The Path and other art games

[Phil_A]

The Path is a third person exploration type game loosely based on the Red Riding Hood story. You chose one of seven sisters to go and wander around in some creepy woods, collecting various symbolic items which all in some way relate to each girl's eventual fate, until ultimately you encounter a "wolf" - not an actual wolf, but a literal personification of death itself. After completing the journey to Grandma's House(no, not that one), you start again with another sister, and so it goes on.

I finished my playthrough last week, and since then I've been trying to assess what I think about the whole thing. It's definitely one of the more unusual games I've ever encountered, but as an actual interactive experience, I felt like it failed in what it set out to do. The creators have apparently little interest in gaming as a whole, and I think that shows in the clunkiness of the mechanics. It basically forces you to go everywhere at an agonisingly slow pace, and on top of that your journey through the woods is entirely random, so often you can just walk for ages without finding anything new. Most of the text comes from the girl's descriptions of items and places they find, and this is often cryptic to the point of irritation. They also throw in a bunch of shiny doodads for you to collect, which seems to be the sole concession to the completist gamer mentality, but which ultimately serve no purpose.

If The Path fails as game, you'd hope that it might stand on it's own artistic merit, but to be honest, I'm not sure it does. I felt the world of the game just wasn't interesting or involving enough to justify spending an extended amount of time getting lost in. Despite some obviously dark and troubling subject matter, I was rarely emotionally engaged by it. I often found myself thinking "Mm, that's interesting" or "I wonder what that represents?" but ultimately it was hard to care. The creators have quite bravely eschewed exposition(i.e. there isn't any) and employed the principle of "show, don't tell", but in this case it was all show and no tell. Paradoxically, despite all the dense symbollism, I came away thinking it was actually a bit of a shallow experience.

Anyway, the rather long winded point to all this is that it got me thinking about art and games, and whether they can actually work together. What's your experience of this kind of thing? Can good art really work in the context of a game, or does it just work against it? Are there are any "art" games that satisfy the criteria of being both artistically valid and actually enjoyable to play?

[Viero_Berlotti]

Anyway, the rather long winded point to all this is that it got me thinking about art and games, and whether they can actually work together.

That's suggesting the two things are mutally exclusive, which I think is not the case. All games could be considered art because they are the product of human creative endeavour. I've not got any first hand experience of The Path but from your description it's sounds as if it is trying too hard to be 'arty', and on that count it fails as both a work of art and a game.

[Pedro_Bear]

The list of artistically valid game experiences is very long indeed.[nb]Tomb Raider is a perfect medium for communicating the concepts of solitude and revelation, but wouldn't label itself thus.

LSD: The Dream Emulator is a novel concept. We walk our way through a drug trip dream, bumping into things instantly changing the nature of our environment. Each dream lasts about 10 minutes, unless we fall from a height. It's surprisingly fun for quite a few games, neverending creativity we immerse ourselves within, and the ambient dream music can be quite beautiful, as randomly generated by our interaction as the visuals.

Max Payne's glorious V-trip is a masterpiece. The idea of a character suddenly gaining awareness that they are a computer sprite is very memorable, and very relevant to the concept of expanded consciousness ambitiously communicated by the level.

Pre-patch Darwinia played with the user interface, our little sentient sprites took orders via mouse movements drawing symbols on screen for them to interpret, but this was abandonded for some reason. Shame, as this "communication" added another layer to the idea that we were dealing with self-aware AI. It's still a fine game.

And so on, the list is as endless as it is diverse in what concepts are being communicated via the medium of a computer game, without the bullshit label "art game".
[/nb] I can't think of one that arises from an "art game" though.

The main issue is that games that are labelled "art games" are usually made by wankers with no sense of self-awareness i.e. conceptual artists knocking out another tiresome installation.

Waffa Bilal's Virtual Jihadi involves the player becoming a suicide bomber and trying to kill George W Bush. It's linear, it's uninspiring, it's a simple mod of an existing game. The fact that the average Oblivion modder could knock out something ten times as entertaining on the same theme without a three page press release which results in the solid gold of the game installation being banned as "incitement to terrorism" says everything you need to know about how the art world works i.e. it's full of shit.

