The International House of Mojo

Profit is the reasoning behind the financing of movies, yes, that's obvious. If you don't think there's a difference between directors who exercise final cut of their movies and those who, (whilst possibly being annoyed,) are prepared to bend over and let a studio change whatever they feel like for purposes of securing specific ratings etc., then you're ridiculous. Whatever their artistic sentiment was, it was altered for non-artistic reasons, and they were okay with it because there was a big pay cheque involved. Fuck them.

But then, who are you to decide what exists only to make money? To stick with movies - isn't profit the underlying motive behind literally every film in existence except for maybe those action figure stop motions I made at age 5 with mom's home video camera? "Making money" is the reason for releasing a Pirates sequel just as it is the reason for signing on to be the distributor for an "underdog" after it wins big at Sundance, or even for giving some talented, up-and-coming film maker a few hundred thousand bucks to make his little dream project. A couple of hundred grand is way less of an investment than the $300 million or whatever it took to make Pirates 3, but, then, the expectation on revenue is bound to be a few claims less as well.

Thing is, just about everything considered a work of art can be accused of existing to make money if the only criteria is that the work's existence was predicated on someone's willingness to sign a check...and I doubt you'll find a whole lot of scenarios where that investment was (considered, anyway) an act of charity. I remember some reviewers calling the Davy Jones Locker sequence in Pirates 3 (just to use your example) "risky" for a summer blockbuster because of the sheer surreal wackiness of it. So there's your "experimental" flourish that apparently somebody (maybe an idiot?) saw in that movie. Point being, everything that cost money to make is a business at the end of the day, and so measuring the "purity" of the intentions behind it - from a Paul Thomas Anderson movie to the Nth installment in a bazillion dollar Walt Disney franchise based on a theme park ride- is as perilous and subjective a thing as deciding what's art in the first place.

Haha, yes. I'm a beatnik pacifist, but I still think I could shoot Simon Cowell in the face and sleep well that night.

I definitely share your sentiments about capitalism (It's a shaky future if we maintain our current trajectory.. but that's another rant all together I suppose), and about its impact on culture. If I flick on the TV nowadays I'm saddened in mere seconds most of the time.

What I object to is the practice of making decisions for financial reasons. It doesn't mean that all studio movies cannot be art by definition, but when the purpose of a character, or their actions, is to appeal to a specific demographic, it alienates me. I can't respect it. I'm talking about the shit that happens when some producer says "We need a car chase. Car chases are popular." and then the plot is contorted in order to support this. It's an act of selling out, in a way, because no-one has any belief that the scene needs to exist, but someone in an office somewhere knows it will look cool in a trailer. It has no artistic merit - no matter how well shot it is, or entertaining it may be - because the function of the piece is based on a psychological analysis of the market and it exists to 'trick' an audience into wanting to watch the film. In a true artistic sense, it doesn't matter if people see the film or not because the point it makes, or the themes it explores, are inviolable - but when that is corrupted, however slightly, the artistic integrity has to be called into question.

I think an easier way of saying what my opinion is, is to say: I despise capitolism in all its forms, and when it invades culture because there's money in it, I get angry. But there are no hard and fast rules.

Interesting point about coding, too. I am very impressed with some demoscene stuff, and I would definitely consider it to be art.

Oh and sorry to spam up this page but on the 'things which only exist to make money' point.. Lets say you have a producer sitting around thinking "gee, I really want to make some cash... Ok, I'll give writer x and director y a call..", and this producer gets the ball rolling on a project that would not have otherwise existed without his unabashed greed, yet the writer and director might care about what they do and pour their creativity into it. I'm sure this is a very common situation. Depending on every factor, all these films might turn out very different.. Some, even if the whole concept plays to 'hot' market trends, might be truly inspired. Can none of them be art?

I never thought of commercial things as art when I was younger, but I absolutely admit I was elitist. I was all over classical music and wrote off anything with a beat as rubbish purely because I hadn't heard much beyond "Spice Up Your Life" blasting through the wall to my sister's bedroom. Nowadays I'll happily call all music art, trite pop included. I might not have much respect for it musically, but I respect that it was someone's vision (be it an individual or collective of collaborators) and that even crafting a solid and successful pop song is an art-form unto itself (which I'm pretty crap at myself in spite of being a musician).

Fair enough of course, and I'm also happy to agree to disagree, I just had to get some of that off my chest :)

One thing I want to bring up relating to your last paragraph is the idea of the coding of games as art. Many do claim that games are art because they contain art, and that angle bothers me too. I've spent a lot of time learning to code (primarily in C++, still have a long way to go really) and I can really appreciate what goes into creating a piece of software.. To take just one example, almost anyone can bind a key to a movement direction, but making gameplay and player movement 'feel' good is a creative challenge requiring creative insight \ inspiration in much the same way that anyone can draw a box but an inspired artist can draw a picture of a box that makes you feel a sense of foreboding, or whatever else. Coding is absolutely a creative medium and coding a game is as personal and creative a task as writing a book. It has a demanding technical side, but so does music orchestration or oil painting. Heck, look at the demoscene stuff. People creating visual art solely with code. It's a shame programmers are almost universally overlooked in discussions of art.

I admire what you're saying, but I do have a fundamental problem with accepting things that only exist to make money being considered works of art. I don't have a problem with artists making money - the concept of the 'starving artist' isn't a cliche I adhere to - nor do I think the artist has to have a specific point. Art is about interpretation, but there is no interpretation in a film where everything has been chosen by committee because of its marketability. Any inherent artistic value in such a project is too clouded behind the blatant and unsubtle 'purpose' of the work, for me.

