearing aren't stimulated nearly as much or as diversely as is the case with sight. In these cases, something crafted serves a more profound function, whereas in visual arts the exercise is in extracting things that you find interesting from your everyday visual experiences. I think that life in general provides a more sufficient "feast" than with the other two senses and so experiences for the visual "organ" don't need to be supplemented nearly as much. (Awkward grammar anyone?)

I was also assigned to write a brief summary of my views on art in my Design II journal. Below is what I have come up with so far (left-click to view a more full-size and legible version).