The same goes for Every Day the Same Dream, a monchrome flash game that won all sorts of arty awards clearly presented by people without an internet connection as Newgrounds knocks out similar anti-games on a daily basis which are actually engaging. If this is the bar for art games, then they've dug themself into a deep pit as far as what three clicks can conjour up on-screen for the rest of us.

The Path was made by the same people who made The Graveyard. We play an old woman walking through a graveyard. We can sit down. We can get up again and leave, ending the game. If we fork out for the full game, there is the possibility that we can drop dead in game. Again, nothing that The Elder Scrolls Construction Set can't do better, with the possibilty of adding humour or background or anything to our player character.


How are these games artistic statements? Because we are told they are. If we have to be told we're having an artistic experience, it isn't valid.

[Still Not George]

The Path is just another piece of shite by epic shit purveyors Tale of Tales. I spotted this on their wikipedia page just now:

The studio is named after Giambattista Basile's book The Tale of Tales (Lo Cunto de li cuntib),

Which pretty much says it all.

Art games are not without their worth. Certainly Jason Rohrer's stuff is magnificent, both Passage and Sleep Is Death manage to be amazingly affecting in entirely different ways. But in general that's a function of Rohrer's own mad genius; it does certainly seem that anything produced by self-proclaimed art game studios is guaranteed to be shite.

[HappyTree]

Flower seems to me to be an art game that didn't specifically label itself as one but was one anyway. But just about any game these days has had months if not a couple of years of development by proper graphic artists. The point and click adventure game Syberia 2 was very beautiful, for example. That was arty in a more obvious way that, say, Fable 2 but I'm sure no more work went into it. We are spoiled in today's gaming world and I think we brush past great works of art all the time as we chase polygons around to get a kill. This is one of the reasons why my preferred mode of gaming is "ignore the game and just fanny around looking at things."





Maybe the distinction being drawn is one between art of the type used in graphic novels and "proper art". Whatever that is. I'm not a fan of comics as I find the stories too simplistic and boring but I am always in awe of the beautiful drawing and painting skills. Computer games have basically become animated graphic novels.

[Puffin Chunks]

Does Flower count as an art game? (I guess so, as HT mentioned it as I was posting this)

It's not really a game, so I guess it must be art... or it's neither and is something else altogether. Either way, I thoroughly enjoyed it in a 'kick back, relax and enjoy the scenery' kind of way. The quite blatant green message[nb]'stop polluting the environment, you bastards!'[/nb] was possibly laid on a bit thick, and the Sixaxis control mechanism isn't for everyone, but as an experience of sorts, I think it was well worth the $9.99. Short, but never not enjoyable.

Flower™ - Official Trailer

[The Boston Crab]

I spotted this on their wikipedia page just now:

(Lo Cunto de li cuntib)

Which pretty much says it all.

A segment of muesli-fied brazil nut just got lodged in my sinuses. Thanks.

[Zetetic]

A Tale of Tales are a little bit too up their own arses. They're worth nothing for at least trying to do something more interesting with player agency, but 'shit' does pretty well cover the result.

The Void/Tension/Turgor's pretty good, although sometimes it seems very much aesthetic for aesthetic's sake.

Kosakovia (Source mod) is fairly impressive attempt to convey a mental illness whilst still remaining rather game-y. Debatable (of course) if there's any success there.

A lot of increpare's games have significant worth (and a fair number are a lot more dubious). Activate the Three Artefacts and Then Leave is a pretty good starting point, and does something that'd be pretty hard to explore in any other medium.

My personal pet hate is games that involve themselves primarily with what it is to be a game. There's nothing wrong with a medium commenting on itself, but right now the tendency just seems rather empty. Braid's a fairly serious offender.

[Zetetic]

If we have to be told we're having an artistic experience, it isn't valid.

What the buggery fuck.

Edit: To clarify, let's start with 'artistically valid', and see if any sense can be made of that.

