Response to Jenna's "Knowledge vs Emotion"

There are two sides to every coin. While ignorance of the art world may in some rare cases allow you to feel more emotionally attached to an art work. Those situations are less common than the reverse. Where knowledge of the art world provides more context for a work of art and granting it more meaning. I believe that the example we used in class was Moby-Dick. Without context Moby-Dick is just a story about a man and a whale, while political awareness of that time period will help you understand the full meaning of the novel.
As for your question, I do not believe that the two are mutually exclusive. Knowledge of an art work does not necessarily mean that you cannot have a personal meaning attached to it. More context for an art object could allow you to interpret it in a more personal way.
Is it possible for a work of art to mean more to an observer than the artist?

Wait? Seriously?

Let's take the power away from the white men. That's fine. I'm all for equal distribution of power. But this discussion of race as a factor for artistic ability or judgment is downright offensive. Why is it okay to talk down about someone's race if they are white?
Perhaps I am mistaken, after all, all white men grew up unoppressed. They all have lived affluently since the beginning of recorded history. The serfs of Feudal Europe were really spoiled aristocrats, right? The Slavs and Polish that were denied rights and ultimately executed during the reign of the Nazis had it too easy, anyway.

To all of the white men in class. Did you all grow up rich and at the top of the world? Am I the only white man who grew up lower-middle class? Oh, my mistake. It's being Jewish isn't it, that's what makes it okay for me to be philosophical thinker.
My Judaism voids out my whiteness, I guess.
Didn't we spend a long time in class today discussing how dangerous it is to group people together based on race or ethnicity as adversaries? But I guess it's okay, because they're just white men. They've had their time.

I apologize for not bringing this up in class when it occurred, but I was so shocked that I may have said things that I didn't mean. I wanted time to collect my thoughts before I made a new argument.

If you have not read my previous post, "Old Dead White Men," then please do so before responding. It will add context.

This does not count for one of my weekly posts. I apologize for how inarticulate and, well rabid, this post was.

Roger Ebert

Link

I am just one of many who was offended by Ebert's essay. And the larger portion of the Internet seems to be on the warpath.

But there are a few particular statements that I take issue with.

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome.

How does he know this? Where in his definition of art does it say that it must be lacking in rules, points, objectives and an outcome?

Santiago now phrases this in her terms: "Art is a way of communicating ideas to an audience in a way that the audience finds engaging." Yet what ideas are contained in Stravinsky, Picasso, "Night of the Hunter," "Persona," "Waiting for Godot," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?" Oh, you can perform an exegesis or a paraphrase, but then you are creating your own art object from the materials at hand.

This is one of the most ignorant statements that I've come across recently. He asks what ideas are contained within these works of art. I'm not even sure what he's trying to get at. I have not read all of these works, but I'd be willing to bet that there is some idea to be communicated by them.

The next few paragraphs are ad-hominem attacks on several games that he says are not are for various reasons.
Waco: He is offended by the subject matter, therefore it is not art.
Braid: He doesn't feel that he would learn anything about his past from it. It is not art.
Flower: May be art, but without a user interface it isn't a game.

Now she shows stills from early silent films such as George Melies' "A Voyage to the Moon" (1902), which were "equally simplistic." Obviously, I'm hopelessly handicapped because of my love of cinema, but Melies seems to me vastly more advanced than her three modern video games. He has limited technical resources, but superior artistry and imagination.

We should ignore this whole paragraph. He admits that his bias makes him unable to speak on the subject. Let's move on.

Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care.

But this is his most egregious mistake. Fischer did not invent chess, nor Jordan basketball, nor Butkus football. So why does he consider the gamer the artist? Is the concert goer an artist? No, so why does he focus on the gamer?

What would a video game need to do to fit a definition of art?

Response to Nicole's "Language Response"

I'd like to address a couple of points in your response before I move on to the new question.

In my post I stressed that I was not advocating for the destruction of any languages, as that would be a tragic cultural loss. The creation of a Standard language would be strictly for official communication. Each person would be taught their native language plus Standard so that they retain the artistry of their native language and gain the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth.
It would be madness for me to say that one language is superior to another. The problem with having each person learn many languages is that it would only improve their ability to communicate slightly. There are almost 7000 languages on Earth, if a person knows 4 or 5 languages then they are exceptional. When a person is educated in America they are taught English and then usually either French or Spanish, not because they are the most culturally rich languages. But because the idea is that the student will most likely encounter those languages in life. It is for communication.
I've known people to learn other languages just to appreciate art in those languages properly. I love this, I think it is one of the best things a person in pursuit of good art can do. I myself spent a good deal of time studying Middle English so that I could properly read the Canterbury Tales. But I'm never going to use that language for communication, just for art.

