The trick was to replace all instances of “art” with “language”.
Let's try it...
“The main points of the article, as I understand it, are that society shouldn't encourage the creation of new [language], because we already have more than enough good [language] to last anyone a lifetime, and because [language manipulators] are mostly motivated by social status anyway.”
Interesting I would say.
Not to pick on your statement, but rather to illustrate how ideological underpinnings frame our concepts. Art exists as nothing more (or less) than language, yet our ideological pressures force framing.
It strikes me that if that is the premise of the article (I read a little more under the hood) then even then, the framing is questionable.
Art, as a breed of language, holds vernacular, symbology, cliche, and many other facets within a culture.
This isn't exactly ground breaking nor novel, but something that requires an understanding to begin an engagement with.
It is as difficult to discuss topics as with any subject, when the two participants are resting on entirely different foundations. Akin to discussing linear algebra without considering the audience.
Best I can do is offer entry points and hope you might see value.
This has the sniffing of someone that isn't willing to follow the tendrils of a work, and certainly doesn't show a willingness to invest effort to understanding. How silly would it look to say "Some areas of software development seem to [xxx]" and conclude that, because something is hard to explain (subjective / contextual) that it therefore (implied) lacks value?
Much like the rest of language, pieces exist in an ecosystem, and the meaning that emerges tends to be occluded until one invests in comprehending the contexts. Postmodernism, for example, is a clear move away from Modernism. I cannot count the number of times that I have seen genuine conflation of "Modernism" with "modern", for example. To understand Postmodernism requires an understanding of what came before and what it may be taking issue with.
Of course, to wrap all of this up and encapsulate it as mere aesthetics or art is to ignore the very thing that gives art and other variants of language life; that it exists as a holistic thing in relation to philosophy, contemporary culture, historical culture, science, music, literature, and the rest of that complex ball.
"Deep down, I don't think our foundations are all that different."
Which is exactly why I am responding and attempting (probably failing) to communicate. It's not an easy task, especially when we consider the general culture around Hacker News, but one that I believe is extremely valuable.
This permeates all aspects of our lives - there is no objective reason why "red octagon" means "stop" except that we have created a design language in which this is standard. Likewise we've constructed massive visual symbologies that have real meaning - the floppy disk icon, an upward pointing arrow, the male/female symbols on restrooms that are so universal, etc. These are non-linguistic things that are nonetheless communication all the same.
There are even more complex manifestations of these symbols, techniques, and themes in fine arts - but in principle they are the same.
So to address your previous point:
> "The main points of the article, as I understand it, are that society shouldn't encourage the creation of new art, because we already have more than enough good art to last anyone a lifetime"
This becomes a nonsensical statement, because art is communication - and like all communication it wears culture and politics all over it. Art is unique to the time and place where it is created - the same way a novel wears the signatures of the era in which it is written.
This would be like suggesting that we should shut down all newspapers, because we already have archives full of old newspapers, more than anyone can read in a lifetime.
Art is intrinsically, inseparably tied to the culture and time surrounding its creation. It is not substitutable in perpetuity like a daily vitamin pill. Art created in the 18th century is not the same as art created in the 19th century - and is not the same as art that will be created in years to come.
> " and because artists are mostly motivated by social status anyway"
I've known a lot of artists. I don't think this statement is justified. You can say a lot of things - artists create for their ego, artists create for the approval of others, but "social status" brings in a lot of connotations that frankly aren't warranted.
Art is insular frequently - many artists have no interest in appealing to the layman, and their works are often inscrutable to anyone who hasn't spent a lot of time studying the art. Their primary interest in creation is communicating with others who are as studied as them in a particular topic. One can spin this as "being driven by social status" but in reality is no different than listening to the same music as your friends, or watching the same movies.
To try and bring this back to our world - think about an expert programmer who blogs about the finer points of compiler design. His blog is complete gibberish to the layman, and in fact is not understandable to most beginner programmers either. You have to have a certain background in order to understand what he's writing - this is what a lot of art is like. The mistake here is that certain people have put this art in a museum and told everyone they should like it - in doing so creating a false impression that understanding what's hanging on this wall is simple. It's really not.