[madhair60]

Indie games have a tendency to get bogged down in being "arty" at the expense of a fulfilling game experience.

I recently played two "art" games for the first time, Machinarium and And Yet It Moves, the former being incredibly engrossing to play, with interesting puzzles and environments, great art and a superb soundtrack.  The latter, however, was a singularly unengaging piece of crap attempting to use its more "artistic" qualities (deliberately strange graphics, "minimalist" music and sound) as a substitute for being any fucking fun.

In summary, though art is subjective, or something, a game that's not much cop but specifically targets the kind of gamers who are desperate to "justify" their perfectly worthy pastime of doing things that are fun can fuck right off.  And that means you, Braid.

[Still Not George]

In summary, though art is subjective, or something, a game that's not much cop but specifically targets the kind of gamers who are desperate to "justify" their perfectly worthy pastime of doing things that are fun can fuck right off.  And that means you, Braid.

I found Braid far more fun when I just treated it as an Addams Family-style old school platfomer with some temporal bits and ignored all the "arty" commentary stuff entirely. But you're right, it is obtrusive in places.

[falafel]

Ah, so I'm not the only one in the world who didn't really like Braid. The "Art" side of it was dreadful, and the platform/puzzle side of it was... OK. But really very, very short and insubstantial.

I long for the day that a videogame becomes an appreciable work of art by accident. On its own terms. We're getting there.

[Zetetic]

I long for the day that a videogame becomes an appreciable work of art by accident. On its own terms. We're getting there.

Why don't you think we're there already? Pedro_Bear does point out some very examples of game unintentionally commenting quite deeply, or at least provoking the gamer to thought, upon aspects of humanity. The whole medium tends towards comment on agency, causation (and responsibility and choice) anyway.

I think that the 'by accident' idea seems odd in itself. How many works of art were created with out any intentionality related to artistic merit? I suppose you might mean that they don't intend to produce "art for art's sake" (although that seems as good a reason to produce art as any other, although I'll admit to finding it rather vapid both in theory and execution in most media), but that they intend to convey something.

(I'm not saying that there aren't works of art that created without intentionality related to art, indeed I think that there are probably works of art where the intention is entirely found in the viewer[nb]I'm sure some would say that therefore they're the creator, but anyway...[/nb]. Merely that there's nothing wrong with people deliberately and consciously setting out to write novels and make films and compose music with a higher aim than being mind-numbing and entertaining.)

In which case, I think you'd be hard pressed to claim that games such Deus Ex, The Void, Planescape Torment, even (say) Far Cry 2 don't already succeed as art on that basis. Each of these started with moral, political, or personal viewpoints that they wanted the gamer to react against. And none of them compromise their quality as games in pursuing this[nb]Well, FC2 isn't very fun I hasten to add, but I think that's because of errors in design largely unrelated to the core of the game[/nb]. The Void is really remarkably in this, it occurs to me now, because it's very much predicated on a sense of impending failure and emptiness (despite the rewards of the game) that I'm really quite impressed they managed to sustain without pissing the player off too much[nb]With the caveat that I've yet to finish it, because I'm not good enough[/nb].

[falafel]

Very good points and I know that in a way the question I am looking at is the very dubious one of canon... it's obviously absurd to suggest that anything we call "art " would be in and of itself a complete representation of that which you might call artistry or depth; and I appreciate that all the games you mention and many more do have that incidental commentary embedded in them, there's no way they couldn't. But to my mind they are more interesting as artifacts of the culture that created them; there's only so much you can do with agency really, without a bit more depth. But there are certainly interesting and thought-provoking things out there even in the most unexpected of places: off the top of my head, for example, in the ending of Bioshock, or the whole premise of Enslaved. I'm just not convinced there is the accidental richness yet that you might find in a Don Quixote or a Clarissa....

[Mister Six]

I'm just not convinced there is the accidental richness yet that you might find in a Don Quixote or a Clarissa....

What was accidental about Don Quixote's 'richness'?

And how does the potential for accidental subtext or depth mark out a medium as art? Why is this feature notable? I'm not sure I understand the thrust of your argument, to be honest.

