I can get behind all of this and know that it is Right and True, but still know that I will take sincerity over well-crafted every time. I remember the first time I got chills from a high school musical as a young girl, older than myself, sung alone on an empty stage made to look like her bedroom. And I'll take that symphony.
I am afraid to admit it, but Andor left me cold. My spouse tells me it is the most perfectly crafted show he's seen (give me Mythic Quest or Invincible. Hell, give me The Last Airbender). I felt the beats they were trying to hit, knew how everything was going to fit together before the pieces started falling, and I just wanted something to be imperfect.
Not that something needs to be imperfect to be sincere—it just shows that there was something the creator cared more about expressing than perfecting, if that doesn't sound too stupid.
Your writing is great, I can see the craft and still hear your true voice in it. I'm still working on craft, and it's embarrassing to pretend I even understand what I'm talking about, but you're always able to understand input before you can produce the output.
I think this is a good point about sincerity -- that's another important metric. There's a huge difference between "I'm making this because I think it might be good" and "I'm making this because the marketing department told me it's likely to appeal to our core demographic."
But I don't think there's any tradeoff between sincerity and craft; craft is what helps you convey the thing you're trying to convey. I take your point that there are things that could be things that are immaculately crafted but hollow; I consider those to be extremely well-made products that I don't want to buy. Like, some people are really into watches. I'm not. So I see a well-made watch, I appreciate that it's well-made and valuable to someone, it's just not valuable to me because I'm not in the market for that.
I’m sure it’s my autism, but I think most of the well-made watches I’ve seen have been gorgeously and purposefully designed.
My problem usually comes from the mid-range stuff. There’s already so much of it, and none of it strikes the “beautiful or useful” metric. It’s what kept me from bothering for so long—there’s already so much out there, we are inundated every day by the mediocre and average.
In college the department, and the building it was housed in, was called Fine Art. Fine Art was where you learned to make one-of-a-kind precious objects, like paintings or sculptures, that would someday, somehow, hopefully, be purchased by wealthy Patrons of the Arts.
If you were good at creating realistic renderings and wanted a job after college doing that, you were in a whole other department, like Graphic Design. The Fine Art kids had nothing but contempt for Graphic Design majors, considering them hopelessly uncool sellouts. For their part, the Graphic Design majors thought of Fine Arts majors as "broke people who can't draw."
The Fine Arts students thought their primary role was to convey Important Ideas, and were generally in denial that their only credible path to success was to move to New York and find rich patrons who thought the Ideas their art conveyed were the right kind of Important.
As far as I can figure out, Back When I Was A Boy (in the 1970s) this split hadn't happened. I think the reason was that "commercial art" still used a great deal of hand-drawn images. So the basics of Fine Art -- drawing, color theory, design -- were what could get you a job in commercial art. But you then learned the prestige aspects of Art on top of that. In practice, you targeted a career like Hopper, earning your keep in commercial art for 20 years before breaking out to be supported by Patrons.
After that, the ease of using stock photography, and using fancy typography to attract the eye meant that the basics of Fine Art were no longer the basics of commercial art.
I like this definition. It applies to lots of areas outside of traditional “art”. There are always pundits who will critique nuclear power plant design or pharmaceutical processing facilities, etc. from afar, but it is only when you really get into the details that require years of understanding that you can really judge the truly good designs from the slapdash crap.
This is very timely coming in the wake of Andor's series finale, since that's one of the most phenomenally well-crafted shows since, well, Better Call Saul, actually.
I’d say (perhaps cynically) that an important criterion for art is that it creates social capital. It demonstrates that the artist is talented, important, and a card-carrying member of whatever group they’re appealing to. The social capital art creates can then be transferred to those who appreciate, or better yet, own it.
From the title, I was expecting a discussion, pro and con, on the famous quote by playwright Tom Stoppard from "Artist Descending a Staircase." (The line is spoken by Donner, the artist.)
"Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art."
For me "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul" are among the best shows ever made because they're driven by a craft that recognizes there is an audience they should be serving. They're less about Big Ideas than drama, the interest we have for conflict and high stakes among interesting people who we like, fear, hate, are intrigued by. The dialogue, the dramatic beats, the tension, the meditations on small moments, the way each scene matters -- you appreciate them because of their effect on you as you watch those shows.
Part of the problem is that "art" is an overloaded term.
An archaeologist or anthropologist might use the term for any creative endeavor that isn't strictly utilitarian, like an old mug in the shape of a head, or drawings on an ancient Greek vase depicting sex acts -- which in a modern context would be treated as porn.
In other contexts, "art" is distinguished from "kitsch" or "stuff that looks pretty but isn't meant to be deeply meaningful".
I’ve been saying for a while that AI is getting better and better at craft, but not at art. No reason to think that the craft improving will stop or even slow down. So… 😬
This is an interesting twist on Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian 'push-pin is as good as poetry' argument. (Which is, admittedly, another way of saying 'I attended a university! Look how intellectual I am!')
In all seriousness, I'm curious about the limits of this theory. Is a well-made episode of 'The Candace Owens and Josh Hawley BDSM Hour' really better than a lower-rated episode of The Simpsons? Is the perfect toothpick better than a middling gaming PC?
"Once we discard our ethnocentric, hierarchical ideas of how the world works, we will find that one basic quality unites all the works of mankind that speak to us in human, recognizable voices across the barrier of time, culture and space: the simple quality of being well made." -- Bill Reid (who had serious chops in both Art and Craft)
My uncle, the smartest man I knew, used to teach a philosophy of art class, but I never took it nor did I finish the book he relied on the most, and he's dead, so prepare for some poorly thought out word salad. I don't think art and craft are opposites, or alternates, some fine artists show incredible craft when they want to (think Picasso or Degas), but chose to see/show differently, probably partly because technology made representation even less what art was for than it had been before (just take a photo). Craft is excellent execution, which can be seen in practical (a building facade, a birdhouse, car design!) or 'useless' (a painting, a sculpture, a photo of no one you know and no place in particular) objects. I think the definition of art has more to do with does the object have any purpose other than to be perceived, and then art can show craft(spersonship) or not, an aesthetic statement or innovation or not, a social message or not, and have a high or low target audience. I think (visual) art is frustrating when it's just a social message (words painted on canvas) and doesn't make a visual statement (which gets harder and harder, and can be hard to appreciate or agree on; what's new about line or color or form), nor does it show delightful mastery of a medium. Good art is hard, good science is hard, they are both pretty rare. Now if you excuse me I'm going to to do something less useful than reading 'Art and Illusion' by Gombrich
I am chuckling about the "Golden Era" qualification for the Simpsons. I would put forth a theory that after probably 10 years, not to mention 20 years, not to mention 30 etc., we just can't continue to enjoy it in the same way. We get bored. By this theory, if you never saw the Simpsons in the 90s or 2000s or 2010s, you could tune in from 2020-2025 and view it as the golden era. It would be fresh and hilarious.
I say this based on largely stopping watching the show in the teens, but seeing one or 2 episodes a year until about 2020 (and none since) and noting that they were pretty damn good. I was just fatigued by the whole enterprise not because it wasn't still golden, but because it was so familiar.
It's certainly true that any sense of "freshness" or "novelty" was long gone circa 2000, but I check in with the new episodes periodically and I think that the main problem is that the writing in 1992 was A+++ and the writing in recent years is C-minus.
I can get behind all of this and know that it is Right and True, but still know that I will take sincerity over well-crafted every time. I remember the first time I got chills from a high school musical as a young girl, older than myself, sung alone on an empty stage made to look like her bedroom. And I'll take that symphony.
