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Roger Ebert rehashes old debate even indie hipsters are tired of

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:tup::tup::tup: to that Rodi, with a caveat:

It's important to have a cultural fringe where people experiment and try new things, and some way of broadcasting output from it. Many of the people in any such fringe will be absolute tossers, some of them will even invent a new, self-supporting subculture that can become institutionalised in some cases (*cough*art world*cough*).

A lot of fashion is about wankers following trends and replacing their wardrobe every year, but couture is entirely different, insane, and inventive, and while Haute Couture is a very exclusive club, there are lots of designers out there trying new things without the name.

The fringe is where you'll find interesting things and the directions culture is going to be driven in, but also, a lot of crap to wade through. The centre also has things of value and things that are/were important, but they're sometimes hard to communicate to outsiders and there's a lot of pretension there too. It can become impossible to tell the difference.

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It's important to have a cultural fringe where people experiment and try new things, and some way of broadcasting output from it. Many of the people in any such fringe will be absolute tossers, some of them will even invent a new, self-supporting subculture that can become institutionalised in some cases (*cough*art world*cough*).

This fringe world exists, it is called 'internet' :)

Taking it a little more serious though, I strongly get the feeling that the world of art and couture have become so far removed from anything else that they have little impact on 'real' culture. They exist in extremely isolated, incestuous bubbles. When was the last time you saw something outrageous on the catwalk actually trickle down to anything worn on the street? Maybe that's not the point of it (probably not), but at least that side of the 'experimental fringe' can be safely considered moot.

(And thanks for the support, gentlemen!)

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This fringe world exists, it is called 'internet' :)

Taking it a little more serious though, I strongly get the feeling that the world of art and couture have become so far removed from anything else that they have little impact on 'real' culture. They exist in extremely isolated, incestuous bubbles. When was the last time you saw something outrageous on the catwalk actually trickle down to anything worn on the street? Maybe that's not the point of it (probably not), but at least that side of the 'experimental fringe' can be safely considered moot.

True, though typically the path anything follows to the high street will be a long and winding one anyway. It wouldn't surpise me if some of the less outlandish things did make their way down to more widely available fashion, such as the polygonal boobs on one of the tops in my previous link. Consumers aren't really the audience for couture, but other designers and perhaps retailers certainly are.

It is extremely common for non-couture designs of famous figures to trickle down through imitation by other designers and end up directly on the high street comparatively cheap (H&M got into legal trouble a few years back for copying a dress too directly). There's also the fringe of hipsters(etc.) experimenting with fashion off the catwalk, not to mention things catching on by accident.

Fashion isn't something I've ever been involved with as anything other than observer, but art is, and even within the art world, amongst the incestuous, backscratching bubble of funding rackets and contacts, you do meet some extraordinarily talented and clever people who tend to be getting the fuck on with their work regardless of opinions on it. Unfortunately there are a lot of con artists and shits too, perpetuating that bubble. Someone writing a statement about their self and work in the third person is always a really bad sign :)

You can't stop culture from forming cults and cliques and wrapping itself in politics, unfortunately. You can find the healthy people though :tup:

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I'm with Rodi, I wouldn't mind the term "art" being retired as well. I'd also get rid of "graphic novel," but that's just me. Certainly the beautiful cave paintings Ebert cites as so elegant and well crafted probably weren't done with the higher thought of them as art. They could have just enjoyed drawing pictures for all we know (if they weren't serving some sort of major communication purpose).

But with his, "video game players READ?" comment, now it just seems like Ebert's intentionally trolling, so I think people should give up writing long heart felt responses to his opinion.

Edited by syntheticgerbil

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I just realized I don't agree with anyone who has vehement opinions about art. One way or another. They are often enough too dismissive, too specific, too angry, too dumb and caustic and pointlessly cynical (about art or about the plebeians who don't get it)—and they amount to the same retarded absolutist statements like Ebert's on which we're shitting right now. Congrats Rodi, you suck!

Plus, I am really exasperated by the use of pretentious in the context of art. Please stop. Art does not need your approval to be art, nor does it need to be populist. It doesn't need to be elitist either! It is just that sometimes you need to use big words to talk about things and sometimes you resort to using a specialized lexicon or an agreed-upon format (talking about yourself in third person, for example*).

Throwing PRETENTIOUS at things just makes you seem like a bitter outsider. Art is not just some rich kids club talking in tongues, though that is indubitably a part of it, and arguments can be maid that this is a bad thing for art and society and so on. But art in general is not vague and meaningless. Just like with any body of jargon-laced lit out there, there is bullshit and there are people who're actually saying things. Lumping all of the above into strawmen does no good to anyone.

Here, for example, listen to what this cowboy has to say.