[falafel]

Shakespeare without question did not anticipate the depth of analysis his work has witnessed (some might say suffered). Lifetimes have been put into Hamlet. There are things in Macbeth that old Will never knew of.

You can have a will to create art but if you force your own subtext all too often you can only drop one level before you hit a brick wall. The film Babel is a perfect example of this to me: portentous and hollow to the core. Real depth comes from somewhere far more mysterious. You've got a better chance of doing it if you have good intentions but that's not even half of it.

See, as I said, it all comes down to your sense of canon and the sophomoric 'what is art' debate; if you don't recognise art the same way I do, of course you will disagree with - or simply not understand - my own criteria. But I for me, the art I find useful or inspirational is the stuff that lets me read between the lines between the lines between the lines and ultimately learn something about myself or the world. Most of what I get out of it is tangentially related to the direct experience: it's a mechanism for evoking ideas and thoughts and chains of revelation.

A game has never done this for me.

[HappyTree]

That's why I love games with a spiritual/philosophical subtext, or even as a main part of the narrative. They do have that quality of lifting the player out of a purely gaming entertainment experience. I suppose you could argue that all games with a half decent story to them achieve this as most if not all narratives of that sort are a comment on what it is to be human.

My favourite game of all time is one such example: The Longest Journey. I only played it once (compared to, say, Spiderman 3 into which I have put about 300 hours of gameplay) but the effects of playing it have been as long-lasting and satisfying as any novel or poetry I have read.

Maybe in the end that is what differentiates "art" from "product". Something that has something to say.

[falafel]

& I never got very far into The Longest Journey, which was no fault of the game's. I guess an important caveat is that I haven't played all the games in the world... Or even a fraction of them.

Isn't to say I haven't loved a fair few though. For me a lot of the closest ones were indeed the old fashioned adventure games, largely because of the focus on storytelling. Not sure of the state of things now- there's not as smooth a continuum between the Michael Bays / James Pattersons and the David Lynches / James Joyces where games are concerned... Did the money get injected too quickly? Mind you it's been several decades so perhaps this is just the gaming equivalent of the 40s.

[Mister Six]

Shakespeare without question did not anticipate the depth of analysis his work has witnessed (some might say suffered). Lifetimes have been put into Hamlet. There are things in Macbeth that old Will never knew of.

...and? You can do a Marxist reading of Half Life 2. A feminist critique of Super Mario Galaxy. Christ, I could write 3,000 words on how Modern Warfare is the most startling mediation on the futility, brutality and inevitability of war in years (and its sequel a crude betrayal of that) if I had the time. Just because people have not written academic analyses of videogames (or, rather, because you have not read them) does not mean that the medium or what it holds are incapable of such scrutiny.

You can have a will to create art but if you force your own subtext all too often you can only drop one level before you hit a brick wall.

That's not true at all. Picasso didn't force his own subtext on 'Guernica'? Bret Easton Ellis didn't force his own subtext on 'American Psycho'? Marlowe didn't lace Faustus with the hot theological topics of the day?

If you've done an English Lit degree, or one for another subject that focuses on critiquing, analysing and disassembling works of art (and I'm assuming you have) then you'll be familiar with Barthes' claim that the author is dead; that the meaning imposed by the author on a work is irrelevant when stacked up against the infinite permutations of meaning that can be identified by the reader.

If not then you'll be pleased to know that you agree on a fundamental level with one of the pillars of modern literary criticism. You just need to take the next step and accept that whatever meaning a designer has placed on his or her own game (or, in the case of Babel, film) should have no bearing on its worth as a subject for artistic critique.[nb]I don't necessarily think that a biography-influenced reading in the old academic style is inherently worthless, mark you, but I think Barthes created a useful rule to open up much more fertile fields of discourse.[/nb]

See, as I said, it all comes down to your sense of canon and the sophomoric 'what is art' debate; if you don't recognise art the same way I do, of course you will disagree with - or simply not understand - my own criteria. But I for me, the art I find useful or inspirational is the stuff that lets me read between the lines between the lines between the lines and ultimately learn something about myself or the world. Most of what I get out of it is tangentially related to the direct experience: it's a mechanism for evoking ideas and thoughts and chains of revelation.

