[-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?

[Rafael Trindade]

Hello, folks,


Not a few times I've prepared myself to post something and got to stop just
because your messages did my job better :) I just regret missing this latest
topic, for I was afraid that kind of contention would happen. I find it a
pity, and I'll try to show you why:

The Picasso instance is not - OK, is not to *me* - as silly as might seem to
some of you. I didn't reply it before for the reason cited above, and - I
believe the main motive amongst us all - vacations!

Back to Picasso-gate, what Daniel meant to me is the most pretty obvious
thing: the same thing Duchamp and the conceptual artists and lots of people
didactically showed us - that there is no such thing as an essentially,
trouble-free, object of art. This is not only a contemporary feat; more
rigid systems of yore demanded - as today - lots of training, education,
sensibility and adequation to norms, institutions, *artes poeticae*, and
dialogue with past canons and coetaneous artistic circles. What is to say,
even believing so, there was not a pure, isolated, intrinsic aesthetic value
in any object in any era. The example can make you cringe, but carries lots
of elementary truth. The de-corporification of art, the stress on its
relational, institutional, ecological nature does not imply art is valueless
or an ethereal fiction. This is a sense a whole century have striven to
build; not only about art, but about [social] reality itself.

So Gabriel Menotti's response is not in conflict with Danc's sayings. We can
find in videogames dependence on circuits, on a whole material ecology, on
some modes of reception (recognition of genres), and a will of tradition
(like I said weeks ago). Most human experiences are bound to some sort of
will-to-canonise (gaming, being part of a gang, any nostalgia), not only the
highbrow stuff. So you can relate games and art. BUT they are realities
crested on very different social and technological complexes.

One cannot fail to notice the enormously difference of weight canons have in
arts. As someone - I forgot, sorry! - have told us here, art is, generally,
about to associate, to enrich, to open more and more possibilities
(according to old prescriptions, as synthetically as possible). This depends
on the intrinsic properties of the object, *triggered* by a set of
apparatuses linking it to synchronic circuits and diachronical traditions.
There's nothing alike in videogames, even the most complex and beatiful;
even the most distant from the childishly-irrational,
fascinatingly-creative, absolutely freak and impatient mobs that makes,
among other reasons, artists interested in 4chan-ness and gaming cultures.

Everybody who happen to be into so-called "literary" fiction is familiar to
the formula (which I believe only in some degree): books have to do with
books, not with "real" stuff to which their tales could point at.
Heretofore, people had learnt that Romeo and Juliet are not about some
Italian couple more than they are about, say, Pyramus and Thisbe; that you
cannot (would say some rigid and enthusiastic Victorian teacher) understand
Molière without reading Bocaccio (and Scachetti, and Terence, and
Menander...). The same has gone to arts. One can say that contemporary
painting is not the same activity the pre-Raphaelites have practised, and
one is right. But the pre-Raphaelites did not understood art the same way
Raphael did, and his Greco-Roman models even happened to know they were real
artists themselves. Every tradition is a will of tradition; every
transmission is really, really impure. But this constitutes art; those
"baggages" are the very elements which compose Culture with capital letters.
By the way, I don't see why refrain from call Deleuze - or any other
philosopher - "baggage"; it sounds very the-great-conversation-ish, and
strikingly sounds a bit deleuzian, too (creation of concepts, instead of
search for truth etc).

I could say it simpler and faster:

Art doesn't come with "baggage". The history of art, as I understand it, is
> a very long theoretical exchange. Saying a painting comes with baggage is
> like saying philosophy comes with baggage. Art has to be in dialog with
> pervious art that has come before it, just as contemporary theory has to
> respond to earlier thinkers. What you're saying is like saying that
> Deleuze's writing about Spinoza is "baggage".
>

What's the big deal? Isn't it just what Danc said? Can you say that the
history of videogames, as art's, is a long theoretical exchange? So why
"shallow" and "ridiculous"?

I believe games and art are very different realities, which can be compared
if we formulate the right questions, and then we can find lots of common
traits. This would be desirable depending more on our interests and projects
than the inner truth lying within these realities. What really inspires me
in discussions like this one in -empyre- is the confluence of these
projects, and the possible exchange between them. There's no need to a
subversive, inter- trans- or cross-disciplinary agenda to do that. And no
need to protect theory from our theoretical exchange. All of us have been
pretty theoretical up to then.

I'm so sorry I have to post and run; I have a trip which would make me
unable to read e-mails. Well, thank you all for the marvelous time \o\

Happy New Year,
Rafael.
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