Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Art can make a room full of non-artists feel the same powerful emotions.
Tell me you haven't ever experienced a powerful urge to kill in an online game? :-0 Or cried when you lost your last life just before reaching the high score in an arcade? ;-)
But sure, some art can do that. That's art 'for others'. I totally disagree that all art is like that. A hermit can make art. Probably most of humanity's first art was mostly for self enjoyment, cave-painting, wood carving, etc.
Just because we have set art forms which are widely appreciated doesn't make them paramount in any way. There is art in carpentry that is entirely covered over with walls and is never seen. There is art scribbled in the margins of millions of dull textbooks. There is art in a good joke that is never attributed to any person. Life itself is a performance art. At least a life worth living. Those who are just getting on with it, hoping to get to the end of it without appreciating it along the way are merely time-servers.
And I think that is what we see in the work of the more widely appreciated artforms. We see a master craftsperson who takes what they do seriously and does it very well. In visual art it may be to create beauty, or to give a message. Same goes for the art of programming - elegance and clarity are always preferable. Ugly code jumps at the eye of those who deal with it, just as ugly instructions in a manual sicken those who have to read it. Indeed it was the sheer artistry that went into the first computer manual I ever owned that got me hooked on programming.
You can argue that creating such clarity and beauty is formulaic, but if you find it so, I think I would hate to read any program you wrote. If there was a formula, we could get a computer to do it. We can't, programming is a human task, with human artistry, forming a beautiful bond between man and machine.
Anyone who's ever actually enjoyed driving a car, rather than merely using it as a way of getting around and ignoring the machine itself, might get what I'm saying. Anyone who doesn't, who can only see art as the major accepted artforms will never appreciate new art, and ultimately will miss the entire point of art itself, the breaking of perceptions, the creation of ideas, the formation of beauty from new elements in new ways.
Such people will deride the DJ as a hack who is merely selecting records, without understanding the genius involved in that task itself, much less the more technical aspects of mixing and sequencing. They will not see a Formula One driver or and All Black as an artist, whose bodies and movements are their art, their expression of their lives and personalities.
And they certainly won't see art in those around them who seek on a daily basis to maximize their enjoyment of life. The old geezer walking along, doing his best not to fall down because of his gamey leg, is an artist hard at work. You can appreciate it when you see the guy getting better at it. You feel better. Well I do, anyway.
If there's an inability to communicate here, it's one way. I understand why you might not appreciate programming. I am a similar novice when it comes to, say, appreciating parliamentary debate. But I won't say there's no art in it. It's just art I don't like, of which there is a great deal. That I don't like it doesn't make it less artistic.
-
Hello?! Homer! Vergil and Ovid!
Hello?! I've got all of those in a small pile right here whilst I put my library in boxes never to be seen again. Fits nicely in one hand. The other arm is not enough for all the Tolkien though.
OK, they didn't have typewriters or printing presses back then, and Homer at least was writing the whole thing down from memory, so I kind of get your point. But none of them actually invented the myths they were writing poetry about.
-
They lack that obsessive polish and independent existence from their creators.
What crap. LOTR was all about obsession with polish, which is why it took 20 years to write. You might not like the polish, though. And Tolkien is dead, but it's still popular, so I don't get the 'independent existence' point at all.
1) No one was ever moved to weep by a line of code.
Only a non-coder could ever suggest such heresy. I wept with joy over one line of code just this week, and plenty of them have made me weep with laughter. Furthermore, the code itself is more like the dots of paint. It's the outcome, the program, which is the overall artwork, and I've seen plenty of people who weren't programmers weeping with frustration at programs over the years. Change a few lines and those tears move to joy and gratitude.
-
3410 makes a good point, but I would amend it slightly.
I would amend it majorly. I don't think it's the experience of poverty that makes poor artists great. It's the reason they are impoverished, which is their devotion to the art itself. There is no set of experiences that make one kind of art better than another. The wealthy have their own experiences, and because these experiences are rarer, sometimes they are of great interest. If they are devoted to the art itself, wealthy people can make great art.
Wealthier people are also much rarer, so the odds of extreme talent being had by someone wealthy is less than in the wider population. But if they choose to be an artist, they can do it as long as they like, so they are probably more prolific. So it certainly can seem like wealthy people make worse art, on average.
-
Paul, Paris Hilton will be remembered much longer than you or I. People will be watching her amateurish BJ forever, thanks to the digital revolution. Probably the most famous amateur scene ever, rivalled only by Pamela Anderson's. But she's technically an actor so it's technically not amateur, unlike Hilton's masterwork.
-
Heather, again, I agree and disagree. There is a huge range of coding environments, from the one-person-band who is entrepreneur, analyst, coder, tester, sales, support and maintenance, all in one, right through to projects which have 10 people for each step, and thousands of salespeople.
