Hard News: Some things you may not know
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Paul, Paris Hilton will be remembered much longer than you or I. People will be watching her amateurish BJ forever, thanks to the digital revolution. Probably the most famous amateur scene ever, rivalled only by Pamela Anderson's. But she's technically an actor so it's technically not amateur, unlike Hilton's masterwork.
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1) No one was ever moved to weep by a line of code.
2) WTF! Paris has infiltrated even this last sanctuary!!
3) Neither LOTR or Harry Potter can be considered "art" as such. They lack that obsessive polish and independent existence from their creators. The former was more-or-less an academic exercise for overgrown public schoolboys (heavily indebted to the writings of William Morris, I might add) and the latter is basically plodding padded pabalum churned out because it's lucrative (She's getting paid by the word people).
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3410 makes a good point, but I would amend it slightly.
I would amend it majorly. I don't think it's the experience of poverty that makes poor artists great. It's the reason they are impoverished, which is their devotion to the art itself. There is no set of experiences that make one kind of art better than another. The wealthy have their own experiences, and because these experiences are rarer, sometimes they are of great interest. If they are devoted to the art itself, wealthy people can make great art.
Wealthier people are also much rarer, so the odds of extreme talent being had by someone wealthy is less than in the wider population. But if they choose to be an artist, they can do it as long as they like, so they are probably more prolific. So it certainly can seem like wealthy people make worse art, on average.
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merc,
I thought JRR Tolkien wrote The Hobbit in letters to his son at the front in WW1?
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No one had ever thought to do it on such a scale before though.
Hello?! Homer! Vergil and Ovid!
Why are elves tall chaps with bows instead of little pixie like creatures? Tolkien. Why are goblins snivelly nasty green things that live underground, rather than things that live under toadstools at the bottom of my garden? Tolkien. Trolls turning to stone in sunlight? He borrowed that one.
I suggest you read your Norse myths. He stole it all.
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merc,
Andrew, thank you, thank you, thank you. I am glad he stole though for his intentions were pure and he has exposed more to myth than Campbell and Star Wars.
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They lack that obsessive polish and independent existence from their creators.
What crap. LOTR was all about obsession with polish, which is why it took 20 years to write. You might not like the polish, though. And Tolkien is dead, but it's still popular, so I don't get the 'independent existence' point at all.
1) No one was ever moved to weep by a line of code.
Only a non-coder could ever suggest such heresy. I wept with joy over one line of code just this week, and plenty of them have made me weep with laughter. Furthermore, the code itself is more like the dots of paint. It's the outcome, the program, which is the overall artwork, and I've seen plenty of people who weren't programmers weeping with frustration at programs over the years. Change a few lines and those tears move to joy and gratitude.
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Hello?! Homer! Vergil and Ovid!
Hello?! I've got all of those in a small pile right here whilst I put my library in boxes never to be seen again. Fits nicely in one hand. The other arm is not enough for all the Tolkien though.
OK, they didn't have typewriters or printing presses back then, and Homer at least was writing the whole thing down from memory, so I kind of get your point. But none of them actually invented the myths they were writing poetry about.
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LOTR was a personal diversion, an experiment to see if it was possible to construct a new narrative in the style of the Old English epics - hence its rather stilted prose and plodding plotting. It's a good yarn, but it's not art and was never intended to be such (art must first be concieved of as art).
If you are the only one weeping, and you wrote it, but - and no offense intended - that's narcissistic solipsism, not art. Art can make a room full of non-artists feel the same powerful emotions. As Rilke said in his sonnet "Archaic Torso of Apollo" and I'mm loosely translating from the German here: "you must/will change your life."
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3410 wrote:
I think one point has been overlooked. Nico's statement is not about the difference between making money from your art and not, but about the inability of the financially secure person to have much insight into the human condition.
Wealthy people (at least those who have never been poor) generally make worthless "art" because everything that they experience in life is filtered through their position of financial superiority over other people. In short, because they can buy anything, they do not appreciate the value of anything. Thus, their musings on life will almost certainly be utterly corrupted.-
Everyone's experience in life is going to be filtered through their circumstances - wealth is no obstacle to being capable of observation and insight.