A game has never done this for me.

And plays may never do that for some videogame theorists. It doesn't devalue the artistic worth or potential of the artform, it just means that your attentions would be better spent elsewhere.[nb]This is not me telling you to fuck off, BTW, I'm just trying to make it clear that what you see to be a flaw in the medium is merely myopia.[/nb]

[Mister Six]

Not sure of the state of things now- there's not as smooth a continuum between the Michael Bays / James Pattersons and the David Lynches / James Joyces where games are concerned...

Where are you looking though? Remember that Game stores are like your multiplexes and airport bookstores; they're concerned with what will sell well, which means big-budget mainstream games (and a smattering of promoted indie releases). For the arthouse stuff you need to look to auteurs, which means homebrewed games. In the west, at least; Japan's pretty good at putting money into weirder titles[nb]Like the psychosexual case study of Catherine, which I'm looking forward to a lot. Just hope the game element doesn't turn out to be pants: Catherine Debut Trailer SUBBED (From The Makers of PERSONA Series)[/nb] but they're pretty consistent about that across all media.

[HappyTree]

You can do a Marxist reading of Half Life 2.

Yes, but it probably wouldn't get very far :-D Of course, any intelligent person can find ways to pluck arbitrary meanings out of the air and make a stab at applying them to a text or game or piece of art. But if there's not enough justification for that reading to refer to then it will not be very successful. In criticism there may be no right answer, but there are some wrong ones.

[Mister Six]

Yes, but it probably wouldn't get very far :-D Of course, any intelligent person can find ways to pluck arbitrary meanings out of the air and make a stab at applying them to a text or game or piece of art. But if there's not enough justification for that reading to refer to then it will not be very successful. In criticism there may be no right answer, but there are some wrong ones.

If I had the time and inclination I could probably have a crack. I was fucking great at this nonsense when I was at uni. In any case my point is that, as with the Hamlet example given above, games are as open to (valid and invalid) critique - including those not considered by the designers - as any other medium.

[HappyTree]

Yep. In many cases the author is not the best placed to criticise his/her own work. And nor should they be, being the creator. I should think that most creators have a good idea what they want to express but of course they are subject to all the magical subconscious processes that influence where they actually end up. But that's what you said already.

[falafel]

Well argued, Six, and it's late. A few quickies:

I knew there had been criticism of gaming, but you're right to suggest I haven't read it. And arts disciplines are notoriously fuzzy; so yes, I did an English (postgrad) degree, and yes I can see how the study of games can absorb from all sorts of disciplines. This is coming from someone who with variable success squeezed Willa Cather through the mill of Cyborg theory. But I don't see an equivalence of value. Games have a value of a different order (not necessarily of a different magnitude), to my mind.

But then everything is art that we label as such. I'm just picking and choosing where my labels go - my supply is finite, the options limitless, so maybe I just stick with what I know. I loved theorising at uni, but so often now it just tires me when I dont respect the subject, and I need to see superficial merit (or meritricion) before I bite. Wrong, I suppose, but we all need boundaries...

My point re Babel (and the whole question of a forced subtext) is that in the wrong hands the primary layer of engagement is debased in favour of something more like a treatise or tract; the point being, such heavy-handedness just makes it really hard for the potential of a story to be revealed. This was really designed to be a reference to the problems with The Path etc.

I think Barthes is a bit dated anyway... I firmly believe in the authorial fallacy (well, I suppose I don't, if you follow). Sometimes though the foregrounded material and the subtext fail to really complement one another, somehow, and that just makes it hard to unravel a piece. Yeah, I carry my cultural baggage with me these days, uni was a few years ago and I lack the discipline to be completely coherent; it was never my strong suit in the first place.

I know to an extent I'm being myopic; but why change my already fairly broad definition of art (which if you notice contains no notice of intent) to accommodate things that don't fit into it? I dont see how that follows. It won't make me feel any different; and it will do a disservice to those things I love already.