It's like the Catholic who speak their own native language, but mostly use Latin for their ceremonies. Or the Reform Jews, a sect a belong to, who speak mostly in English but use Hebrew for our own ceremonies. A language for communication, a language for religion, a language for art and culture.
The idea of Standard may not be beautiful, but it is efficient.

Now, I'd say that English is already evolving. It's constantly evolving, it's one of the hallmarks of the language. Urban American-English, Spanglish, Welsh-English, Scotch-English, these are all examples of the English language changing on it's own.

If we adopted a Standard language, do you believe that native languages would fall out of use?

Response to Aurora's "When is art?"

Simply put, Aurora. He's not.
As we discussed in class, for every question that could be raised about a work of art based on the word "when" we can find a counterpart with the word "what."
When is something a work of art? What makes something a work of art?"
When we use an artwork for a common task, is it no longer art? Does the use of an art object control its properties?
While there are some circumstances in which the word "when" more easily creates a question about an art object, it is merely a semantic difference that distracts us from solid discourse.
So can we find any value in Goodman's treatise?

The Limits of Language

I was thinking about the idea of genetic mixing the other day. When people of different genetic backgrounds have offspring the chances are that the offspring will be better off than it's parents. This is best exemplified by inherited diseases such as Tay-Sachs disease (Often found in those of Slavic, Jewish, or Eastern-European descent. or Sickle-Cell anemia (often found in those of African descent. In both situations the child is only born with the disease if both parents are carriers. So the chances of someone being born with Sickle-Cell or Tay-Sachs is extremely low if one parent is African and the other is an Ashkenazi Jew.
Now what if we were to apply this same thinking to language, something that's almost has hereditary as genes themselves. By mixing languages we can form a new, more complete language. The example that I used in class is of the coup d'etat, where we didn't have a phrase in English that quite fit in it's place. But there are dozens of other examples, and even more times when we could adopt this strategy.
For instance the word Malquerer is Spanish, it means something to the effect of loving/hating something. There is no word in English to fit this. So what if we adopt it to improve the language. Could we move forward to a single language that combines the best parts of all language to create the most complete linguistic experience?
Of course this would not be a substitute for all languages. The poetry of French, and the forcefulness of German could be lost in this new "Standard" language. A truly tragic loss for humanity. So I'm not advocating getting rid of any language. But creating a standard language to avoid communication problems. Languages like Spanglish and Yiddish before it are combining two languages in an attempt at better communication. It is irrelevant what language that "Standard" is based on.
Is it morally right to advocate for a standard language? Or would be considered too ethnocentric?

Response to Tyler's "Serious art"

I completely sympathize with your Frankenstein experience. In high-school we spent entire classes dissecting Holden Caulfied's red hunting hat. (While all I wanted was someone to dissect him so he'd stop whining.)
I think that the over-analysis of some works of literature comes from the belief that all narratives have significant philosophy hidden within them. In my American Rennaisance class, (with Prof. Langston, highly recommended,) we're analyzing Emerson and Thoreau. These two authors wrote their opus magnums as works of philosophy with excellent prose. While the next authors we inspected were Melville and Hawthorne, these authors used narrative as a way to slip in obvious political and philosophical comments. These are legitimate uses of intense literature analysis. But when this idea gets applied to every work of literature we can certainly ruin it.
But, how can we tell when it is appropriate to use these techniques? If we don't intensly analyze each piece of great literature we may miss something important!

Ethical dilemmas degrading art

So I have thought about the question of Ethical dilemmas degrading what we think of the quality of art. I ask, is it possible to put aside all ethical considerations of a work of art just to consider it for art's sake? This leads me to another thought, is it right to ignore the ethical concerns brought up by the artist? For instance, I think that Russel Crowe is one of the best current actors, but I find his off-camera behavior reprehensible. In this case I was able to separate the artist from the art to appreciate the art. After all, Crowe is simply an ass. And while I think he is a great actor, his performances have little effect on my core emotions.
But I found it more difficult to separate the author Orson Scott Card, who wrote some books that were deeply important to me. I have a strong emotional attachment to his writing. But I am also strongly rooted in my belief that homosexuals and heterosexuals are equally normal and that all people are created equal.
Card however is an outspoken homophobe, and while that never came up in his writing, I find it hard to forget about it when I'm reading his work. Which makes me wonder if it's the right thing to do. I realize that this is more me asking questions than presenting a point, but it's something that I've been wondering about.
Question: Is it morally right to separate an artist from his work if we find the artist's own morals questionable?

Response to Aurora's "Weitz"

I love this question, I believe that it is imprecise to say "time period" in the question though. The more appropriate question would involve not time periods, but art movements or continuous types of art. For instance the theory of significant form doesn't hold up in any discussion of what Bell would call descriptive painting as an art form.
Aside from this though I don't believe that we've yet encountered any theories that work within some art movements, but not all. The argument can and is often made that the theories apply to no art, because they are simply wrong.
Another interesting question is, have we encountered any part of the theories of art that are universally true?