Does art need to serve a purpose for it to be called art? Could art be an expression of the maker and so anything constructed, painted, photographed, videoed, coded that represents an expression of the artist, art?
Oh my, I can just feel myself about to type for an hour! Apologies in advance if I get a little too into it sometimes haha. But in a way that is what Arendt was sorta driving at in some of her critical commentaries right? or Heidegger I suppose (it's somewhat unfair to pin them together, even if everyone always does, although not totally unfair hehe) but like if we start scrapping around in the diaries or at the time when the 'Question Concerning Technology' was kicking off. It's always tough to put a philosopher in a nutshell, since the process is sorta more important than what comes of it, but after you crack it open, dust off the Greek and really settle in, the basic kick there was a return to techne as a form of poesis. Or all artifacts as expressions of the ars, in exactly that sort of way, or with that sort of creative sensibility or sense of awe attending to it.
And then the terror and technophobia that follows, when that part is so readily dismissed after first introductions and things just become objects for use, emptied of meaning etc. Arendt I think is a bit more stoic about it, whereas with Heidegger you do get the sense (after all that word play) that he's basically just really bummed that we no longer marvel at techne or think of it in that way anymore. Both sorta obsessed with ontology or how it was abused in carving up the world to be readily understood and transacted. Of course there are later takedowns too with completely different tracts, cause in this style of philosophy origins are usually privileged and everyone wants to go back to first foundations right, or play with the philology there. So then we get another 50 years, at least for peeps who took that tradition seriously, to do something very similar for the other branches, in Ethics (say Levinas, who's always fun for stuff about the Eyes hehe) or others like say Wittgenstein logos on the other end of the spectrum, with an angle that's more like in search of exact language - the undercut there being something like, 'don't we already have a word for that though?' and then just sorta unravelling the semantics at play.
It's all good fun, but also philosophy really strains to account for itself sometimes in the realm of Beauty or the Beautiful, since the early Philosophers were all largely hostile to the Poets, from the first, and a sought a different valence for the conversation.
Broadly speaking the terrain was already sketched out by the time we get to characters like Plato or Aristotle musing on the subject, and those are sort of the foundations we are usually presented with, but it's all already syncretic at that point, like they're already all Multi-classing by then (to borrow a D&D concept). Which is why it's fun to read biographers like Diogenes for little glimpses on their precursors, who are more like the Class purists I guess hehe.
But their stuff only survives in fragmentary ways, so it's kinda hard to get much of a complete portrait on them really. As an undergrad I used to love all this stuff and thinking about it long nights. Like I even took the aesthetics emphasis cause I really wanted to try and figure some of this stuff out to see how it could maybe be applied to my interests, but it's so meandering and circuitous as a discipline. Ultimately Classics was more my speed, though I did nab that double major with Philosophy, before just bowing out and taking the more autodidactic approach to it. I'll still read along and try to keep up though. Honestly if it didn't require massive student loans here, I could have probably stuck it out and kept that going like Doctor Faustus, but for someone who enjoys visual art, the contemporary philosophy around it became really deflating after a few years in the thick of it.
Not to be overly dismissive of the Philosophy of Art writ large, but all that stuff about aporia, I mean it's pretty real. That's what happens if we lean hard into it. Like the entire philosophical project from earliest times was to break down the structures or the fundament and bring the thinker to the point where they're totally unmoored and back in the wilderness again. Then the options are basically 'leave 'em there' so they can discover their own wisdom unencumbered, or the do the sophist power play sort of thing and provide the ready answers to fill in the gaps that you just created with all those newly introduced doubts hehe.
Meanwhile in the arts and letters proper, there were all these convulsive things that happened particularly at the end of the 19th and early 20th century, and movements among artists which sought a much more egalitarian frame, one that gave primacy to expression as the main and most important thing, and to sort of validate a broader relativism there. It was deeply iconoclastic, which is kinda odd for the visual arts, but basically tearing down a lot of old gods and old patron saints to give us our new ones, and those are still ascendant. As a history, this was both exciting and wildly disruptive, pretty significant inversion of the earlier kick.
So a similar sort of aporia there too, when Visual Art started transforming into the Philosophy of Visual Art, which was gradual but also unrelenting. It basically remains there right now, at least at the level of major galleries and museums and auction houses, the broader public discourse, and this is in part because so much wealth is tied to it. Tied to the value judgements and investments that were made, or who decided what was going to make the grade and what wasn't. My own sense is a bit like if the old tomes got torched and replaced with new ones, but then the new ones need translators and arbiters and such, because it became pretty divorced from what it had been previously, which was essentially a form of universal language.
I think that's actually a good way into it for me now, because if you think about Visual Art (or at least the figurative, or imaginative realist sorts) the viewer doesn't need anything other than their eyes to make sense of it. Some sort of sense, anyway. The art that we celebrate, even still, today, often functions as a way to explain something at the point where written language fails. So an emotional resonance that you can just see in the thing, without needing someone to point out or explain it, which is where the universality of it comes from. The human face and figure as a metaphor or a symbol, that sort of stuff, which everyone can understand and recognize. Very much the reason it was used for icons in the first place. I still think that's a good test, perhaps not of what constitutes art, but whether it's working, because if it can't function symbolically there's not much left to it.
To see what happens when something becomes ubiquitous, just check out Instagram right now to see all the Disney Pixar style cartoons floating around since this weekend. It's just like the Lensa thing from a year ago, but now it's for pets and such too! Goodness. Or I mean, take those BG portraits I'm sure we've all seen by now, the ones generated by AIs that look super clean, cause they scrapped like 40 years worth of professional fantasy portraiture using traditional methods. First time you see it it's mind blowing, second time around just becomes meh. Same deal for CGI in films. Pretty short shelf life on all that stuff, compared to the practical effects of yesteryear, which still hold up in context.
I'd take Loomis' again here, because he gave really solid advice to Illustrators (and this was in the 1940s) but he basically said, what you draw is more important than how you draw it. Meaning that it's up to artist to be selective and to exercise some judgement about which subject is worth pursuing. I think this still holds, and it's something that Bots just cannot do, thankfully. Or at least not yet.
But to bring it home to BG3 and the initial Q, it probably is important that we are at least somewhat discerning on this count, just to retain some meaning for the term, if everything is Art then nothing is. So not to pan too hard, but we'd need to have some clear examples of a similar game that is for sure not Art. Like just complete trash that can't hold a candle, because then we can start to see what makes one thing worthy of the claim and the other not, via the positive/negative example. This is much easier to do with painting, where I can just say "yeah, fuck Cezanne!" and peeps would just immediately know where the lines in the sand are. Not to pick on him or anything, I'm sure he was cool and all, but good grief. So many shitty Cezanne reprints of fruit bowls hanging at my Nona's house, that I'm sure he can handle the dig hehe. Also I think wasn't he on the ARC vitriol page? lol
Here let me see if I can dig it up...
www.artrenewal.org
Like I don't think we need to drink that much kool-aid, but it's good fun for counter points. You can just sorta picture the guy with the Disney Pixar steam coming out both ears there heheh. I don't agree with this per se, but it is worth a read I think. Like at least dude takes a position and stakes a claim, though it might be a bit hardcore for even my tastes.
