Why is the art theory presented in this book and the tradition it stems from so frowned upon today in academic circles?

For clarification, this is from Nietzsche, which he uses as a launchpad for his theory:

>The tragic artist. — It is a question of strength (of an individual or of a people), whether and where the judgement "beautiful" is applied. [...] Pleasure in tragedy characterizes strong ages and natures: their non plus ultra is perhaps the divina commedia. It is the heroic spirits who say Yes to themselves in tragic cruelty: they are hard enough to experience suffering as a pleasure.

As for your "tragedy was meant to produce catharsis, not pleasure" comment, Nietzsche said this about it:

>Supposing, on the other hand, that the weak desire to enjoy an art that is not meant for them; what would they do to make tragedy palatable for themselves? They would interpret their own value feelings into it; e.g., the "triumph of the moral world-order" or the doctrine of the "worthlessness of existence" or the invitation to "resignation" (— or half-medicinal, half-moral discharges of affects a la Aristotle). Finally: the art of the terrifying, in so far as it excites the nerves, can be esteemed by the weak and exhausted as a stimulus: that, for example, is the reason Wagnerian art is esteemed today. It is a sign of one's feeling of power and well-being how far one can acknowledge the terrifying and questionable character of things; and whether one needs some sort of "solution" at the end.

The snippet from Benjamin that he says is "a conclusion which is essentially the same" as his is:

>From a photographic negative ... one can make any number of prints; to ask for the "authentic" print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. ... it begins to be based on another practice — politics.

Also, "artfags" are not experts. They are the people (slave moralists) who transform the arts into anything other than beauty, pleasure, the aesthetic (i.e. politics, the "slave game"). That is what his category refers to.

>Also, there are a bunch of academics who consider vidya art, their problem is that they don't know shit about vidya.

And that is why their perspective on the matter is worthless.

>Nietzsche's understanding of the aesthetic through tragedy
Nietzsche had a wrong idea of the apollonian

icy keep updating orgy that shit's amazing bud

This is the problem with Nietzsche, he's pretty much giving his opinion, when any careful reading of say, The Bacchae, Oedipus or Medea, the cathartic element of these tragedies seem evident. If we consider the work of people like Agamben and Girard, not to mention Plato's expulsion of the poets and Aristotle's pharmakon (to remain on classic antiquity ground, obviously), the very separation of representation and everyday life (as opposed to say, the vedic or talmudic life which is all about reproducing the mythic times in the quotidian), it becomes difficult to agree with Nietzsche. As I've said, I don't want to delve within The Work of Art in the Age of it's Mechanical Reproduction because A) that text is dense as fuck and B) This is a VERY plain reading of said dense text.
Now, if "artfags" (again, as you put it) and academics of art aren't experts on art, who is?
Also, you seem to be the one driven to a view of art imposed by outside forces, while the artfags are the people remodelling art and opening up new possibilities of expression and communication. You seem to be the slave here, tied to a conception of art which was never really considered or applied, and getting mad at the people who lash out at the decrepit groundskeepers of art. The kingdom of heaven MUST be taken by storm.

>art theory
A manchild's tirade seeking to excuse why he enjoys playing Mario more than looking at Kandinsky, to call that reductionist hoghwash an art theory is very generous.

>he's pretty much giving his opinion
It's never his opinion, but his observations of the psychospiritual characteristics of man.

>Now, if "artfags" (again, as you put it) and academics of art aren't experts on art, who is?
People who properly understand them. For example, those professors know shit about video games, by your admission, so they can't be said to be experts on them. To "know about video games" they would have had to have played them, and the more they have played (and played well, obviously), the better they'd understand them.

They not knowing about videogames doesn't exclude them from being experts on art. As for "psychospiritual characteristics of man", believing something like that is very anti-nietzschean.

>They not knowing about videogames doesn't exclude them from being experts on art.
It does exclude them from being experts on the artform that is video games, however. And it also limits the extent of their expertise by not knowing anything about the latest artform.

