Sexual Politics in The Witcher 2

So I’m planning to keep on writing about The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings for two reasons. First, I question the productivity of having all writers everywhere write about a single game/book/movie for a few weeks before quickly and permanently moving on to something newer. Second, I’m a freelancer, and I don’t get review copies all that often. So when I do get one, I show my appreciation by being thorough both in my experience with the work and in my analysis of it.

So with that in mind, let’s talk about just how questionable the game’s sexual politics get toward the end there.

There are male mages in The Witcher 2, but all of them are minor villains—sexless area bosses who serve mostly to add some fireballs and such to important battles. Female magic-users are a different matter, uniformly attractive and, almost without exception, sexually available to Geralt.

When I say that they are uniformly attractive, by the way, I mean it: many of their animations, both for spell-casting and for flirtation or sex, are identical.

Come to think of it, most women in The Witcher 2 are uniform in that way, drawing from a handful of body-types and a somewhat shallow pool of movements. One sex scene late in the game (the one with that sexy spy sort of a sorceress) is little more than a palette swap of an earlier encounter with a recently rescued she-elf. The only action unique to the late-game sequence involves said sorceress slapping Geralt on the ass before diving into bed with him. Which marks her as—empowered?

In any case, the universal hotness and promiscuity of sorceresses seems innocuous enough—even if somewhat at odds with the “mature” or “grown-up” intent of the Witcher series—and certainly an improvement over the prudish, game-long courtships typical of Bioware fare.

That is, until the third act. Oh my, the third act. Men and women both get killed, but undeniably, the women fare far worse. Sorceresses are pretty much exclusively the ones to be shackled and imprisoned, beaten and tortured, and on and on and on. One unfortunate character (the only authoritative and socially ascendant lesbian in the game, incidentally) gets blinded with a spoon.

In a game replete with choices and divergent paths, that rather grisly spoon-blinding business is inexplicably mandatory. And for God’s sake, it happens while Geralt is standing there watching. Geralt, whom the game has taken such lengths to establish as a man allergic to injustice—and who refuses to kill a war criminal literally seconds later—does not give the player the option to intervene and stop a then-defenseless sorceress from having her eyes gouged out. That’s bizarre, not to mention wildly incongruous.

My sneaking suspicion is that CD Projekt RED simply wanted to heighten the stakes of the plot and the grittiness of the world as the game drew to a close, and that the above was simply the most direct route to that destination. But that idea is more than a little upsetting. As Film Crit Hulk pointed out in the context of Arkham City, misogyny and violence against women are all-too-common go-tos for readymade videogame grit.

But whatever their reason, the game’s last few sections contain a hugely disproportionate amount of horrific and not-quite-necessary violence inflicted on attractive and partially interchangeable women. That’s a shame in a game that can and often does do considerably better.

Reviewing The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

It’s been said that, if being a video game protagonist were a disease, its most prominent symptom would be anmesia. The second-most-prominent would, of course, be kleptomania.

Video game heroes forget things in order to preordain otherwise nonsensical plot twists, and they steal things because the people who play games—or the people who have been playing lengthy RPGs for years or decades, in any case—tend to be the kind of people who need to collect or complete all the things. For that same reason, we could add a third symptom, namely an unhealthy preoccupation with solving other people’s sometimes-petty problems. Hence side quests.

And from that same love of tidiness and acquisition and metrics, we get an obsession with reviews. So in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I am one of the 1,000 bloggers to whom CD Projekt RED magnanimously sent copies of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings in exchange for nothing more than a thoughtful review.

I don’t usually write reviews per se, but a deal’s a deal, so here goes. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is more engaging, more ambitious, and more interesting than most other games of comparable genre and price. The visuals are nothing short of gorgeous, and the newly-released Xbox 360 version (which was the one I played, as was the deal) pushes the now seven-year-old console as far as I’ve ever seen it pushed. The combat and character-building focus on the intricacies on one particular class (withcers, in case that’s not clear) rather than swimming in the vast, generic soup of knights/warriors, mages/wizards, and thieves/rogues. Witchers are kind of all three, and also none of the above, and it works remarkably well.

Fair enough? Cool, fair enough.

Though while we’re at it, full disclosure-wise, I should note that I never did play the original Witcher, nor did I ever get around to reading the series of Polish novels on which it’s based. So I’m playing The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings as a double-amnesiac, compounding the gaps in Geralt of Rivia’s memory with significant, extradiagetic gaps in my own knowledge about the game’s fiction.