I am afraid to admit it, but Andor left me cold. My spouse tells me it is the most perfectly crafted show he's seen (give me Mythic Quest or Invincible. Hell, give me The Last Airbender). I felt the beats they were trying to hit, knew how everything was going to fit together before the pieces started falling, and I just wanted something to be imperfect.
Not that something needs to be imperfect to be sincere—it just shows that there was something the creator cared more about expressing than perfecting, if that doesn't sound too stupid.
Your writing is great, I can see the craft and still hear your true voice in it. I'm still working on craft, and it's embarrassing to pretend I even understand what I'm talking about, but you're always able to understand input before you can produce the output.
I think this is a good point about sincerity -- that's another important metric. There's a huge difference between "I'm making this because I think it might be good" and "I'm making this because the marketing department told me it's likely to appeal to our core demographic."
But I don't think there's any tradeoff between sincerity and craft; craft is what helps you convey the thing you're trying to convey. I take your point that there are things that could be things that are immaculately crafted but hollow; I consider those to be extremely well-made products that I don't want to buy. Like, some people are really into watches. I'm not. So I see a well-made watch, I appreciate that it's well-made and valuable to someone, it's just not valuable to me because I'm not in the market for that.
I’m sure it’s my autism, but I think most of the well-made watches I’ve seen have been gorgeously and purposefully designed.
My problem usually comes from the mid-range stuff. There’s already so much of it, and none of it strikes the “beautiful or useful” metric. It’s what kept me from bothering for so long—there’s already so much out there, we are inundated every day by the mediocre and average.
In college the department, and the building it was housed in, was called Fine Art. Fine Art was where you learned to make one-of-a-kind precious objects, like paintings or sculptures, that would someday, somehow, hopefully, be purchased by wealthy Patrons of the Arts.
If you were good at creating realistic renderings and wanted a job after college doing that, you were in a whole other department, like Graphic Design. The Fine Art kids had nothing but contempt for Graphic Design majors, considering them hopelessly uncool sellouts. For their part, the Graphic Design majors thought of Fine Arts majors as "broke people who can't draw."
The Fine Arts students thought their primary role was to convey Important Ideas, and were generally in denial that their only credible path to success was to move to New York and find rich patrons who thought the Ideas their art conveyed were the right kind of Important.
As far as I can figure out, Back When I Was A Boy (in the 1970s) this split hadn't happened. I think the reason was that "commercial art" still used a great deal of hand-drawn images. So the basics of Fine Art -- drawing, color theory, design -- were what could get you a job in commercial art. But you then learned the prestige aspects of Art on top of that. In practice, you targeted a career like Hopper, earning your keep in commercial art for 20 years before breaking out to be supported by Patrons.
After that, the ease of using stock photography, and using fancy typography to attract the eye meant that the basics of Fine Art were no longer the basics of commercial art.
I like this definition. It applies to lots of areas outside of traditional “art”. There are always pundits who will critique nuclear power plant design or pharmaceutical processing facilities, etc. from afar, but it is only when you really get into the details that require years of understanding that you can really judge the truly good designs from the slapdash crap.
This is very timely coming in the wake of Andor's series finale, since that's one of the most phenomenally well-crafted shows since, well, Better Call Saul, actually.
It belongs to the canon now, justly sitting alongside the likes of BCS, Sopranos, The Wire
I’d say (perhaps cynically) that an important criterion for art is that it creates social capital. It demonstrates that the artist is talented, important, and a card-carrying member of whatever group they’re appealing to. The social capital art creates can then be transferred to those who appreciate, or better yet, own it.
ooof. this hurts my heart. i'm giving you a doot, but then i'm walking away and pretending i never read it.
From the title, I was expecting a discussion, pro and con, on the famous quote by playwright Tom Stoppard from "Artist Descending a Staircase." (The line is spoken by Donner, the artist.)
"Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art."