* Personally, I can't stand artist statements. Too many people see them as an alternative to saying things with art. If I like the work, I may read the statement, and more often than not it tries to bite more than it can chew and it just makes me angry to the tune of, Sorry son, your shit doesn't do half of what you claim it does.

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* Personally, I can't stand artist statements. Too many people see them as an alternative to saying things with art. If I like the work, I may read the statement, and more often than not it tries to bite more than it can chew and it just makes me angry to the tune of, Sorry son, your shit doesn't do half of what you claim it does.

Seeing too many such statements is exactly why I left the art world :tup:

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Roger Ebert: "Damn kids, get off my lawn!"

I'll just keep walking down the sidewalk paying no attention to an old man who can't embrace change. It is after all his opinion and he's entitled to it, but it does not affect me in the least.

EDIT:

And a day later, a sweet comic that visualizes what I said. Nice.

Edited by Chuckpebble

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Ebert reviews "Cosmology of Kyoto"

Is this the same Ebert? I honestly have no idea. Derek Yu posted it on his Twitter-thing. Just thought I'd drop the link in here since I didn't see it posted in my quick skim. X:

Well, he didn't say it was art. :P

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Yeah, that's true. His reply to Ron Gilbert was that Pirates of the Caribbean isn't art either.

I don't see a review for Pirates 1 on his site, but he does not call the sequel art in his review. I think he has to explicitly use the word.

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I think we need a new branch of Godwin's Law for this debate. As an online discussion of video games as an artform grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Citizen Kane approaches 1.

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I think we need a new branch of Godwin's Law for this debate. As an online discussion of video games as an artform grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Citizen Kane approaches 1.

To be fair that guy dumped a phone book into his article. Not mentioning Citizen Kane would've been a gross omission.

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Yeah, that's true. His reply to Ron Gilbert was that Pirates of the Caribbean isn't art either.

I don't see a review for Pirates 1 on his site, but he does not call the sequel art in his review. I think he has to explicitly use the word.

If Ebert pointing out particular game titles as not being art proves games cannot be art, wouldn't this prove that cinema cannot be art?

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To be fair that guy dumped a phone book into his article. Not mentioning Citizen Kane would've been a gross omission.
We're talking about the guy that did a bit on ABC News about how the Citizen Kane of video games was Metroid Prime. He just can't resist.

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I just realized I don't agree with anyone who has vehement opinions about art. One way or another. ...

This. As someone who has attempted at least making a counter argument to Pollack and Mark Rothko bashing, etc. ... that whole statement is just true.

Rodi, I can completely see where you're coming from, since squares of color arent as immediately visually cool looking as something painted by Lawrence Alma-Tadema or even Frank Miller if you wanna go there. In fact, I personally dont like Rothko or even Warhol's stuff... at all. I'll still defend it as being valid though, because who am I to say that the thing those guys worked at for years is not just crap to me, but should be considered crap by everyone.

Also, if Sister Wendy is a rich hipster, then I'm not sure what to make of the world.

I was trying really actively not to get trolled by Ebert on this... but it's becoming unavoidable... Even innocently reading the reviews for How To Train Your Dragon of all things stuck it into my eyeline.

ebertrolled.png

I actually said out loud "Just... stop talking." ...Har har.

But really... I'm a bit embarrassed for him? He's really made it apparent he doesnt have a clue where his opinion is based and that he is pigheadedly not going to do anything to enlighten himself at all, ever, no way.

Here's the full review for those who care: http://tinyurl.com/y7oqmlq

There's a little extra video game zing in the opening paragraph too. He didnt really sound too positive about the movie either, which I dissagree with. It was fun. I recommend it to those of you who are too old for kids movies but still see them anyway because they're awesome. They're the best for making your day nice and sunnier. :clap:

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Yesterday, Shawn Elliott (of video games fame) made a series of tweets on his feelings about this topic, which I quite agree with (although I really wish he would have just put it in his blog instead of twitter).

Here are all of the tweets put together in paragraph form:

Engaging in @ebertchicago 's game of "My art can beat up your art" is cliche, but I'll argue a bit against my better judgment. It seems that @ebertchicago is intent on conflating two questions. Whether games as a category can support art, and whether a currently existing game can compare with the great poets are separate concerns. Answering the latter in the negative will not tell us whether a positive answer to the former is likelier to arrive in 5 or 500 years. The slippery semantics of "art" and "games" aren't helping anymore than his dismissal of games without rules as "representations of a story." The fact that several forms of art other than sculpture occur across time does not negate sculpture's standing as art. Nor does the fact that some games have rule sets disqualify them from artistic status.To argue that @ebertchicago is too old to grasp games allows him to counter that you are too young to appreciate art. He could, however, correctly argue that a 20 year old who hasn't read a novel carries mistaken assumptions about literature. And you can counter that a 67-year-old who hasn't played a game perpetuates mistaken assumptions about games. Which is why arguments between unread 20-year-olds and a 67-year-old who refuses to try games are so silly.