I’m sure that I’m missing innumerable little things—references to characters, places, and events of which I have no prior knowledge—but the overall effect is actually incredibly compelling. As I mentioned in my recent write-up of Dark Souls, I love hashing out a game’s meaning by diving head-first into its mysterious, and perhaps even inexplicable, imagined world.

So for starters, here’s what I’ve pieced together about witchers.

1. They’re mutant “warrior-monks” who live long (but definitively mortal) lives.

2. They hunt monsters for pay, using special silver swords that they carry alongside their standard steel ones.

3. They believe that the guilty must be punished and that the innocent must be protected.

4. They brew potions and cast magical signs, the latter running the gamut from shields to snares to Jedi mind tricks.

5. They’re incapable of reproducing sexually, but oh-so-capable of having super-sexy sex with sexy sorceresses.

Geralt suffers from a profound case of videogameprotagonitis. The mercenary monster-slaying aspect of his work lends itself well to his agreeing to solve people’s troubles, most of which seem, conveniently enough, to involve monsters. He labors throughout the franchise to regain his unsurprisingly spotty memory. And as for his kleptomania—well, there I’ll plead double-amnesia and say that, I don’t know, maybe witchers are culturally permitted to wander into people’s homes and places of business and take anything that isn’t nailed down? Or maybe the good people of Temeria are wont to leave out extra cups of iron ore, like winegalsses for Elijah, or something.

Also notable: The Witcher 2 features sex scenes that contain—I shit you not—actual sex-acts, a far cry from the sexless titillation of the first Mass Effect or, for that matter, the mostly-suggested action movie sex of the second Mass Effect. I wouldn’t call these sequences an unqualified success, and Geralt’s sexual itinerancy does have a potentially unseemly gotta-catch-em-all quality to it, but The Witcher‘s sexual encounters have some playfulness, some humor, and even some genuine tenderness. They’re a cut above, game-sex goes.

When it’s not pausing to attempt sexiness or humor, the world of The Witcher is as dark and filthy and scorched as the Dragon Age games seemed to think they were. This is largely because The Witcher aims to make the player a participant, rather than a mere messianic tourist, in a fundamentally sick society. Dragon Age, for all its virtues, often drifts toward near-total ludo-narrative dissonance—why don’t Templars, who are tasked with hunting blood mages, care if I use blood magic right in front of them?— whereas The Witcher 2 does a remarkable job of putting the player in Geralt’s shoes. Activities that are eccentric or taboo in the narrative—from collecting herbs for potions to meditating in order to create and drink those potions—manage to feel eccentric and/or taboo during gameplay. I guess that I am indeed sort of a weirdo for stopping to pick flowers while being perused by giant crabworms, but don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.

More than that, by applying intrinsically binary (or sometimes, tertiary) choices to truly intractable ethical situations, the game makes it mechanically necessary to think in terms of Geralt’s straightforward, Quixotically consistent moral code. And by denying the player any transparent metric for determining his or her moral efficacy (no Paragon/Renegade slider here), the game aims at a sort of Žižekian hysteria that more closely mirrors our relationship to real morality than to the game mechanics we usually call “morality.”

Half of doing the right thing is figuring out what the hell the right thing is, and the other half is living with the consequences of your choice. The Witcher 2 obscures the former, and introduces consequences long-term enough to discourage quick-saving, thereby complicating the latter. Do you side with the brutal, racist powers that be, or with the straight-up terrorists opposing them? To say that there’s no perfect answer would be a considerable understatement.

Both whichever choice you make, you can be certain that the consequences will be compelling, and that there will be strangely compulsive new errands to run and inventive new monsters to slay. Also, there will be more junk to pilfer from unsuspecting and uncomplaining peasants. And new potions to brew, and new swords to forge. It’s a world worth getting lost in, and that’s what counts.

A Zelda Game, But Moreso: Dark Souls and Beyond

I’ve known for some time The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was not my favorite game of 2011. But then it occurred to me that it might not even make my personal top five, given that 2011 also saw the release of Portal 2, Rayman Origins, You Don’t Know Jack, and no less than three games by DoubleFine Productions—not to mention Frozen Synapse, Atom Zombie Smasher, Terraria, To The Moon, Rock of Ages, and new works from the likes of Anna Anthropy, thecatamines, and Jason Rohrer.