Ivan Turgenev, for instance, was very rich, yet his book about the lives of serfs A Sportsman's Notebook was moving and powerful enough to influence Peter the Great to abolish the system of feudal heirarchy and emancipate the serfs.
Turgenev's experience of the serf's lives was from the point view of the son of someone who owned serfs, but his position as the son of a wealthy landowner did not affect his his ability to observe and understand the misery of the serf's situation - even if his or her owner is a kind and benevolent owner.
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Quantity is not quality
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Wasn't Virginia Wolf's Schtick that you needed to have an independant financial existence to write and create - hence "A Room of One's Own"
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But I admit that I probably just don't get the subtlety of being a coder in a big shop.
"You start coding, I'll find out what they want" is always entertaining. But is it art?
Code comments - now those can be art.
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1) No one was ever moved to weep by a line of code.
*coff* Just because you can't comprehend it, doesn't mean it's never happened. There are a couple of open-source modules that have moved me to tears. Granted, that's after wading through a whole lot of truly abysmal legacy code at my work.
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Clearly two alien cultures unable to communicate - but I'm taking my ball and going home before the programmers all gang up on me.
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..oh, and Ben: your biggest team is my smallest team, so you're likely onto something. I think probably where we differ (and I've muddled the issue with references to Art) is mainly in definition than anything.
There's plenty of room in the programming world for such attributes as beauty & innovation, & Art in the overriding sense that you've used the term, but I still think of creativity as a utopian concept which is making something from nothing. Programming is making something from the perceived lack of something - filling a gap. Code can be dull & derivative, or beautiful / exciting / sheer genius, but creativity is a facet that I don't think programmers are necessarily trying to achieve.
That's not to detract at all from innovation and elegance - two attributes that I'm fiercely passionate about in my work (and the inevitable side projects). But basically, the quest for creativity is why I write fiction. Coding gives me a similar satisfaction to finishing a crossword puzzle, whereas writing fiction exercises an entirely different part of my brain.
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Clearly two alien cultures unable to communicate
*sigh* the story of my career. For five minutes I thought it'd be quite fun to be a business analyst. But no.
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Art can make a room full of non-artists feel the same powerful emotions.
Tell me you haven't ever experienced a powerful urge to kill in an online game? :-0 Or cried when you lost your last life just before reaching the high score in an arcade? ;-)
But sure, some art can do that. That's art 'for others'. I totally disagree that all art is like that. A hermit can make art. Probably most of humanity's first art was mostly for self enjoyment, cave-painting, wood carving, etc.
Just because we have set art forms which are widely appreciated doesn't make them paramount in any way. There is art in carpentry that is entirely covered over with walls and is never seen. There is art scribbled in the margins of millions of dull textbooks. There is art in a good joke that is never attributed to any person. Life itself is a performance art. At least a life worth living. Those who are just getting on with it, hoping to get to the end of it without appreciating it along the way are merely time-servers.
And I think that is what we see in the work of the more widely appreciated artforms. We see a master craftsperson who takes what they do seriously and does it very well. In visual art it may be to create beauty, or to give a message. Same goes for the art of programming - elegance and clarity are always preferable. Ugly code jumps at the eye of those who deal with it, just as ugly instructions in a manual sicken those who have to read it. Indeed it was the sheer artistry that went into the first computer manual I ever owned that got me hooked on programming.
You can argue that creating such clarity and beauty is formulaic, but if you find it so, I think I would hate to read any program you wrote. If there was a formula, we could get a computer to do it. We can't, programming is a human task, with human artistry, forming a beautiful bond between man and machine.
Anyone who's ever actually enjoyed driving a car, rather than merely using it as a way of getting around and ignoring the machine itself, might get what I'm saying. Anyone who doesn't, who can only see art as the major accepted artforms will never appreciate new art, and ultimately will miss the entire point of art itself, the breaking of perceptions, the creation of ideas, the formation of beauty from new elements in new ways.