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I just realized I don't agree with anyone who has vehement opinions about art. One way or another. They are often enough too dismissive, too specific, too angry, too dumb and caustic and pointlessly cynical (about art or about the plebeians who don't get it)—and they amount to the same retarded absolutist statements like Ebert's on which we're shitting right now. Congrats Rodi, you suck!

To be fair, my rant was not aimed at art itself, which I frequently will loathe or enjoy, but the terminology, which in my opinion isn't specific at all, but is used almost always as if it is. The use and abuse of the term, that's my beef. Not with 'art' itself. I wouldn't presume to cast generalized comments on it.

In that sense, I am not at all in the same league as Ebert, who is including or excluding media at the merest whim. I'm not drawing lines at all, only pointing out that the people who do that use terminology that is impossible to decipher and therefore their arguments are crap.

Ergo, I do not suck.

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I'm a bit late to this, but....

Video games have writers, composers and graphic artists so how can they NOT be "art"?

If an engineer calculates the exact quantity of mayo a sandwich needs to be perfect, does it stop being food?

If artists worked on something, it's art, we could go on for ages on what is art and what's not, but we could hopefully agree on what an artist is... even if the artist only is the kind whose art is the "art of the silver tongue to make my work look better than it is"....

Movies have people how are not artists involved in them, yet they are still art because it's made by artists, so shouldn't that apply to everything?

Yes, yes, you could say that artists can do thing that are not art, but THEIR JOB is to make "art", so if an artist is HIRED to work on something, it becomes art, simple as that....

But wait, don't they hire artists for ads, labels, logos, etc, etc...? Yes, and to me that would be still be art, even though what they use them work isn't necessarily art...

I could just say that if someone calls it art it is art, that's how art works.... I can't remember where it's from though...:erm:

I kinda agree with Rodi, the term "art" is being abused too much lately...

EDIT: It looks like Penny Arcade agree with what I said about art! :woohoo:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/4/21/again-art-stuff/

Edited by Tanukitsune

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To be fair, my rant was not aimed at art itself, which I frequently will loathe or enjoy, but the terminology, which in my opinion isn't specific at all, but is used almost always as if it is. The use and abuse of the term, that's my beef. Not with 'art' itself. I wouldn't presume to cast generalized comments on it.

In that sense, I am not at all in the same league as Ebert, who is including or excluding media at the merest whim. I'm not drawing lines at all, only pointing out that the people who do that use terminology that is impossible to decipher and therefore their arguments are crap.

Ergo, I do not suck.

It is not art's fault people make shit art. Guns don't kill people, etc.

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I'm a bit late to this, but....

Video games have writers, composers and graphic artists so how can they NOT be "art"?

I think before this recent comment, Ebert had said before that does not count because the end product is still not art.

Which I guess to him, art means something that's has a statement or is moving. I don't know why it has to mean that, because I just figure it encompassed all sorts of human creation whether it was worthwhile or not.

I still more agree with Rodi on whether the term is even useful, but had it not been used to easily to draw lines in the sand, I would be okay with it. Thinking back to the cave paintings, I wonder if a caveman who drew better than the other guys ever stood up and gloated about his drawing of a buffalo was art while the other guy's wasn't.

I personally think art should be more about communicating your idea sufficiently so it that it doesn't become some kind of obscure self indulgent thing, but that's just me and I doubt more than 1 in 10 people would even agree with me on that. I also see what Kingzjester is saying about getting rid of the word pretentious in reference to art. It's extremely common to throw that around now for whatever reason and I'm guilty myself. I think it usually gets used when someone's artwork comes off as intensely hard to understand and obscure, but like Kingzjester sort of said, they should just communicate it better, since it seems like just name calling something pretentious doesn't really help the artist get better or the outsider understand any more.

Buh, I guess I just mean to say, I don't understand why something isn't art whether it's unsuccessful or not. When we eat bad food, it may be hilarious to yell, "THIS IS NOT FOOD! WHAT IS THIS SUBSTANCE?!," but we all know it's still food even if it's soylent green.

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It is not art's fault people make shit art. Guns don't kill people, etc.

Your statement presumes that there IS such a thing as art, which is the very thing that I'm disputing.

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Your statement presumes that there IS such a thing as art, which is the very thing that I'm disputing.

Your attempt to expunge a common, widely-used word from the lexicon is a crazy academic exercise far more pretentious than acknowledging that there is confusing art out there and shit that blurs the line between random, far-fetched, fanciful, conceptual crap and classical, goop-on-canvas, hunk-of-rock art.

