Romanticization of the Artist (this got long) (Gaming)

by Vortech , A Fourth Wheel, Tuesday, May 26, 2020, 18:07 (1641 days ago) @ Robot Chickens

Doing anything worthwhile is going to take effort and a significant portion of your time.

So why do we not talk about the engineers designing the space telescopes the same way you talk about an artist? The people working to produce a vaccine for Sars-Cov-2 as we speak? The people searching for Dark Matter? The people designing electric cars? The people designing faster and faster microchips?

Good relevant thoughts and reflections.

This stuff is way more intense, both intellectually and in terms of time, than making art.

Vile bullshit

I simply refuse to believe that we’re going to be able to define “art“ when hundreds or thousands of years of philosophers have failed, and yet this entire thread is predicated on the idea that people can start gatekeeping what is and what is not art - so that they can provide self-selecting anicdata about whether or not it was required - which means it’s an entirely useless waste of time at best and a raging trash fire tearing us apart at worst. But all of that said, yeah. If Art is something that is mostly or only made by people who are exhausted, then it must not be as hard as work that can only be done by people who have their full capabilities.

Causality Fallacies all over the place. Crunch being common in a world of art, even if we are going to accept that is true, does not mean that it’s required it simply means that it is common. So is artists being at a disadvantage - a power imbalance — to their source of money. Once upon a time it was an artist dependent on A patron lady bountiful, now it takes the form of people who argue after the fact that they don’t need to pay for what they ordered because they were repaid in exposure or because it doesn’t match what they expected or decided they wanted. Artists are typically independent contractors who have all manner of things stacked against them in the system from taxes to healthcare and it’s considered that it’s supposed to be that way because art is so fulfilling, as they say out loud, and that art is done by people who are Adolescents regardless of their age, the part they don’t say out loud. Artists are considered to be able and required to do this kind of work style because they are looked down upon and not valued.

Confirmation bias all over the place. I don’t think it’s true. I think this is correlation, not causation. I think you may just as well say that a college exam paper “cannot be done without crunch“ simply because there are millions of examples of it being done in crunch. It does not mean it is required, it means it is common. The reality, of course is that there are many people who quietly and without notice plan their time effectively but because most don’t does not make it required.

When you hear hoofsteps behind you you think horse, not zebra. Unless they are an artist. I know lots of lawyers and investment bankers, retail clerks, and plumbers who work too long or too hard and damage other parts of their life. Nobody says of them plumbing requires sacrifice. Nobody says we could not stop them; the lawyering just has to come out of them because their brains are touched by divine muses who won’t let them rest until their singular lawyering is on the pages of the brief for the world to see. Nobody says you can’t scan bar codes unless you are in your tenth hour of work today. No. We say the partners gave them too big a caseload. We say they have no union. We say they are not guaranteed a living wage. We say they are hiding at work from problems at home. We assume those hoofsteps are a horse. Workahaulics are not unique in creative fields, but creative fields uniquely view them as “doing what they love” or an unavoidable cost. See also, drug abuse in Art.

Now add in thousands of complicating variables across hundreds of people and it does in different business is subject to problems of technology and timing and tell me that games that aren’t done with crunch don’t qualify as “art“ I don’t see how the argument is possible. And I don’t see how counter-argument is possible When you can simply take any example, should it be that someone found an absence of drama notable somehow and thus made it recorded for posterity and therefore sits waiting to be used as an example, and declare it not art. For we have no bright line rules for inclusion to begin with.

I’m willing to believe it is a hard problem to solve, but the fact that certain parts of the world of Art are having a harder time solving it strongly suggests to me that it is a problem with that industry, not with “Art”. But if I am wrong, if this is what is required for Art, then we have a new problem. We need to decide how society is going to make sure that we have much less Art. Because calling someone an artist does not justify treating people like shit, running their lives through a juicer so that society can have the juice of their lives as a break from their more humane non-artistic jobs, or writing off their suffering as unavoidable.

I’ll leave this here, because otherwise you won’t understand why I keep wanting to tell the people defending crunch to go jerk off into some geraniums.

Nanette is full of surprises, not the least of which is @hannahgadsby finding a use for her art history degree. Now streaming. pic.twitter.com/6f5Q70i6xq

— Netflix Is A Joke (@NetflixIsAJoke) June 22, 2018