>believing something like that is very anti-nietzschean.
lol, how?

>Mario
Consider reading the book sometime. He mocks the people you're referring to.

you're a pleb m8

>latest arform
Nigger how pretentious are you, videogames are almost 50 years old, meanwhile there are people doing art with nanobots, neurological implants, genetic manipulation and so on, if those professors aren't experts, they are clearly more in line with you for this only.
>lol, how
I'm rather sure Nietzsche didn't believe in a essential state of man in order to make psychospiritual observations about it. He very clearly analyzed people in defined situations (as vast as the may be, i.e. christianity) precisely because believing in said "state of man" is to become a platonist cuck.

>there are people doing art with nanobots, neurological implants, genetic manipulation and so on
Oh, and what new artforms have they created that are not just the visual arts?

>if those professors aren't experts, they are clearly more in line with you for this only.
They don't know anything about the art form, how can they be said to be experts on it? You are making zero sense right now.

>I'm rather sure Nietzsche didn't believe in a essential state of man in order to make psychospiritual observations about it. He very clearly analyzed people in defined situations (as vast as the may be, i.e. christianity) precisely because believing in said "state of man" is to become a platonist cuck.
Making observations does not mean he has to "believe in an essential state of man" nor did I imply this is the case at all. He is constantly making observations throughout his books; his observations in fact take into consideration the fact that the current state of man became this way and wasn't always this way. I think you're stepping out of your realm of expertise here.

take the hint and try to keep face, user

Take the hint and contribute something meaningful if you want a serious response.

...do you even know what the term "visual art" entails? Do you realize there have been interactive pieces of "visual art" since the fucking 1910s? As well as works of art without a material (or even truly visual) element? Because those professors all do, considering I studied under them and know of these things you don't.
I think you're the one completely out of your realm. I like Nietzsche, but to say he's completely right all of the time is to be anti-nietzschean as fuck as well. That being said, another thing you completely seem to gloss over, is that the greek relation to art is VERY different to the western relation to art. So different, indeed, that as I've said before, I don't even think it's right to call what the greeks did art. Whatever Nietzsche said about tragedy is probably extremely removed from the actual tragedy, and works more in telling how a 19th century man influenced by romanticism would see art as to how the greeks did. I don't even think you completely understand what the term "artform" means. Something belonging to a different medium than say, painting, doesn't exclude it from being a visual art.

lol

>interactive pieces of "visual art"
And let me guess, this is what you think video games are? Interactive pieces of visual art? Because this would precisely confirm my suspicion that you are as much clueless about the subject of video games as any of those professors are — anyone who knows anything significant at all about video games hears this shit from them all the time, like games being "interactive pieces of visual art," and we always laugh at it, because it's ridiculous and very clearly an analysis from someone with little to no insight into the true aesthetic experience of play and video games. It's a critique from someone who has not had any experience with the object being scrutinized critically.

>but to say he's completely right all of the time is to be anti-nietzschean as fuck as well.
Another thing that was never said or even implied, thank you for that.

>That being said, another thing you completely seem to gloss over, is that the greek relation to art is VERY different to the western relation to art.
I don't gloss over it. At this point, you should understand that I, like Nietzsche, possess an aesthetic taste that is much more aligned with the ancient Greek's than it is with any contemporary taste. I'm totally conscious of that. But I also don't think that what you say is entirely the case — only in the academic circles is it as strong as you're suggesting. There are still millions upon millions in the West (and many as well in the East) who are driven by their pleasures and by aesthetic beauty and who judge art chiefly by this faculty.

What relation do you even want me to videogames? I play them, a lot, since I was a kid. I've read about them. I never tried making one seriously, but I try to do some pixel shit miming actual 16 bit graphics instead of lolsoquirky pseudo-8bit shit all the time. The problem here is that you're refusing to give any explanation as to why vidya is so drastically different from anything else while also claiming only you, Nietzsche and some autist understand what aesthetics and videogames are.
You're the Schiller fag, aren't you, you try to hide your opinions behind pseudo-grandiloquent prose but in the end what you're saying is "no one in the west understands art except for me". You're like an autistic mix of Quentin, ACFag and EvolaKid, as well as a great argument for anti-natalism.

