Posted By: shreyas

Holy crap, RANT MODE ON.

Marketing doesn't try to evoke a PERSONAL and MEANINFUL reaction from you on a product, but only a superficial and fleeting canned reaction similar for everybody, like for example a superficial nostalgic sensation to sell you vintage items.

Marketing is Kitsch or Propaganda, not Art

"Things I think are cool are art and things I don't think are cool aren't," is a terrible, embarrassing, insulting definition. I think you should find a better one.

Uh?

Where did I say that kitsch can't be cool?

You seem to have read my post with the misunderstanding of "kitsch" as an insult, or a synonime for "rubbish". It's not. It's a category that include a lot of wll-loved things created for people's enjoyment (in Eco's essay apocalittici e Integrati, that I think was only partially translated in english as "Apocalypse Postponed", "Superman" and "Lil' Abner" were classified like kitsch. I enjoyed many stories of the first and I have the complete collection of the old Kitchen Sink books of the second).

There is a reason for the use of two different words (Kitsch OR Propaganda) above...

I don't know how that definition stands in today's art scene. As I said, I never studied art (I studied civil engineering). I read these books only because I am a fan of both Eco's and Kundera's writings so I read even many of their essays, and noticed that they used the same definition of art. I posted it only because I found it interesting that, by that definition, narrative games are something of an authomatic machine to create art. But I don't invest no particolar importance to this. I would never think of saying that I game to "create art", it would be silly.

I agree with Shreyas.

Paul/Moreno, if you told a graphic designer that marketing wasn't art, you would spend the rest of the day bleeding profusely. When you look at an ad and I look at an ad, we'll appreciate different things about it. You might see nostalgia and vintage things, I might see a link to the past and an exploration of my grandfather's world. There is no such thing as a generic response to advertising and marketing.

Marketing is a type of art designed to sell things.

Here:

Some writers churn out books at an alarming rate. Some of these authors I consider pathetic money-slaves who compromise artistic integrity and sell cheap drivel. Daniel Steel is one example. Some of these exact same authors I consider groundbreaking authors who've written a fascinating library and redefined genres. Stephen King is one example.

Daniel Steel writes books to sell them. I do not consider her an artist. I consider her stupid.
Stephen King writes books to sell them. I consider him an artist.

There are similar parallels in other art forms, but this one's a good one.

What I'm trying to say is that creating images (visual, mental, literary, whatever) and evoking responses... that's kind of what art's about. I don't think it has anything to do with the end goals of these images and responses. Even if the end goal is profit.

I'd like to say yes. And if you've followed me this far, I'm surprised. I feel very rambly.

I'm with you and I agree. This was mostly how my thought process on the subject presented itself as well (minus the creepy bone stuff).

I've been thinking about this for awhile, but it became an issue in my mind a few months ago with a topic here on Story Games where someone (I can't remember who) asserted that when they bought a game they were paying for the physical artifact and labor, but not the idea. I claimed that the idea was the product, that the mental work involved in developing that idea was 90% of the work involved in creating the final product, and when they paid for that product what they were paying for was mostly the idea (or at least that was what i was selling. I suppose some people buy the cookies for the packaging). Some people agreed with this, some didn't. I couldn't understand the opposing veiw at all. This was how I created my art. The creative process was a vital part of the development of that art. Then it occured to me that maybe these other people didn't see what we were doing as art (of course maybe they did and just disagreed with me). Since I did see game design as an art, I kind of assumed everyone did. Of course, the question of whether game design is art wasn't really that important to my original arguement that when you purchase a game part of what you are paying for is the idea, but that was how I first began to wonder whether game designers and players considered games and game design to be art.

After you, Ryan, John, Nick and I played Cheap in Seattle, you took a minute to explain to us how the game worked. You passed the rules of the game to us verbaly. I had been thinking about games as art all that day, and when we were playing Cheap I was convinced that we were creating art, or at least participating in art. When you explained the game to us I could see the art in it. When you gave us permission to play and share the experience with others it became art as an oral tradition. Neat stuff.

Jake

Jake, I'm humbled that Cheap helped clarify your thoughts on whether games are art. I'm also humbled that it seems to have made it into the art category, as opposed to the "filthy, vulgar rubbish" category.

Posted By: Ben LehmanWhat Tony said.

yrs--
--Ben

P.S. Note how my post adheres to an incredibley rigid one-line poem format :-)

But it's your elegant use of whitespace (well, blue for me) that provides the impact.

Posted By: TonyLBI'll add my voice to the chorus of folks saying that advertising and marketing is a subset of art. But then, as stated above, I think it'sreally, really hardnot to create art. What you can do is notnoticethat you're creating art.

Each and every one of the posts in this thread? Art. You've all chosen words with care, arranged them with regard to commonly accepted aesthetic and functional rules (some, it must be admitted, more successfully than others) and presented them to an audience. If a poem is art, how can your posts not be?

I think that the (strong!) tendency to want to "claim" art as a term by excluding a whole lot of stuff that is clearly creative and artistic is ... misguided.

Given that every post in this thread is "art", again I must say the OP's question is utterly the wrong one to be asking.

p.

Posted By: jake richmondI'm mostly thinking of this from my own point of view. I recently did an illustration for a client that I wasn't really happy with. I didn't consider it art. Later, a friend of mine saw it and really, really liked it. he asked if she could have the original art. I told her it wasn't really something I liked that much, and I didn't really consider it to be in my "art pile" (as opposed to my non-art pile). She totally disagreed,and said that it was definitely art. So who's ri-ht? I guess we both are. I guess art is in the eye of the beholder. What I was saying was said from the point of view of a designer though. I wasn't really taking the audiences opinions into consideration.

Does that make sense at all?

I'm opposed to defining art by intent and/or audience -- because I feel that it ties into modernism, which can encourage self-indulgent works like a featureless black ball or splattered paint that is "art" because the artist had some deep thought about it. I'm post-modernist myself, and feel that the emphasis should be on what it actually means to people rather than what the artist intended it to mean. Art is creative production of aesthetic products. The historical use of "art" is often as the opposite to "nature" -- i.e. art is anything intentionally created by people, as opposed to natural.

I think what's telling is that people nearly always use the term art as elevated over non-art. You disagreed with this in principle earlier, but I note that the work you had classed as non-art was one you weren't happy with.

Outside of semantics, I think that there should be more emphasis on local creativity. These days, much of our creative life is passive -- watching mass-produced movies, listening to mass-produced music, and reading mass-produced books. I favor more direct creativity -- i.e. playing or singing rather than putting on a CD, decorating by hand rather than buying something off the shelf, and indeed playing RPGs rather than just watching a movie. There's nothing inherently wrong with passive consumption, but I do feel that it is overly dominant these days. Thus, I prefer that there is not an elevated term for popular, often-mass-produced creative works over more personal creative works.

If someone paints a beautiful, inspiring picture -- it shouldn't matter if it was to make money, to get into someone's pants, or to please themselves. I don't feel that we should question, say, the poetry of Emily Dickinson because her intent for them wasn't clear.

I've talked about this a number of times on my LiveJournal -- cf. my

[url=http://jhkimrpg.livejournal.com/tag/art][b]My LJ tag on "art"[/b][/url]