Such people will deride the DJ as a hack who is merely selecting records, without understanding the genius involved in that task itself, much less the more technical aspects of mixing and sequencing. They will not see a Formula One driver or and All Black as an artist, whose bodies and movements are their art, their expression of their lives and personalities.
And they certainly won't see art in those around them who seek on a daily basis to maximize their enjoyment of life. The old geezer walking along, doing his best not to fall down because of his gamey leg, is an artist hard at work. You can appreciate it when you see the guy getting better at it. You feel better. Well I do, anyway.
If there's an inability to communicate here, it's one way. I understand why you might not appreciate programming. I am a similar novice when it comes to, say, appreciating parliamentary debate. But I won't say there's no art in it. It's just art I don't like, of which there is a great deal. That I don't like it doesn't make it less artistic.
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Code can be dull & derivative, or beautiful / exciting / sheer genius, but creativity is a facet that I don't think programmers are necessarily trying to achieve.
**That* is exactly what is wrong with most programming today. When you make humans into machines, you tend to find they are very bad at it. The only reason to use a human for a job is because they have that insight talent, and taking it away from them is madness if you want productivity.
Coding to spec can be like solving a puzzle, which definitely is not always a mechanical chore. Surely your side projects have unlimited scope for creativity though? If not, why not? Do you like to live in a box?
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Tell me you haven't ever experienced a powerful urge to kill in an online game? :-0 Or cried when you lost your last life just before reaching the high score in an arcade? ;-)
Nothing like the sensation of the transcendant sublime I experience reading Goethe or the first time I saw Tintoretto's Feast of Cleopatra. You, I suspect, are confusing kitsch with catharsis.
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I think one point has been overlooked. Nico's statement is not about the difference between making money from your art and not, but about the inability of the financially secure person to have much insight into the human condition.
The whole interview was full of romantic utterances that might not have borne rigorous scrutiny but sounded marvellous at the time. The rest of that quote (yes, I found the interview) goes:
"I always become nasty when I have money. I think I'm being persecuted and I think people are after me for my money. Although I never had a million for instance. The most I ever had was $10,000 (She smiles) Because everybody owes me royalties, they all cheat me. You know, from The End album, I never received a penny."
And then some stuff about how her first manager before she went to "Andy" did her over. Also:
You're sometimes described as a survivor - do you see yourself as one?
"I not really in the situation of surviving. I mean, you can only survive a war or some catastrophe, but not when there's peace. Survive myself? (Laughs) I don't know, because I'm not that much of a block. I feel like I'm part of the wind …
But you were in similar circumstances to, say Edie Sedgwick in the late 60s - and she didn't survive.
Yes, because she was 28 and everybody had to die by the time they were 28 (she laughs). They were all 28 -- Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones … Jim (a weirdly wistful tone) … Janis, Edie,. Maybe it's best for some of them. Because, you know, you remember the beauty. It doesn't get to the tragedy of decaying, disintegrating."
And this one sounded great at the time …
"I really have to choose very carefully what I sing. I have to restrict my vocabulary. Some songs, the old ones, they sound more religious … they're more …still, like as if I hadn't already become a nihilist.""
She was so cool.
(BTW, the photographer was Chad Taylor, and I am sure he will testify to her graciousness too.)
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You, I suspect, are confusing kitsch with catharsis.
I can't work out if that's a diss. Certainly a lot of catharsis is kitch. Particularly loving Goethe. My diss >-)
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3410,
The whole interview was full of romantic utterances that might not have borne rigorous scrutiny but sounded marvellous at the time.
Likewise, my original comment.
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Nothing like a well-timed romantic utterance from a hot young blonde. Is it art? I like to think so.
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"I really have to choose very carefully what I sing. I have to restrict my vocabulary. Some songs, the old ones, they sound more religious … they're more …still, like as if I hadn't already become a nihilist.""
Nico's solo albums are some of the finest ever made. Yes, they are bleak and difficult, but also incredibly beautiful and rewarding to listen to.
I really, really recommend The Frozen Borderline, the recent two CD re-issue combining The Marble Index and Desertshore. The liner notes are really good and the bonus tracks as good as the main songs.
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