[Pedro_Bear]

Edit: To clarify, let's start with 'artistically valid', and see if any sense can be made of that.

We're kind of covering it already. I'll add that it's not something we can fake by just saying "it's valid". We can't fake a good novel no matter how much bullshit is hyped about it. We can't fake the experience of eating a delicious meal no matter what language is employed by an arty-farty menu. Same for many of these so-called "art games"; without the prefix label, we wouldn't know they were supposedly art-related above and beyond any other, and the installations I've played certainly fail to deliver any kind of artistically valid experience, i.e. they're fake. It's only art because they say so, neo-conceptual bullshit casing the mark, like the rest of it.

[Big Jack McBastard]

I'd chuck in a tuppence for Myst and most of it's sequels for arty games that work well.

[Mister Six]

Well argued, Six, and it's late. A few quickies:

I knew there had been criticism of gaming, but you're right to suggest I haven't read it. And arts disciplines are notoriously fuzzy; so yes, I did an English (postgrad) degree, and yes I can see how the study of games can absorb from all sorts of disciplines. This is coming from someone who with variable success squeezed Willa Cather through the mill of Cyborg theory. But I don't see an equivalence of value. Games have a value of a different order (not necessarily of a different magnitude), to my mind.

A different order to what? Literature? Paintings? Sculptures? Poetry? Film? All or some of the above? How many orders of art are there in your philosophy and how are they grouped?

I know to an extent I'm being myopic; but why change my already fairly broad definition of art (which if you notice contains no notice of intent) to accommodate things that don't fit into it? I dont see how that follows. It won't make me feel any different; and it will do a disservice to those things I love already.

I just don't see any point in limiting one's conception of art (or, at least, ruling out the possibility of engaging on an artistic level with a medium[nb]At the minute, at least, but I'm sure if you had a good rummage you'd be able to find a game that rings true for you on an artistic level today.[/nb]) any more than I see a point in only listening to one type of music or only watching one type of film. But this seems to have come down to a matter of personal preference rather than an objective discussion of what constitutes art so there's not a lot to be had in me trying to dissuade you. I just find it frustrating to hear intelligent people say these things. A similar feeling comes over me when Newsnight's doing one of it's occasional, 'Well it can't be literature if it's a comic book', as though the medium has any bearing on the value of the content.

[HappyTree]

I can see how, objectively, prejudging graphic novels as not being literature could be said to be wrong, however (a) I have never seen a comic book with the same complexity of theme and form as literature in standard book form and (b) in order to be classed as literature a piece of work has to contain enough recognisable traits to conform to that type of definition.

For instance, you couldn't really write "hello" on a chewing gum wrapper and call it literature. That is an extreme example which has none of the characteristics of literature. So what could be debated is whether a graphic novel contains enough of a resemblance to the received canon of "literature" to be called such. As I said, I don't personally think an illustrated story does contain enough of that form of writing. There is simply not enough text to sustain literature by the definition by which I recognise the term.

I have a friend who writes the story part of some graphic novels. You may have heard of him: Sylvain Runberg. He has done "Orbital" amongst other works. It seems to be quite highly regarded in the genre of the graphic novel. Would I call it literature? Not really. The text is just not able to be rich enough, in my opinion, and there is a preponderance of speech with little textual description, the images being provided by the illustrations.

I'm sure those who love comic books will disagree. I do think there is a canon of literature that has to be somewhat followed and respected in order to be recognised as such. I could admit that graphic novels can be "art", however.

[falafel]

A different order to what? Literature? Paintings? Sculptures? Poetry? Film? All or some of the above? How many orders of art are there in your philosophy and how are they grouped?

Well I suppose it's a qualitative difference but it's hard to say that without evoking the notion of "quality" as a value judgement, which isn't what I'm trying to due. But I mean to say that games I've played haven't inspired me in the same way that certain examples (of all of the art forms above) have managed to do. I'm not saying they aren't as "good", or don't have the potential to be. But they don't reveal themselves to me in the same way.