And then it occurred to me that Bastion had done a better job than Skyward Sword of scratching my Zelda itch, as had Edmund McMillen’s The Binding of Isaac and From Software’s Dark Souls. 2011 was quite the year for Zelda games, I suppose, because Skyward Sword was only my fourth favorite of them.

My frustrations with the Legend of Zelda series are well documented, and some other writers have recently voiced similar objections far more eloquently. Simply put, “Zelda needs subtraction, not addition.”

The Binding of Isaac starts from the original Legend of Zelda, and it does add things—randomized content, bleakly appropriate thematic trappings—but it also subtracts significantly: no in-game dialogue, no gentle difficulty curve, no explicit explanations of what items do or why.

Similarly, Dark Souls starts from the targeting-optional combat and heady exploration or 3D Zeldas, adding Western RPG character building and JRPG loot drops, but subtracting all manner of hand-holding. Try to explore an area that is beyond your character’s ability, and no fairy or talking ship will stop you; you’ll know that you’re not ready for the graveyard area when its skeletal inhabitants prove impossible to kill, simple as that. Talk to a Non-Player Character, and in addition to items or upgrades, you’ll get some of the most cryptic, menacing non-information since “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.”

And the game’s utterly bonkers introductory cutscene, which explains and explains and explains, still manages not to explain much of anything. Even the most ardent fans of Demon’s Souls, the previous entry in the series, can have a hard time making sense of this second game’s ill-defined Lovecraftian monstrosities (Nito, the first of the dead) and world-building borderline-gibberish (the furtive pygmy, so easily forgotten).

Insane, right? Maybe that’s all intended to be disorienting, or maybe something or other is getting lost in translation. More than likely, it’s a little of both. But the result is a world that feels thrillingly alien and dangerous—a feeling reinforced by every subtraction that the game makes from the now-stodgy Zelda playbook.

Where Skyward Sword (as well as Wind Waker, to a certain degree) draws itself out with fetch quests and backtracking, Dark Souls makes endless, dreamy wandering (punctuated by genuine victories won despite apparently insurmountable odds) a core value.

Hey you, the game says, we know that you’re used to breezing through games, piling conquest upon conquest. But this time, slow down and appreciate this world we’ve made for you. Slow down and appreciate how the items feel, how the systems work, and how many different ways you can approach a given situation. Slow down and get lost in a world that makes no sense, and which is hostile or indifferent to you, but in which you can nonetheless thrive.

That’s what I look for in a Zelda game—and in 2011, I found it in purer form elsewhere. As a longtime Nintendo fan, I find that a little sad. But as someone interested in video games has a medium, I find it pretty damn exhilarating.

The Factual Age

John Sharp says that we’re leaving behind a “visual age,” shifting from a culture of aesthetics to a culture of play, interaction, and discursive collaboration.

In his On The Media appearance (and in the book he was there to plug), David Weinberger points toward another, equally important historical shift: we’re moving from a culture of indisputable facts and “stopping points” (the culture of books) to one that “includes difference and disagreement as a part of knowledge itself.”

With the Internet, Weinberger argues, “we finally have a medium that is big enough for knowledge,” allowing us to worry less about the place of things in “the order of the universe” and more about the act of constantly, incrementally contributing to collective human understanding. Knowledge has moved from something fixed and immutable to something that necessarily, constantly, and explicitly contradicts itself, “a huge mass of contradictory connections that you travel along forever.”

This new epoch has its drawbacks: nowadays, “facts are not going to settle the issues we want them to settle. There is no conceivable additional evidence to convince Americans that our president was not born in Kenya, yet a sizable percentage of Americans continue to believe that. Facts are not going to settle our disputes.”

But then, the factual age had its share of epistemological bugaboos, too: because the platypus fit so poorly into contemporary taxonomy, it was entirely possible to look at a platypus right in front of one’s own face and say “This cannot be!”

Do give the piece a listen if the above sounds interesting.

Where’s Evil?

This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country—the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

He didn’t have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

-Rick Santorum

 

“I’m not your destiny, or the Devil, either!” I said. “Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that’s all the glory you deserve!” I said. “That’s all that any man at war with pure evil deserves.

