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Creativity, craftsmanship, and pixies (II)
You may wish to read the previous entry before tackling this one.
So ... this afternoon I got an email which I am keeping anonymous, for reasons which I hope will become clear.
The Ardent Reader noted that she had been to this site of student "Digital Art" projects from the "multimedia" portion of a school of art at a Famous American University ... and had especially noted the pages of the teacher. (Warning: Long and pointless animations at that latter link.)
She noted:
I still don't quite get it. There's a lot of art, or artsy, or pretty web sites I've seen that I like better.
I mean, I dunno. I'm no artist, right?
No, you're just someone who knows her own tastes.
The art world makes fun of anyone who is not part of its exclusiveness. (It eats its own, too, but that's another story.) The art world took a phrase that should be a rallying cry for us plebians - "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like" - and they turned it into a bad joke at our expense.
The art world promotes the idea that there is a fundamental standard of aesthetics that exists outside of individual taste, independent of all personal preference. A Greater Aesthetic, if you will.
And it's a lie. You either like something or you don't. It's an indefensible. Art pleases you or piques you or intrigues you or soothes your eye ... or it doesn't. There is no accounting for taste, nor should there be.
Basically, if it doesn't suit your personal standards, then you don't have to respect it. Which is exactly the opposite of how I feel about my programming work, as I said in the previous entry. There I want people to respect it even if it's something they don't care about.
I can resolve the apparent conflict here, so be patient.
It's the distinction between art and craftsmanship, between content and technical quality.
I want people to respect my code even if it's not a program they'd use or write themselves, because of the quality of the work - how well the program's designed, or in some cases how quickly it was done. I want people to respect my writing for its technical merits, even if they can't stand whatever topic I happen to be ranting or telling a story about. Even when I do work you don't like, I do my best not to produce half-assed product.
But in the art world - and Marc, don't get ruffled, I consider you one of the rare exceptions - craftsmanship is no longer a value. It is not even on the scale. The days when a painter spent most of his life mastering the brushstrokes and didn't really begin to produce art for public display until late in life are all but over.
I don't insist that an artist have training - in some cases training can even be detrimental, as I personally have witnessed. My point is that "art" now encompasses such a wide variety of output and styles that technical craft can no longer be used as part of the judging. For all you know the artist was trying to do it that way.
The real sign that art has Lost Its Mind, to me, is that often a lack of expertise is deliberately held up as a virtue. Imagine if, as a writer, I boasted that my prose contained a spelling error on every line, as if it somehow made me unspoiled and non-commercial.
I like art even with its built-in insanity, don't get me wrong ... but I have learned to never apologize for my tastes, and never again take someone's word that I should like something because it's famous or revolutionary or a Big Name or what-have-you. Nine-tenths of the pieces in an average art museum (or more) do absolutely nothing for me. And I have learned to like it that way.
My standards of art are, I'm afraid, fairly commercial. I think like a designer. I want clarity of concept first - I want the artist to communicate the idea behind the piece clearly to me - unless the artist instead chooses to make clear that her objective was to be cryptic. But I'd better get some signal.
And I am not an artist. I am a writer. Sometimes I draw. But hell will freeze over before I call myself an artist. So you see I have issues here.
If you'd like to see some "digital art" that I approve of, head for SITO ... and do not neglect to stop in on the collaborative projects, which are where the action is. This is the good stuff. There is more liveliness and energy - excuse the fluffy words - in these projects than there is in anything I saw on the sites my Ardent Reader sent me.
You want weirdness? OK, go try Moonmilk. If you root around in Ranjit's playground long enough, and follow his links, you'll find out just how odd Art can get without losing its joy. Or follow the links to some of the SITO artists' home pages. There's lots of real Web Art going on.
But very little of it, I'm afraid, is being produced by faculty at Famous American Universities. (Lest you think I'm dumping unduly on Cornell, ask me privately what I think about a certain Famous Experiment at the Institvte.)
Why is that, do you suppose? I leave you to form your own conclusions.
I've been nasty enough for one day.
© Columbine
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