This is an entirely personal viewpoint. I will never accept an advertisement as being a work of art, and in many ways I see a lot of studio produced blockbusters as being interchangeable with that. I'm happier to consider the 9/11 attack as a work of art - an entirely destructive one, of course - than I am the movie World Trade Center. It was a statement, an image none of us will ever forget, that is entirely divorced from the actual point they were making - but it's ripe with interpretation. Some people look at the footage of the planes and see Israel/Palestine, others see oil, yet others will see religious fundamentalism.

But again, I don't really go around trying to decide if the things I like (or dislike) are art or not. My terms are too vague, I accept that, and my opinion might be entirely void. I guess I just agree with Moriarty that, just because games have artwork in them - from textures to skydomes - they're not necessarily art because of that. I hate the assumption that that's how it works, which is my real gripe with most of the 'games are art' advocates - but that is not you, so I'm happy to agree to disagree ;-)

urr, replace everywhere I said "Pirates" with "Pirates 2" :p

These are precisely the arbitrary criteria I'm bothered by - Does something have to be 'experimental' to be art? How do you quantify experimentalism? Does it have to make a point? Does the artist have to have had a specific point in mind for you to find meaning in it? What about abstract art? Does its creation have to be motivated by an intention to make high-art and not to make money? How can we measure the true intent of an artist? Do we have to consult with the creator to be sure something is art or not? C'mon!

All these things are irrelevant to me not only in determining what is art, but in what value the art has. If you go in blind watching a film, reading a book or looking at a painting, knowing nothing about the artist, era, cultural context, etc, the actual intentions of the artist or the reasons it was created don't factor into your experience of it at all. You might like it, you might not. You might find meaning, you might not. You might think it's a cash cow because it's so similar to other things you've seen, you might think it's revolutionary because you haven't seen anything like it. Different people can have different experiences with it. None are wrong. That's what art is all about!

Who are you, or who am I, to decide that Pirates isn't art? The goal of making money isn't a formula that fabricates films out of thin air.. It is still the product of creative choices, be they commercially 'safe' ones or not, and skilled creative work. There are creative choices made by the director, the actors, the concept artists, the visual effects guys... Can you justifiably claim the film can't be art simply because you don't jibe with the probable reason it got made? I'm sure someone out there has watched Citizen Kane and Pirates back to back and was more affected by Pirates.

That's the subjective aspect of art - experience. The definition should no more be subjective than the definition of a chair is subjective. Which it is, when it boils down to it, but we generally agree on a functional definition. To me a functional definition of art is one which sets the subjective aspects aside and agrees on a fundamental core. There can be good art, bad art, commercial art, experimental art, and all other kinds of art, and those qualifiers are subjective. At the core, though, is art, which is the product of human creativity. Nobody needs to meet any one person's criteria of 'good', 'experimental' etc, to create something that can move someone else.

Well everyone is entitled to their opinion, and the definition of art seems to be somewhat subjective. Like Ebert, I don't consider all movies to be automatically art - something like the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels were blatantly made purely because they were profitable, which I have a problem with. If the scriptwriters had wanted to do something experimental, they would have been fired and someone else brought in to replace them. The only 'function' of the films was to make money, which you can argue is true of any commercial creative work, but to me that makes any other meaning that can be gleamed from the work purely coincidental. It's the product of a business, not the product of an artist who is making a point.

It might be fair to say that's elitism, but it generally isn't an issue in the real world. Just because those films are horrible capitalist products doesn't mean I don't enjoy them, because I like pirates. It's the same with video games. I either like them or I dislike them, but whether they're art is irrelevant.

... my apologies :p

This topic always provokes me to respond.. It's important to me because I've dedicated my life to art, and because my wildest artistic ambitions lie mostly in the digital landscape.

The idea of games not 'qualifying' as art is ludicrous to me. Drawing a line between 'high art' and 'the rest' is ludicrous to me. All criteria used to determine these qualifications and draw these lines are arbitrary and subjective, and therefore cannot be a part of a functional definition. Interactivity is a part of all art - You can't absorb a work and all of its potential implications in one glance, you have to explore it to get something significant out of it, in a variety of ways depending on the medium or your particular interest in the work.

The interactive digital medium is by far the most exciting to me of any. Everything possible in other mediums of art is possible here, with the powerful addition of user input and response to that input. The idea that player choice takes away the artist's 'authoritative control' is idiotic, as the designer\programmer must explicitly decide how the game responds to all player input.

It seems to me that the only claim to 'expertise' that art critics can have is knowledge of art of the past and the academic literature that exists about it. Since 'video games' didn't exist far enough into the past for there to be much academic literature or academically recognized 'classic' works, this is problematic for someone like Ebert, who is predictably looking at games through the lens of film history, literary history, etc, and not finding a match. Since the whole profession of 'art critic' is built on such history, the alternative would be to admit that he doesn't know any better than anyone else... something I'm yet to see a critic do. The very idea of art "experts", particularly ones who do not create art themselves, is in itself utterly ludicrous to me.

"Video games" are the early years of the digital LIBERATION of art.. into new dimensions of time, interactivity, and whatever else creative folks can imagine. I honestly can't see a rational reason for there to be any debate on the subject at all, and am basically prepared to stand by such toxic statements as "Anyone who claims any criteria that results in one creative work being art and one not being art is elitist and\or ignorant.."

The great thing about art is that an artist can use their imagination and create new paradigms, rather than being required to work within established convention. Ebert's statement that "games can never be art" showed a shocking lack of imagination, especially for someone who is actively interested in a creative medium. I guess that's why he only talks about art instead of creating it.

Oh wow. When I first posted that link the speech wasn't yet available, and I didn't follow up.

Heh, this has been available from the original link pretty much since it went up.

FWIW I mostly agreed with him - I went into it thinking he was going to peddle the "games are art" schtick, which I didn't want to hear, but he didn't.