The Nature of Art

Scrambling for a definition

What is art, really? Is it the emotional experience or a material thing that can be in some way measured? It seems to exist in neither, and is, at the same time, entirely composed of them. Strip away emotion and you are left with something material, a vessel with which no further meaning can be derived. To me, it seems that we have lost all that it means to be art. Then say, we strip away the material, that is, whatever you are left with does not inhabit any physical form but, of course, you can not have one without the other. I can not elicit any emotion from you without first bringing something into the world. So, for the purpose of this article, I'd like to define art as the perception of something material that evokes an emotional response. There is a lot to pick apart here; this definition is necessarily vague.

To ascribe value

Does it then follow that the maximization of the material and emotion bring about more art? Why might we want to make something more artful? Is a big painting artistically superior to a small painting? I picture it like so: all art has some dimensionality and the richness of our emotional response is limited by these dimensions. Take, for instance, Gogh's Starry Night and hang it on a wall beside Michelangelo's David. From which stimuli will the average person perceive a greater emotional experience? And, perform this same experiment for all the sculptures and paintings from all of human history. What would we find? In any single comparison, the result will depend entirely on the quality of art. But if we zoom out and discuss the results in aggregate, there are three possibilities:

1. Paintings ~ Sculptures
2. Paintings > Sculptures
3. Paintings < Sculptures

I can't say with confidence what will win out. However, if we instead compared paintings with films, I would be shocked if we ended up with anything other than (3)¹. To summarize, I'll conclude that the value of art is correlated with the average amount of elicited emotion, disregarding its material form (not to say that it can't contribute).

High dimensional art

From our building intuition of art, we could say that video games, through their high dimensionality, are singular in their ability to generate deeply rich, emotional experiences. Do they become necessarily better art for it? No, there are plenty of examples where this is not the case. But player agency is a powerful tool. Your choices matter, right? And this brings us to an important question: why do we, as artists, limit our expression with lower dimensionality? In other words, why don't we just make video games all day? Practically speaking, people don't create art for art's sake. People create art for people, however numerous that group is. People create art for themselves because they have to ². Furthermore, the drive for expression is entirely personal and we should expect it to manifest uniquely, unconsciously, instead of rationally and concretely. I rationally conclude that I ought to create video games but I can't stomach it. Video games are hard, annoying, and take a long time. You have to be a certain kind of crazy to make a game.

To ascribe value, cont.

If dimensionality presents a mechanism for expression, and we know that mechanisms depend on the hand that wields them, then ultimately, the value of art depends on the application of those mechanisms. A talented painter knows his brush and not a camera. Knowledge comes from curiosity and curiosity from passion. One can not make a game without wanting to want to make a game and one can not choose to want to want. In this sense, I like to look at art as a cosmic gift, a reflection of the beauty in our universe.