Not him but what makes video games different from all other art is they are interactive. Or, if you want to get very technical, they are much more interactive than other types of art (since looking at visual art is a type of interaction). Video games have "mechanics" which are not present in other art.

t. someone from culture.vg. why do ya'll insistently shill on Veeky Forums of all places.

Cool thread. Questions:

1) What do you guys define as "art"?

2) What separates the different mediums (art, music, etc)? The different senses through which we experience them? The process through which the piece of art is made?

3) Talking specifically of videogames, and assuming "art" is some sort of quality standard, (if this ends up at odds with the previous answers disgregard the question), has the medium reached this height? If so, with what works?

Got certain opinions, want to understand your points better before replying though

Interactive art predates videogames, as I've said in my previous post.

i think the main issue is that vidya anounts to murder and dating simulators which isn’t at all what tragedy is supposed to be about, it shares nothing with the visual arts beyond inferior aesthetic experiences that approximate some of the content of the other visual arts. games look like shit, if you have a trained eye and haven’t played then for a while they look absolutely horrendous, the physics are mind numbingly horrid. you would need a game written by master writers, programmed by people with a freakish budget and constructed to be like a play or a painting to break through these barriers and since games are chiefl entertainment devices and consumer products there is a guarantee of this never happening. There’s nothing else to say

yawn.jpg

>You're the Schiller fag, aren't you
I shill the Schiller for free, yes.

The reason why I haven't given a thorough explanation of the aesthetic experience in games yet is because giving such an explanation about any aesthetic experience, especially one for the most advanced artform, is not easy, because said experience is had through the senses. That said, I can tell you that "video games are interactive pieces of visual art" is a horrible depiction of the experience, and here's why.

From Schiller:

>The object of the sensuous instinct, expressed in a universal conception, is named Life in the widest acceptation: a conception that expresses all material existence and all that is immediately present in the senses. The object of the formal instinct, expressed in a universal conception, is called shape or form, as well in an exact as in an inexact acceptation; a conception that embraces all formal qualities of things and all relations of the same to the thinking powers. The object of the play instinct, represented in a general statement, may therefore bear the name of living form; a term that serves to describe all aesthetic qualities of phaenomena, and what people style, in the widest sense, beauty.

>The use of language completely justifies this name [the play instinct], as it is wont to qualify with the word play what is neither subjectively nor objectively accidental, and yet does not impose necessity either externally or internally. As the mind in the intuition of the beautiful finds itself in a happy medium between law and necessity, it is, because it divides itself between both, emancipated from the pressure of both.

His understanding of the aesthetic experience breaks the dichotomy of "external" and "internal" or "objective" and "subjective". In a state of play, which I'm sure you can imagine, we do not experience the objects of our play drive in this way. We are, in a word, "immersed" in them — we take ourselves into them, but we melt into the things we play with.

The phrase "interactive piece of visual art" betrays this feeling. It does not describe how it feels to play a game. We are not interacting with objects in a game like they are works of visual art. We do not consider them so indifferently. In a game, we consider things by their relation to ourselves. Is it a friendly NPC, or an enemy? Does the NPC need to be healed, or protected, or what? What can I do with the NPC? What can the enemy do to harm me? What can I do to get out of harm's way? What can I do to overpower the enemy? etc. In a state of play, like being kicked into survival mode when you see a bear in a forest, your mindful identification of yourself is put on pause and melts into the situation at hand, the environment you find yourself in, in order to take action best. That experience, in that, is where the aesthetic lies for video games. What professor ever mentions anything like that, though?

