Rock, Paper, Shotgun

18/03/2012 at 19:56 thestage says:

and of course TJ’s post here is entirely correct. The “emotion” conjured by a work must be proper to that work itself, as no one in the world, least of all the artist or the critic, is concerned with the individual experiences of the guy for whom all paint in all cans in all forms elicits a drastic emotional response as a result of some idiosyncratic experience from his past. If the work of art is simply a medium through which one sees one’s self (which may or may not be the case), then that seeing must at least be mediated in some way or the entire experience is simply illusory, transparent, masturbatory. The “art game” movement falls in this hole nearly every time. Pick a subject not common in games; paint it in maudlin terms; make sure the subject is visible in its entirety to the player. Emotion follows, and all of a sudden you’ve a spot in the blogosphere.

The splash-of-paint-in-the-gallery thing is the standard example not only for those in favor of entirely subjective and groundless interaction with art, but also those in favor of rigid and defined objective standards (to say nothing of everything in between). This is so simply because there is an assumed antagonism lurking behind that entire paradigm, as if there must be something on the part of the art, the artist, the gallery, the audience, or the outsider–if not all of these–that exist simply to refute one or more of the other points of the axis. The assumption leads to the conclusion: judgment here is not proper to the work, but to the situation. And so one opposes these points to each other, and if the relationship comes out as a combination of them which is palatable to the sensibilities (usually expressed in terms of an agenda) of the critic in question, then we can say something about the work. The point of these works, as such, is often to assault the institutions upon which they are founded, or to in some other way call attention to the power system in play. It is a reflection of modern tastes, which are inclined to search for some greater social function of art, to minimize the work in favor of its didactic properties, to have its mimetic capabilities funneled into specific directions with specific outcomes as the goal of the entire artifice of expression. In this sense, the paint-on-the-wall example does not illustrate some (largely imagined, it must be said) veneration of the meaningless as a means of establishing a power structure rooted on interpreting or “appreciating” the unapproachable, but rather it is founded entirely on the assumption of out-and-out defined and singular “meaning” as the goal of all art–the splash is only relevant in that it shows us the meaning of the cultural and personal institutions through which it is viewed; pick a side and fight the other side. Those that use the example often mean to lament the loss of aesthetics, but all they are really doing is devaluing aesthetic principles themselves.

Chandos assumes that the function of something approaching the canonical artist and of the critic who promotes that artist over another artist is to establish socionormative hierarchical views of reality which he can then oppose–and his mode of opposition is the veneration of idiosyncratic behavior in all forms, so that the subjective identification of Object X as capital A Art, which is ostensibly the result of attachment bred from the production of intense emotional experiences that are then projected back onto the work itself (a model which has already been refuted by TJ to the extent necessary for this conversation), is in actuality 100% socially derived itself, in that it is defined in terms of identification and of opposition. The critic of Chandos’ creation (ie, himself) is concerned only with venerating his own emotional reaction, divorced from the work in question, defined by its position of antagonism to a sphere which he perceives as hostile and its identification with a sphere which he perceives as either friendly toward his intentions or, more likely, with which he has already previously aligned himself. The typical gamer of this type is keen to both elevate video games to the realm of art and to obliterate all standards of taste or of judgement beyond some entirely non-existent “objective” metric of the standard time invested/technical quality/level of polish/ability to conform to previously established modes of play. This paradoxical quality leads us to conclude that the hostility latent in the “games and art” debate is thus entirely rooted in the nature of the imaginary community of gamers; in the tag “gamer” itself. Why this form of gamer is naturally predisposed to the veneration of his own emotional reactions as projected onto a social community A in opposition to a social community B is best saved for another discussion.