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,” I said, “but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

“It’s that part of an imbecile, ” I said, “that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Intellectual Property Thought Experiment #1

Tim has been out of school for several several years. When Tim was in school, he hated the high prices of textbooks. So Tim decides that he wants to hurt the textbook industry, and he decides to do so by pirating as many textbooks as he can find.

Tim goes to a BitTorrent tracker, and he downloads 10,000 textbooks. Neither the authors nor the publishers get a cent of Tim’s money, and now Tim has an extensive, interdisciplinary library at his disposal.

But Tim has the sinking feeling that he hasn’t struck much of a blow against the textbook industry.

As we’ve said, Tim isn’t in school anymore, so there’s a fairly slim chance that he would have bought many (if any) of these books. And if Tim does go back to school, he just might get charged for books upfront, regardless of whether he already has the texts he needs. And by the time Tim does go back to school, if Tim does indeed end up going back to school, there will very likely be new editions of the books he needs, and his professors will very likely require those new editions, which may or may not be available to pirate.

So in other words, what Tim has done is acquire for free a bunch of things that he would probably never have paid for, and that he just might end up purchasing anyway, in the end. In short, Tim has failed completely in his attempt to hurt the textbook industry.

Tim has succeeded, however, in disproving the ridiculous notion that an instance of piracy necessarily represents a lost sale. Is there any rational way to argue that, by pirating 10,000 textbooks, Tim has cost someone 10,000 sales? or 5,000? or 1,000? or 10?

Without ignoring the ethical dimension of piracy, we can recognize that what Tim has done here is quite different from, say, stealing crates of textbooks and then hoarding or reselling them. We can recognize the significant differences between piracy and theft, and further, we can recognize that having one’s work pirated 10,000 times does not mean that one has lost 10,000 sales, or even 10,000 potential sales.

Next time, I’ll go into more detail about that last point.

Selling Art by Marketing “Art”

This is the fifth post in a series on the limits of art as a term.
Parts One and Two and Three and Four might help new readers, context-wise.

This past year, I’ve been working to establish a small business called Gray Blush Gallery. I’ve tried to mention the project on this blog from time to time without just coming right out and saying buy art buy art online buy original art online buy original art online and do it right now because the original art that you can buy online at Gray Blush Gallery is really quite good and you will rather like it.

Restraint has not always come easily.

Gray Blush Gallery is a place to buy gallery art online, but we usually refer to it simply as a place to buy art online, and I’d like to talk a bit about why that is.

Our advertising and traffic data is (1) necessarily somewhat private, (2) probably boring to most people who are not us, and (3) still inconclusive. But I’ll say this: people don’t usually find us by searching for paintings (even though we have a lot of paintings), or by searching for an art gallery (even though we most certainly are an art gallery, albeit a gallery of ones and zeroes rather than bricks and mortar). And certainly, no one is searching for gallery art, since that’s a term I more or less made up.

The data suggests that people who are looking for an art gallery don’t expect to be able to buy anything. They anticipate a one-way communication in which the gallery presents stuff for them to look at and appreciate, and then they look at it and appreciate it, and that’s that.

Likewise with paintings. Your average Google-user doesn’t seem to be searching for paintings in order to buy them.

When people want to find the sort of stuff that Gray Blush sells—unique art-objects in traditional gallery media—they seem to search simply for art. This means that Gray Blush Gallery gets stuck in among art galleries that don’t sell the work they display, abstract academic discussions about art as a concept, and the sorts of mass-produced art prints in which Art.com tends to traffic.

Now, I’m not badmouthing any of those three groups. I love museums, I’m (obviously) interested in discussing art, and I have no issue with mass-produced art-objects of any kind.

What is sort of an issue, for me personally and presumably for others with similar business models, is that there is no word in contemporary English that clearly indicates the difference between a Starry Night poster in editions of ten-million and the original Starry Night, of which there is only one. We can agree that there’s a difference—and indeed, some will say with great vitriol that the former is not art—but how does one explain that difference to another person, let alone to a search engine?

Words like original and unique do describe the difference, but they can easily be misconstrued as value judgments. A print of Salvador Dali’s work could reasonably be described as unique in its style and original in its aesthetic intent, at least when viewed in its proper historical context.

And besides, lots of contemporary artists are creating original art that is meant from the first to be mass-produced. So neither original nor contemporary will do the trick.

No, as I’ve said, when we want to describe unique art-objects in traditional media, we generally just call them art. Which would be fine, if not for the unruly gelatinous mass of alternative definitions that burdens the term at all times.