I just don't see any point in limiting one's conception of art (or, at least, ruling out the possibility of engaging on an artistic level with a medium[nb]At the minute, at least, but I'm sure if you had a good rummage you'd be able to find a game that rings true for you on an artistic level today.[/nb]) any more than I see a point in only listening to one type of music or only watching one type of film. But this seems to have come down to a matter of personal preference rather than an objective discussion of what constitutes art so there's not a lot to be had in me trying to dissuade you. I just find it frustrating to hear intelligent people say these things. A similar feeling comes over me when Newsnight's doing one of it's occasional, 'Well it can't be literature if it's a comic book', as though the medium has any bearing on the value of the content.

See, I don't think that to say that a game isn't art is necessarily to denigrate it. I know it's an arbitrary distinction, it comes down to "I like this", "I think this of this". I don't think it's really possible to have an objective discussion of what constitutes art. Not even close. Everyone has their own view. I'm actually coming from a relativist perspective. If I didn't make judgements about what I wanted to spend my time doing and how I chose to interpret that time, I wouldn't be playing games, reading books, watching films or indeed trying to write a novel as I so incessantly continue and fail to do. I have to make this distinction, I have to call X art because for art to mean something it has to categorise. Art is about synthesising the world, it's about pulling things together. You can read anything as art, you can indeed, but everyone chooses what they see; people with ordinary lives can't analyse the pavement they walk on or the muesli they have for breakfast. The problem is in the worlds that analysis opens up. You could write a thousand words for every second of your life, but it would take a thousand lifetimes... so you have to make choices.

I think it's almost dishonest to cast the net of art too wide. We need the quotidian as much as the transcendental simply to survive... if that isn't too florid a way of putting it. I choose to put pretty much all of the games I've played in the "quotidian" box. This is what makes sense to me. It seems naive to suggest that discussion of art ever comes down to anything but personal preference.

So I apologise for seeming so horribly authoritarian in my first post. But in my own way, it's what I believe - and yet it isn't. Yeah, so that's doublethink. But that's what civilisation is.

PS I certainly wasn't ruling out any possibilities! I'm not Roger bloody Ebert!

[Zetetic]

We're kind of covering it already. I'll add that it's not something we can fake by just saying "it's valid". We can't fake a good novel no matter how much bullshit is hyped about it. We can't fake the experience of eating a delicious meal no matter what language is employed by an arty-farty menu.

Right, but 'delicious' and 'good' are easy to comprehend regarding meals and novels, respectively. But 'valid' regarding something that may or may not be art? My driver's license might be valid (it might be valid as a form of identification for one thing), my question might be valid, a formula might be valid. All these seem to indicate that in one situation or another 'valid' just means to conform to one set of rules, often fairly clear: either my license was obtained in the last 5 years or it wasn't, either the question relates to the subject matter and hasn't already been answered, or it doesn't or it has, the formula may or may not be valid in terms of an inductive definition or something.

But 'artistically valid'? Is that meant to be analogy with "as-a-form-of-identification valid" or "formulaicly valid"? What rules is "artistically valid" judged by? I don't mind even if these rules can't be articulated (although this would be odd, and 'valid' then still seems a really weird word to use), but I'd like some kind of demonstration that they're there. What's a 'valid' meal or a 'valid' novel, or if you prefer to be 'valid in a meal-like manner'?

It's only art because they say so, neo-conceptual bullshit casing the mark, like the rest of it.

And it's only a driver's license because it says so on it, and I and the policeman have agreed that it's valid as a form of identification (or credibly much more important, we agree this because of rules that are accepted widely and societally). Plenty of people have agreed that Duchamp's found pieces were 'art', and only because he said it was so. Bullshit, perhaps, but important for demonstrating how silly 'validity' as applied to 'art' pretty much is.

Why not just say that you thought it was shit art, but art nonetheless? It's still not as easy as a 'shit meal' to come to a common agreement about (that is, we all know what an awful meal is, even if we don't agree which meals are shit), but it's a hell of a lot easy to understand than 'validity', and much more honestly expresses the subjectivity at work in the judgement.