My experiences have all been at the smaller end of this, the biggest team I've worked in is currently, 5 analyst/programmers, about 4-5 capitalists, about 5 support people, and dozens of salespeople. But I have worked with bigger teams in previous jobs. My observation was that the artistry is more and more stripped out the bigger the shop. The more processes added to up the quality of the code, the less room there is for any real flair. But I admit that I probably just don't get the subtlety of being a coder in a big shop. Perhaps there is deep satisfaction in meeting someone else's spec, which counterbalances the annoyance at how fucked the spec was to start with.
Your mild frustration asides are indicative to me of why you seem to disagree with me about the artistry. Yes it is hampering to have the ways you could solve a problem closed down by foolish analysts or more likely by the people pulling their strings further up who aren't even technical at all. It would be like telling Michaelangelo he had to paint entirely with his left hand because left-handed paintbrushes had been purchased in bulk by the church.
Naturally a great deal of the artistry in such an environment is in exactly how you tell management they are wrong. That is every bit as much the job of the programmer as cutting the code. If you are a master artist, you can see bad analysis before you go to all the trouble (and expense) of trying to code it up. You work to make it seem like their decision, in a Socratic kind of way. Or you kick some arse, get them fired and get your promotion. Either way, it's either done artistically or in a slapdash careless way that backfires more often than not. Your choice.
-
Dilletantes like that Hilton woman never spend enough time on one thing or commit to it emotionally (at least Parsons was emotionally committed to his music) to be able to make the emotional connection with the audience - she has no insight into their lives at all.
I would defend Hilton by saying her art is her entire life as a celebrity. That's what she's chosen to be, to do, and she does it well. There is a lot of entertainment to be had out of Paris Hilton, something that most heiresses would not deign to give to the public. I think it is wrong to say she has no insight into the lives of her audience. She just chooses a strange audience.
-
Amen to that. It took me about four goes to get through the whole thing. I don't reread LOTR much anymore,....
But you have reread it. Which is more than I can say for Potter, and I have more tolerance for that genre than most.
For all these criticisms, most of which are valid, the fact remains that this book was amazingly successful. Most people agree the prose is tedious and many have all sorts of ideas for how it could have been better. But few will even give that attention to most fantasy works.
Personally I actually read the chapter "Mount Doom" before I even started the book, when I was 9 or whenever it was that I first read it. I'd seen the cartoon and wanted to know how the story ended. So I already knew how it ended, and was in no hurry to get there, when I read the book. To finish the book took me over a year.
That is the way with mythopoetic stories. It's not about racing to the end, or 'getting the point'. The enjoyment is in the telling, in the escapism. We all know what happened at the fall of Troy, so we don't judge any telling of it by how it ends. It's how it's told, how caught up we get in it. It's the little lessons along the way, and the characterizations. The work is Art, with a capital A, no matter how many minor or even major faults you find in it. We don't say the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is kitch and trite because once again all it does is honour God and Christian mythology. We judge it by the beauty, the scope of the vision, and the care and attention put into it. It's not like no-one ever painted a ceiling before.
-
Lyndon,
"Person x has an irrational (and false) belief that any one or more of their beliefs were irrational and false."
That formulation can be rejected immediately as false since it leads immediately to contradiction. You simply can't have an irrational and false belief that any one or more of your beliefs is irrational and false. Because if you have that irrational false belief, then you are having at least one such belief, which makes your belief- that any one or more of your beliefs is irrational and false - true. It can't be false and true at the same time. So you can't have such a belief (although you could believe you did, but that's a different story).
My hat tip is to Raymond Smullyan - "Satan, Cantor, and Infinity" finally enabled me to get how to work these antinomies out, something 2nd and 3rd year logic never managed to do.
It's one of those little known facts about modern philosophy that a great deal of the problems that plagued middle ages philosophers to do with logic and numbers have been conclusively solved. Even most philosophers don't know, because, as with all philosophy, once it was solved it moved out of philosophy and into science and/or maths. So this stuff is mostly taught in mathematics departments and your average philosopher finds it incomprehensible and extremely boring. But being logic choppers themselves they still love to raise these old puzzles, and are extremely difficult to convince that they just don't have the background required to actually find the answers, and should head over to the maths department where some autistic guy will tell them the answer.
-
merc that is quite interesting. I never knew Treebeard was a homage/caricature of Lewis.
And I think I should add to my 'profit motive muddies art' point that eschewing the profit motive is of course no guarantee of making great art. Most people simply don't have the talent for it. And as Paul Rowe says, poverty can make people obsess about profit even more than they would if they were just dribbling along making decent money with commercialized art. It's an observation about art, not a prescription for how to become a great artist.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 1032 1033 1034 1035 1036 … 1066 Older→ First