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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

I though Duchamp was making fun of the art world. There is a large group who are obsessed with curators and experts, and will praise anything that's put in a gallery whether it's any good or not.

Edit: well it seems that was wrong, so let's derail the thread some more with a strong recommendation to watch "F for Fake", and a long Twitter rant I found about how to approach the "are video games art" conversation. https://twitter.com/ForgetAmnesia/status/882933955174989825

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This Twitter thread is just really really bad. The argument it attributes to Benjamin is just not what his essay says at all. In fact, Benjamin was a pioneer in what we'd call "media studies," and he wrote about popular entertainment long before the rest of academia took that sort of thing seriously.

And if that were all that were wrong with it, it'd be a petty criticism, but this attitude--of assuming every critic is an elitist snob--just pervades the whole thing. Critics don't hate Thomas Kinkade (dude gets his name wrong, also, twice) "because he mass produced his art"--so did Warhol, so do most modern artists on some level. They hate him because his work is kitschy and boring. It's the elevator music of painting.

Contra the author, comics are taught in higher education. There was a whole furor roughly a year ago because religious students at Duke were angry about being assigned Fun Home. There are academics who specialize in science fiction, who write about comic books. This entire long thread is against an enemy that doesn't exist anymore.

>>he mass produced his art"--so did Warhol, so do most modern artists on some level

Not sure how far back "modern" goes but Florence was full of workshops[0] during the renaissance. A lot of the good stuff (David IIRC) was produced by teams of professional artists to some degree.

[0] http://matthewgream.net/Professional/HistoryOfArt/workshops_...

Asking for game(r)s to be taken seriously is specifically asking the elitists to legitimize the medium. Non-elitist critics might take games seriously but they don't count because culturally they aren't the gatekeepers to legitimacy.

I think the Kinkade point wasn't about mechanical mass production but mass appeal. Critics might not like the work but he sold zillions of prints. There's clearly a disconnect between what people think is good and what gets praised as good.

That's the thing, though--who are these gatekeepers he's imagining? Game studies are growing rapidly in academia. So-called "elite" media (which is, let's face it, much cheaper to consume than the games themselves) don't necessarily exclude games anymore. The New Yorker runs articles about games, for instance.

But it's silly to act as if dislike of games never has anything to do with quality. A lot of games, even now, have stilted dialogue, poorly-considered plots, inept voice acting. They're bad _as games_, and this applies even to many of the widely-praised ones. It's counterproductive to act as if lack of coverage for games has nothing to do with this.

Many people like Thomas Kinkade. Many people like hundred-hour long video games with badly-dubbed dialogue, repetitive battles, and lots of bugs. People should be allowed to like what they like, but that road goes both ways. Critics aren't obligated to pretend they enjoy things that actually make them miserable, just because that's what people are buying.

Yes, when people ask "is it art?" they're ussally actually asking is it good art? Who knows?

It's part of something broader. A lot of people seem to need whatever they enjoy (science fiction / comic / video games) to get a seal of approval as great and serious art. They complain that people don't respect the art they enjoy. Of course, when someone tries to do something serious in the genre/medium they complain that it is the wrong kind of whatever. You're supposed to respect first-person-shooters and space opera as great art. They don't want you to make anything that actually tries to be literary.

It's the other way around: he was critiquing what was popularly not accepted as "art". He submitted Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists, who claimed they would exhibit any art submitted to them, and was rejected.

http://www.teemingbrain.com/2013/05/09/orson-welles-on-chart...

If you don't have time to watch a two hour documentary, at least watch this part, which is beautiful.

>I though Duchamp was making fun of the art world.

This piece is part of the DaDa art movement. They were not so much making fun of the art world as they were deliberately revolting against the world. It started about the same time WWI did and it's mostly symbolic of people (not just the artists) rejecting a society that could cause such a massive war.

re the underlying jab at post-modernism, post-modernism has gone beyond using aestheticism as a way of evoking emotions and simply gone ahead to evoke emotions directly (starting with expressionist art evolving out of impressionist art). the ultimate "deconstruction" of art is when evocation of emotion transcends medium - when "art" makes you feel a certain way without the bias of being a physical object, or anything at all.

contemporary art is the current physical limitation of this logical extreme. art today is about trying different media through which they can get a reaction out of you.

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