By calling gallery art art, we grant gallery spaces and traditional media a mystical, totemic power. We keep them those media and institutions at a distance. We make them remote at best, and frightening at worst.

And if we use a more precise or less intimidating term than art, then ironically, what we’re saying immediately becomes less clear to most readers, listeners, and potential art-buyers. We’re compelled to rely on a word that is vague and spookily unfixed.

So the solution is not merely to start using a different word (which would only confuse matters). The solution, rather, is to demystify gallery art—which is easier said than done, of course. But hey, we’ve worked hard to make Gray Blush Gallery inviting, accessible, and substantive. So that’s a start.

And understanding the history of the word art, and its quagmire of contradictory definitions, and its shaky utility in the marketplace—I would like to think that understanding all of that is a pretty good start, too.

What We Mean When We Say “Art”

This is the fourth post in a series on the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here, Part Two is here, and Part Three is here.

So. When we say art, and we are not referring simply to paintings and sculptures and stuff, we usually mean one of the following things.

1. Art is something that takes skill to make or execute well

When Julia Child wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she probably meant that French cooking was an art in the pre-Renaissance sense: pies and crepes as “well-crafted functional objects.” We all need food (which the functional part), but it takes an accomplished chef to make truly great food (which is the part that makes it art).

But contemporary readers tend to understand this usage as a metaphor, and indeed, Child herself might have meant it as one. It’s not that French cooking is an art, this argument goes, but rather that if you’re sufficiently good at French cooking, the results can be like art.

2. Art is something that seeks meaning and explores the human condition and does nothing else

When we say that French cooking is like art, but not actually art, this is the kind of art we’re saying it’s like. As discussed in a previous post, this is an extraordinarily and pointlessly restrictive definition.

It also makes very little internal sense. Operating on this definition, we often try to separate art from entertainment, despite the great number of things that explore the human condition while simultaneously entertaining us, from the Shakespeare canon to The Colbert Report. A skilled writer can find time for high-minded ruminations on morality and numerous dick jokes.

We could say that some entertainments contain art, or that they contain art-moments, but at that point entertainment and art are officially intermixed anyway. It’s too late to take the chocolate out of the milk–and what would be the point of doing so, anyway?

3. Art is something that well-educated people respect, and that people of good taste enjoy

I have several friends who become angry when they see conceptual art of pretty much any kind, and I suspect that their anger stems from this definition. They always want to say “That’s not art!” or “You’re telling me this is art?” because they have internalized the idea that art means something they have to respect (which is a hard sell where stolen urinals are concerned, which was sort of Marcel Duchamp’s point).

As I’ve said before, this makes it impossible to talk about bad art, dumb art, art that tries and fails, or art that you can understand and even respect without liking. If only the really successful attempts get to be included in the conversation, then we miss out on a whole lot of really interesting work, and that’s a shame.

4. Art is something that is meaningful and important without being enjoyable

This is appreciating art as a synonym for eating your vegetables, and the arts as a blanket term for those entertainments that we should probably keep around even if no one really finds them entertaining.

It’s this definition that leads people to sit quietly with their hands folded at the opera, nodding off occasionally and glaring at anyone with the audacity to applaud too often–despite the fact that opera was as rowdy and lowbrow a popular art-form as any in its heyday. The more you respect opera, the less you expect to enjoy opera.

And in galleries, when visitors encounter visual art that is overtly playful, or layered with historical meaning, or salacious and moronic, they tend to regard it all with the same sort of uniform, glassy-eyed seriousness. Nothing sufficiently respected has the opportunity to mean much of anything.

So enough with all the stultifying respect already.

Art has to be something that we all have permission to love, hate, kinda-like, kinda-dislike, laugh at, cry over, intellectualize, or engage viscerally on a case-by-case basis, or else there’s very little point in talking about it.

What I’m trying to ask is whether the word art is really worth hanging onto, given all of the above. It’s a term that means at least five different things, none of them all that useful, most of them highly problematic, and at least one of them actually nonsensical.

But even so, I think we’re sort of stuck with the word, at least for the moment–and in my next post, I’ll discuss how running an online art gallery has lead me to that conclusion. If we can understand what makes the word necessary right now, we can better address the goal of making it less necessary in the future.

Non-Gallery Art and Inexact Music

This is the third post in a series on the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here and Part Two is here.