I think if you spent a little time looking into the last 120 years of art history and theory the vagaries that anger you so much would make sense and not seem so obnoxious.

Pavlov believed that being pressured to make excessively fine discriminations could trigger neurosis or mental disturbance. In one experiment, Pavlov taught a dog to discriminate between a circle and an oval. The location of the circle and the oval was changed randomly, so the dog had to discriminate between them on the basis of shape, not location. When the dog pointed its nose at a circle, it received food. When it pointed at the oval shape, it received an electric shock. Gradually Pavlov made the oval rounder and rounder. Soon it was hard to tell the oval from the circle. The dog began showing signs of distress, whining and defecating. Pavlov said this showed an experimental neurosis.

There is no such thing as ovals! Ovals are meaningless! People who insist on ovals are deluded pretentious fucks, etc.

You're too passionate about damning a large number of people who do see value in art that you do not—who see a need to distinguish between art and craft. I used to be there with you, hatin' on the ovals, but then I got better.

This is not to say that I swoon at every piece of conceptual asshattery out there, but that I have figured out where all that stuff is coming from, historically speaking, and can see a) the difference between Art and Not Art, and B) where and when and why this became an issue at all.

There are many different ways to draw this border. I personally like to ask if something passes the decoration test: does this painting do anything more than decorate? Is the artist trying to solve some sort of problem (conceptual, technical, narrative, architectural, etc), or are they obviously entirely in their comfort zone, churning media? And even then, I can see how someone could subvert decoration as a medium and use it to some conceptual end—whereupon they would still pass my test without creating a paradox.

I would be happy to throw light at any specific annoyances with art you may have. Feel free to ask away.

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Your attempt to expunge a common, widely-used word from the lexicon is a crazy academic exercise far more pretentious than acknowledging that there is confusing art out there and shit that blurs the line between random, far-fetched, fanciful, conceptual crap and classical, goop-on-canvas, hunk-of-rock art.

I think if you spent a little time looking into the last 120 years of art history and theory the vagaries that anger you so much would make sense and not seem so obnoxious.

I think he is more hinting at that the terminology of art has become saturated to the point where any meaning past or present is divergent to the point where it means nothing.

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I would be happy to throw light at any specific annoyances with art you may have. Feel free to ask away.

Now why'd you have to go and do that? I was kind of interested in both you and Rodi arguing about this stuff, since it's a much better read than about Ebert personally being a butthead, but now you've attempted to elevate yourself as the superior brain in art history and the meaning of it.

You know you aren't the only one who draws and paints around here and that your tastes and appreciation for certain works of art and why they are successful are bound to be different from another's? If you want to insist that people who do high brow art and are involved in gallery showings aren't a club, then why do you need to act like you belong in that club?

Anyways, Patter is more to the point than I can ever be. I'm sure Rodi didn't realistically think the word "art" would ever disappear from the lexicon. He's just saying it would be nice.

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I think he is more hinting at that the terminology of art has become saturated to the point where any meaning past or present is divergent to the point where it means nothing.
I don't think he made that argument, or at least he hasn't made it successfully.

Either way, I disagree. The fact that in the last half century museums have gotten into the fashion business and started stocking up on (and raising the profile of) things that probably shouldn't be in museums doesn't mean we should stop using the term art and employ the more banal words descriptive of the medium (painting, sculpture, comic book, etc.). Rodi effectively wants there to not be a distinction between decoration/escapism and Something More, which is drastic and unhelpful.

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Now why'd you have to go and do that? I was kind of interested in both you and Rodi arguing about this stuff, since it's a much better read than about Ebert personally being a butthead, but now you've attempted to elevate yourself as the superior brain in art history and the meaning of it.

You know you aren't the only one who draws and paints around here and that your tastes and appreciation for certain works of art and why they are successful are bound to be different from another's? If you want to insist that people who do high brow art and are involved in gallery showings aren't a club, then why do you need to act like you belong in that club?

Anyways, Patter is more to the point than I can ever be. I'm sure Rodi didn't realistically think the word "art" would ever disappear from the lexicon. He's just saying it would be nice.

Man, no, that is not what I wanted to say. I just figured it would be more helpful to offer what I know as a starting point and talk about specifics than to just say GO READ ABOUT ART AND COME BACK WHEN YOU'VE UNDERSTOOD IT ALL, ASSHOLE.

I have ABSOLUTELY no intention of pulling an Ebert here and judging shit as Worthy or Not. I do think I may have more of a granular historical perspective on this than other people here who want to participate. I may be able to give a TLDR version of theory since I may have a lot of this information internalized or a more direct line to relevant literature.

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