I loved that play and so many more of the radio plays
For me "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul" are among the best shows ever made because they're driven by a craft that recognizes there is an audience they should be serving. They're less about Big Ideas than drama, the interest we have for conflict and high stakes among interesting people who we like, fear, hate, are intrigued by. The dialogue, the dramatic beats, the tension, the meditations on small moments, the way each scene matters -- you appreciate them because of their effect on you as you watch those shows.
Part of the problem is that "art" is an overloaded term.
An archaeologist or anthropologist might use the term for any creative endeavor that isn't strictly utilitarian, like an old mug in the shape of a head, or drawings on an ancient Greek vase depicting sex acts -- which in a modern context would be treated as porn.
In other contexts, "art" is distinguished from "kitsch" or "stuff that looks pretty but isn't meant to be deeply meaningful".
All I’m hearing is that this is art
https://youtu.be/PJeIbMZsGgM?feature=shared
I’ve been saying for a while that AI is getting better and better at craft, but not at art. No reason to think that the craft improving will stop or even slow down. So… 😬
Is there still a Village Voice?
Great read in its day.....
As that Supreme Court justice once said about pornography, I know it when I see it.
This is an interesting twist on Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian 'push-pin is as good as poetry' argument. (Which is, admittedly, another way of saying 'I attended a university! Look how intellectual I am!')
In all seriousness, I'm curious about the limits of this theory. Is a well-made episode of 'The Candace Owens and Josh Hawley BDSM Hour' really better than a lower-rated episode of The Simpsons? Is the perfect toothpick better than a middling gaming PC?
I mean I’d watch that first thing for sure yeah
"Once we discard our ethnocentric, hierarchical ideas of how the world works, we will find that one basic quality unites all the works of mankind that speak to us in human, recognizable voices across the barrier of time, culture and space: the simple quality of being well made." -- Bill Reid (who had serious chops in both Art and Craft)
My uncle, the smartest man I knew, used to teach a philosophy of art class, but I never took it nor did I finish the book he relied on the most, and he's dead, so prepare for some poorly thought out word salad. I don't think art and craft are opposites, or alternates, some fine artists show incredible craft when they want to (think Picasso or Degas), but chose to see/show differently, probably partly because technology made representation even less what art was for than it had been before (just take a photo). Craft is excellent execution, which can be seen in practical (a building facade, a birdhouse, car design!) or 'useless' (a painting, a sculpture, a photo of no one you know and no place in particular) objects. I think the definition of art has more to do with does the object have any purpose other than to be perceived, and then art can show craft(spersonship) or not, an aesthetic statement or innovation or not, a social message or not, and have a high or low target audience. I think (visual) art is frustrating when it's just a social message (words painted on canvas) and doesn't make a visual statement (which gets harder and harder, and can be hard to appreciate or agree on; what's new about line or color or form), nor does it show delightful mastery of a medium. Good art is hard, good science is hard, they are both pretty rare. Now if you excuse me I'm going to to do something less useful than reading 'Art and Illusion' by Gombrich
Norm MacDonald, in a few of his interviews, explicitly described comedy as a craft as opposed to an art.
Love your take Maurer.
I am chuckling about the "Golden Era" qualification for the Simpsons. I would put forth a theory that after probably 10 years, not to mention 20 years, not to mention 30 etc., we just can't continue to enjoy it in the same way. We get bored. By this theory, if you never saw the Simpsons in the 90s or 2000s or 2010s, you could tune in from 2020-2025 and view it as the golden era. It would be fresh and hilarious.
I say this based on largely stopping watching the show in the teens, but seeing one or 2 episodes a year until about 2020 (and none since) and noting that they were pretty damn good. I was just fatigued by the whole enterprise not because it wasn't still golden, but because it was so familiar.
It's certainly true that any sense of "freshness" or "novelty" was long gone circa 2000, but I check in with the new episodes periodically and I think that the main problem is that the writing in 1992 was A+++ and the writing in recent years is C-minus.