The criticism in the article is off-base precisely because of this. This is like an amateur programmer looking at this compiler design blog and saying "all of this is gibberish I don't understand, therefore bullshit". The reality is that these are expert works designed for experts in a field - and to understand it (not that you're obligated to understand it at all) you have to work your way up to it, by understanding who has done what, where they came from, where they learned and copied from, etc etc.
This is patently untrue. Two of the top films in theaters right now are Interstellar and Gone Girl, neither of which can reasonably fit under the umbrella of "simple thrills". In fact Gone Girl has been widely described as a very difficult film to watch in terms of its emotional impact on its audience - suffice it to say the appreciation of that film goes above and beyond mere entertainment, yet both are "popular art" in the sense that they are widely consumed by the mainstream.
The general public is capable of a substantial amount of artistic understanding, and there are more experts out there than you acknowledge. Appreciation of different types, genres, and subgenres of art change over time as a reflection of culture.
One good modern example of this is the comic book movie - comic books have unique thematic, structural, and aesthetic elements to them that were previously the exclusive territory of comic book nerds. In recent years this has gone spectacularly mainstream - and hundreds of millions of people now better understand stuff that used to be pretty inscrutable.
All art exist in a spectrum between the novice and the expert, mainstream society is quite expert at some (see: music, cinema) but not currently practiced in others (see: postmodernism). To boil the artistic sensibilities of the mainstream down to "simple thrills" is not only grossly cynical, it's grossly incorrect.
"Popular art" is not mere entertainment - and it has never been, and has always been a reflection of the time and place in which it's created. Captain America - popular right now - was a nationalistic symbol created during the midst of WW2 when it was felt that such a symbol be needed. The utopian portrayal of the future in the original Star Trek attracted viewers as an optimistic opposite to the Cold War. Heck, the conflict between the Federation and the Klingons is a direct analogy between the USA and the USSR (and naturally, the Federation always prevails).
And these art forms evolve - just this year we've had two massively profitable films between the X-Men and Captain America where the US government was portrayed as openly malevolent, and one of them directly addressed governmental spying. These works transparently reflect the times in which they were made. With the increasing media attention on drone strikes worldwide, even the RoboCop remake wasn't spared - the movie went from a reflection of 1980s crime anxiety to a reflection of 2010s morality re: drone strikes.
This isn't just movies either - Tupac built a huge mainstream career and long-standing legacy on works that plainly and openly commented on crime, race, and equality in the context of 1990s America. He's far from the only one - the general public is much more capable of expert artistic appreciation than you give them credit.
People seek commentary, understanding, belonging, and even escape from the world and times in which they live, and popular art has provided this, and in this way they are not substitutable. The notion that people can or should subsist on past art exclusively is plainly false, as is the basis assumption that "popular art" is merely entertainment.
Books like Dead Air by Ian Banks, or Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, are simply not available in earlier eras as their narrative reference points did not yet exist.
It is like looking for something in the golden age of Hollywood that closely resembles Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Without the culture of computer games to draw on, that film could not get made.
How about, because new art is often created to fill the particular desire of an actually-existing person rather than to feed gwern's smug sense of superiority to the rest of humankind. And let us add, people create art because it's fun, which is reason enough for almost anything.
And then there's the issue with citing Robert "capital-accumulation is ethical value" Hanson on, well, anything.
Really?
>And let us add, people create art because it's fun, which is reason enough for almost anything.
He's arguing against subsidising art, not for stopping all art production.
It's easy to see that this is false. Pick an arbitrary point in history and imagine that cultural production had stopped at that point. Would that be "enough good art"? Of course not. Old art is not our art.
> artists are mostly motivated by social status anyway
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Though I agree, don't encourage art, make it illegal. It will not stop people from being artists, but it would curb a lot of mediocrity :P
The theory implied there is that art is a shelf-stable commodity product whose only value is in consumption as entertainment. Will anybody seriously admit to believing that?
> artists are mostly motivated by social status anyway
If we get to cancel everything where social status is a motivator, we should cancel everything. We are social animals hardwired for social status. We should certainly cancel HN, which of course has rankings to show who's on top and where people spend stupid amounts of effort trying to win arguments in status-enhancing ways.