>Is it a friendly NPC, or an enemy? Does the NPC need to be healed, or protected, or what? What can I do with the NPC?
And just to add, this also doesn't really depict the feeling all too well — we don't think of them as "NPCs" really. Like in Halo, for example, we do acknowledge that they are not controlled by us, but we don't necessarily look at the marines by our side as "NPCs" but as marines. At least, this is what happens when we have become fully immersed, that is, our play instinct is in full engagement and we are on our way to having ourselves an aeshetic experience in a game.

1)I don't define art. The concept I'm most satisfied with right now would be "a harmonious struggle between mimesis and poiesis" but even that fails to account to a lot of things within art history, while also being extremely vague. I can also try to restrict it to western art, which makes it easier but still difficult as fuck, so I'd put it as "the act or producing open possibilities of creative communication", but that still is limited as fuck.

2) Their method of consumption. What makes, for example, Yoko Ono a performer instead of a musician is the fact that her music was sold / given as performance / non-music. We can even stretch it a bit further, once you consider Shakespeare is always remembered more as a poet than a playwright, or Homer, or Sophocles.

3) Art is not a quality standard. I never said it was. In fact, my first post says that I never understood the need of vidya to be art, there's no intrinsic value in something being art. We kind of use it as a qualitative statement out of habit / convenience, but every attempt from both art and art theory in trying to elevate or prove said elevation of art ended up failing and proving quite the contrary.
See, that's the problem with you. I always try to take something out of your walls of text and you always gives rambling subjective, grandiose experiences which amount to nothing when intersubjectively considered. This was the problem with romanticism, this held aesthetics back a lot as a serious school of thought. You think you can start with your own definition - or Schiller's outdated one - of art and then be the judge on what is or what isn't art, but the truth is that a lot of shit I don't like is art, but that's ok. A lot of videogames are bad as well, that's life. It's not the value of something that determines whether or not it is art, the art status is given to the objects that are accepted as art, be them bad, good, sincere, opportunistic, sacred, profane, moralist, immoralist and so on. Art is not a fixed metaphysical ideal, art is the relation between society and the art objects, whatever they may be. Once the boomers die out and gen xs and ys become the majority in academy, videogames will suddenly be art like cinema was before it.

Didn't I clarify that we are talking about degree's of interactivity, if you want to get technical?

What are the degrees?

Do you really need to be explained that video games, especially the more advanced one's that are being released, have a much greater degree of interactivity than other type of art?

>more advanced ones
You mention Halo, Halo is a movie next to Dworfort or Nethack. Also, all of your claims about immersion seem kinda retarded considering you're in a literature board. Do you really think videogames started immersion? If anything, they made it easier to autists like you by giving you qt waifus instead of actual text which requires work and imagination.

I'm not even the guy talking about Halo, nor has anyone said video games invented immersion. Calm your tits.

Then please point me to the official international immersion scale pls, I haven't been educated on that.

>I don't define art.
It's easy to avoid appearing wrong about a subject when you mask your position with nonsense like this. People with sense know what this means though: that you already appear as such and are looking for an escape route before the less keen find out.

>Once the boomers die out and gen xs and ys become the majority in academy, videogames will suddenly be art like cinema was before it.
Sure. That's why you have me now, and people like me, beginning to crop up, thanks to Icy. Individuals like Icy will have pioneered it.

I haven't masked anything. I gave you two positions that are as clear as I can get. I can give you some more, but none of them will be fit to categorize the totality of art. You never give any definition either, you just keep repeating date examples of the "sublime experience", hiding your lack of substance behind an empty façade of deep spirituality. You're not fooling anyone but yourself. As I've said before, people have been aware of the existence and potential of videogames as art for quite a while now, Icycalm is just an autist on the internet who gives other autists what they want to hear.
Your definition of art is poor, your reading of art is poor, your understanding of art history is poor, and yet weekend after weekend you come to Veeky Forums/ trying to sell the same crap, being btfo by most likely the same people until everyone just goes out to do anything else while you keep pretending you are the final judge on what art is. I gotta thank you though, I never have anything to do on saturday afternoons and that seems to be your peak activity, so you always entertain me until nightfall with your mellodramatic retardedness.