When we say art, we’re often referring to paintings and sculptures and stuff–those well-established visual arts that are generally found in galleries, and that I therefore refer to as gallery art here on this blog. It’s an improvement over just calling those things art, I think, because it doesn’t lazily imply that film and television (and books and games and music and clothing and so on) are somehow not art.

It’s kind of like classical music. We generally understand that term to mean Bach and Mozart and Tchaikovsky and such, even though Mozart’s music is the only one of those three that is Classical-with-a-Capital-C. Bach’s music is Baroque, Tchaikovsky’s Romantic. But colloquially, classical music just indicates that Bach and Mozart and Tchaikovsky have more in common with each other than they do with Duke Ellington, The Beatles, and The Roots.

So fair enough. An imperfect term, but a fairly clear one, at least. Leonard Bernstein once tried to come up with a better, clearer, more accurate one, and he settled on exact music–as in, music that is supposed to be performed exactly as it is written on the page, as distinct from improvisation-heavy forms such as jazz, blues, and rock and/or roll.

But of course, Baroque music includes a fair bit of embellishment, interpretation, and improvisation. And it wasn’t until Beethoven that sheet music habitually included metronome markings, so it would be disingenuous to say that tempos were all that precise or uniform prior to the early 1800s.

Besides which, Bernstein could not have foreseen Techno. We now have multiple electronic forms that are more regular, more metronomic, and indeed, more exact than any “exact” music. So we may as well stick with classical music for the sake of clarity.

Because if we referred to that music simply as music, we’d be suggesting (with more than a hint of snobbery) that only “exact” music qualifies as music. Which would be supremely unproductive, for reasons that are hopefully self-evident.

So for the moment, gallery art. I’ll go with that, even if it’s unlikely to supplant art, despite art’s many problematic alternate definitions, which I’ll unpack in my next post.

The Visual Age

This is the second post in a series about the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here.

In his appearance on the Brainy Gamer Podcast, art historian John Sharp suggests that we are “leaving a five-hundred year period that [was] dominated by visual culture, and moving into one that’s much more about systems.”

Prior to the Renaissance and the dawn of the visual age, Sharp argues, “the whole idea we have of art today did not exist.” Before that, art referred to what we now call design. “These well-crafted functional objects–that’s all there was, really. There wasn’t such a thing as these objects that we created simply for enjoyment, for aesthetic appreciation, and so on.” The Renaissance signaled a cultural shift toward the visual, toward using our eyes “as the primary filter for thinking about the world.”

Painting, sculpture, print media, and eventually photography were not just the predominant forms of Western art. They were art as such. So much so that, as cinema and television came to be considered worthy of aesthetic contemplation, so too did they come to be categorized as primarily visual media, despite the inclusion of sound in the majority of cinema and virtually all of television.

Just as the idea of autonomous art-objects (and artists as a special creative class) has a specific historical context, so too does the oft-cited idea that the sole function of true art is to converse with the sublime, or to explore profound truths about the human condition. “That’s this very Romantic 19th Century notion… a bit of cultural baggage” that tends to limit our understanding rather than expand it. Just because that’s what Vincent Van Gogh (or rather, our posthumously mythologized version of him) was up to does not mean that all artists must necessarily live and work along similar lines. To think of commercial art, or bad art, or disposable art as oxymorons is to take an unnecessarily narrow and restrictive historical view of the terms involved.

Knowing that, we can easily understand the past century of “is x art?” hand-wringing. It’s not that a stolen urinal or a guy getting shot in the arm isn’t art (whatever that would mean), but simply that those things aren’t addressing themselves to the tradition of visual perfection that has been art’s perceived aim since the Renaissance. What matters isn’t how those things look, but rather how they fit into larger systems, and what they demand of the viewer.

In that specific sense, large swaths of art theory have failed to keep pace with art practice. Try to evaluate Dada on the same terms as you would evaluate Piet Mondrian (let alone the representational art of the Renaissance), and you’ll just end up confused. I think that when people walk into an art gallery and feel lost, confused, or intimidated, it is this disconnect that is tripping them up. Art galleries are designed for looking at things, but they’re now filled with art that is not meant exclusively, or even primarily, to be looked at.

So all of that muddles our understanding of art, both as a usable word and as an intuitive, unspoken concept. In my next post, I’ll break down that problem.