I also want to know how deep in it I am.

Also it's raining a lot and my current Darkest Dungeon campaign is kinda going off the rails so we might have to extend today, if that's okay with you. You better hope someone calls me to play something.

>1) What do you guys define as "art"?
Art is the creative human effort to produce aesthetic effect. Works of art are human creations which produce the highest aesthetic effects. An aesthetic effect is an effect that creates an aesthetic emotion, an emotion which not only contains the sensation derived from beholding beauty but also the sensation of reverence and freedom. tl;dr - what is art is a creation that I feel is beautiful and worthy of worship beyond all the rest.

To quote Clive Bell:
>I have no right to consider anything a work of art to which I cannot react emotionally; and I have no right to look for the essential quality in anything that I have not felt to be a work of art.

>2) What separates the different mediums (art, music, etc)?
"Art" and "music" are not separate mediums. Visual art and music are separate mediums, or artforms. What separates them is how we experience them, through which we also come to understand what defines them and what is art among them. But the principles of art and the aesthetic is the same in all of them from the theoretical standpoint.

>3) Talking specifically of videogames, and assuming "art" is some sort of quality standard, (if this ends up at odds with the previous answers disgregard the question), has the medium reached this height? If so, with what works?
Some games are already at the level of art. Icy covers best which ones are.

>worthy of worship
slave morality detected

>what is art is a creation that I feel is beautiful and worthy of worship beyond all the rest.
>art is a creation that I feel is beautiful
>that I feel
that's the problem. No one cares.

>art and the aesthetic is the same in all of them from the theoretical standpoint
postmodern relativism detected

...

People do care. Why do you think user gives OP such a hard time?

>A noble soul will be glad to feel obligated to gratitude and will not anxiously avoid those occasions on which such obligation arises; it will likewise also subsequently be composed in the expression of gratitude; whereas baser souls resist all becoming obligated or are afterwards excessive and all too sedulous in their expressions of gratitude.

As I've said, there's never shit to do on saturday afternoons. I'm the only guy in my group of friends who doesn't work weekends and I barely even have a chance to talk about art to anyone, it's very convenient. If he changed his official schedule to wednesdays or thursdays I'd care a lot less.

Worship isn't gratitude, pseud.

To feel that something is worthy of worship does not mean I worship it. It is an acknowledgement of the greatness of a thing, a form of gratitude towards it by marking it as worthy of such, a nobler sentiment than you imagine it.

Yeah, you sound so noble.

so do you mister

What level of immersion is this?

An attempt to actually get some discuss going instead of turd-flinging.

Concept of the subhuman and his relationship to art.

1/2

> To be sure there was Baudrillard, who had made a belated attempt to expose the "conspiracy", but who has understood him? And that is by no means to disparage anyone, since he had failed to understand himself! on the one hand praising the cinema as "really the place where I relax" (precisely, by the way, what video games are to me), and on the other not deeming it sufficiently worthy to be included in the term "contemporary art". Paint splotches and shit-filled cans were art — even to Baudrillard! — but Hollywood's stunning spectacles (the only place on earth, by the way, that has so far taken the cinema with the seriousness it deserves—) were not! Such was the blanket dominance of pseudo-intellectual hipsterism and bullshit manufacturing in the twentieth century, that even its greatest thinker was powerless to resist it. As for the alleged conspiracy, if only there had really been one! That would at least have indicated some intelligence on the part of the conspirators, some measure of humanity — some common ground on which to meet, to communicate, to talk some sense into them. As things stand we are forced to acknowledge a complete and utter lack of a conspiracy, of any kind of premeditation, any thought process at all — an instinctively malignant behavior on the part of a breed of creatures that could hardly be called conscious. A monstrous vindictiveness against life, a mortal hatred of beauty, of intelligence, of competence, of power. A flat rejection of 100 millennia of art history, of all the values of the race, of all the ideals of our ancestors. — And in all seriousness, the question must be asked — for it is time we asked it — that if these creatures reject some of mankind's greatest achievements, the hopes and dreams that it is precisely art's purpose to represent and glorify — if they reject mankind's dreams — in what way exactly, can they be said to be human?

>No one cares.
Most people don't, because their play-impulse has been fried trying to keep up with society's demands. For those who have not suffered this, art and the aesthetic life is mostly all that they do care about.

2/2

>Dehumanization, therefore, starts right there; the stripping of a humanity we have so hastily bestowed on them; the dawning realization, at once terrible and hilarious, that the time is well past since bipedalism, lengthened ontogeny and decreased sexual dimorphism sufficed to distinguish men from chimps; that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it may not, for all that, be necessarily a duck; that there is something more than brute physicality, than mere flesh and bones, that is required here — in which, indeed, an orangutan far exceeds even the strongest of humans —; that what happens in the brain — the mental, that is to say, dimension — is just as important as the "physical" one (to employ, for the sake of convenience, a crude duality here — as if the brain were something immaterial, but that's another story...), and in some fields more — that is to say intelligence, and as a corollary of that ideas and consequently values.
It can't "be art" because it's good! This is the upshot of all their argumentation! It can't "be art" because it's rich, because it's engaging, because it's beautiful — it can't "be art" because it's manly! — Fagots may perhaps think that way, would be our reply today; but not everyone is a fagot. In fact a great many of us are not, and it's precisely we who have inherited 2,500 years of Western culture, and we'll be damned if we'll allow you to destroy it. Indeed it's time you learned — it's time we made this clear — that whoever attacks our culture attacks us, and thereby becomes an enemy of mankind, which should be, and soon enough will be, treated as such.
If verbal persuasion, then, has been correctly defined as mental violence, it is another kind of violence we need today, a more immediate, stronger kind of violence, to act where all the subtler attempts have failed. It's no use. Words have never gotten us anywhere: one might as well try to talk a vulture out of devouring corpses. There's only one solution to the problem — not only in the artistic sphere, but everywhere — and I am afraid it is the final one.

Terrifying concept.

eyeroll.jpg

Saged nigger

I've said this before. You're the one who doesn't care about art, you only care about your narrow view of art, which doesn't matter at all to art or the art world. You try to paint yourself as noble, but you only sound like a little kid angry because they didn't let you sit at the big boy's table.

this is pretentious pseudo-nietzschean garbage whoever wrote this, i assume Icycalm or MM, should kill themselves. reeks of shallow auto-didacticism.

>You're the one who doesn't care about art
If only I thought about abstract economic models, political schemes, pop philosophical inquiries, and the latest hip pseudo-scientific theories when experiencing art. If only I talked about the presence of these things in music and not at all about music's mechanics, meter, rhythm, tempo, harmony, etc. or the development of musical genres and arrangements like types of quartets, what defines them and their increasing complexity, or any of the sensations from listening to them or the different instruments, alone and when played together. Then I would care about art. Then I would be talking about art. Right?

t. subhuman

Thanks to you both for the answers. Have to go now, will hopefully be able to reply tomorrow.

You don't get it lad, only OP and Icycalm understand western art, the rest of humanity is wrong.

The Greeks understood as well. You should have started with them.

god imagine how that shit must smell now

I loved that essay.

now one knows if they actually contain shit

*no one

so much samefagging itt

So you're saying the millionaire hipsters who payed good money for their canned shit might have not even gotten the real deal? A total rip-off. Scammed like a kickstarter campaign! Suppose they did contain turds but they were turds from some random bum instead of an artist? Not even real art-shit but FAKE art-shit!

Could you sue the artist for fraud? Wait. What if the value of the cans actually INCREASED if you were given no turds, or fraudulent turds?

I look forward to your contribution as the third participant in this week's episode of Man vs. Wild-Ass.

>vidya makes me le man cuz I play them

This is the level of the fag you're arguing with.