Art
After working on the article for checks notes 0 hours i have decided to make intermediary articles in the meantime.
What is art?
Usually, this means everything. I do not like this definition. Art, in a sense, can be with the medium you are looking at this and the medium I was writing this. I feel, however, what separates art from just regular pieces of work are the two aspects of scrutiny and intent.
Intent is the easier to define. It is just saying that art, in itself, has to mean something, has to try and convey something to the purveyor of the art. However, it is also one of the hardest thing to understand and learn when starting an art form. Most people care more about how the piece of art looks that what it actually does in the heart and mind of a person. Anyone can write poetry; it is simply writing a rhythm in a short amount of words per line; sometimes it does not even have to rhyme. What makes some poetry genuine is the intent of it, not just writing rosy prose, but inciting emotion in the reader.
This is why, in my opinion, profit-oriented and art made by Artificial Intelligence is so easy to tell. Art made for profit has the meaning of wanting to sell something to someone, and has to change tact to do this. It cannot rely on the gravity of the words; it wants to have as broad a market as possible. Art for profit cares less if the Art is worthy enough and focuses on it being palatable enough. AI art suffers from the same problem. A generator wants to have a specific motive, it must be able to discern what sectors of training data to use and what that data can be used to help it create something unique. It cannot inherently know what training data is good for a specific motive, or what training data is bad on purpose to fulfil that motive. Shock art would not be used by AI and is somewhat unsettling for humans, but it carries more artistry than most other things.
The second part of this is scrutiny. But cannot all art be scrutinised? Scrutiny and objectifying art, I think, should be two different things. Scrutiny relies on the art being able to be thought and talked about in good faith, having nuance in the discussion, and it is that good faith that separates genuine scrutiny from something like hate-watching, which is not in the spirit of artistry at all. Scrutiny itself does not have to be a grand gesture. It only requires one person to see and express an opinion, even if not heard, for it to be scrutiny. This can be a random person on the street, or on the internet, or a friend talking about art you made, or a comment on a post. The only thing the element of scrutiny demands is that the work itself is open to that engagement, that it does not wall itself off from being thought about. A bad artist who despises all feedback can still make a work that invites genuine scrutiny. The work and the artist are not the same thing. This can be subdivided into whether it can be scrutinised by looking on the platform it is hosted and the substance of the art piece. It is hard to scrutinise a stereotypical drawing because all scrutiny will always centre on the bigotry. Art cannot be scrutinised if it on a platform that only allows a specific type of comment; it attempts to be art, but with the safeguards upon it, it fails to be art.
Scrutiny is one the most opaque and controversial parts of art. While art can be praised, it can also face criticism, even unfounded criticism. There is a phenomena that attempts to deface the value of art, such as hate-watching which are not in the spirit of artistry at all. Art, in terms of this, becomes a two-way street. I do not think any type of art is inherently 'good' or 'bad', but high value art is able to focus the public's scrutiny on the private intent. Things Fall Apart, perennial prose taught at every African school, was able to have the intent of African tradition and its cold reality in that world be the subject of its scrutiny. Games such as Overwatch 2 are universally hated cause they did not meet the expectation of its audience; the intent of the developers was not the scrutiny it received.
We have talked about Art in the abstract here, when the content is also very important. Something may have the most important meaning and the can be critiqued, but if it was written by a person who has never read a book in their life, it may cease to be critiqued faithfully and lose its intent, reducing its artistic value. The content of art is something that has to be trained to be good at. I think I, still, am bad at writing. When I look at my old pieces of work, I cringe a lot. That shows that that I am getting better, and conversely have something to improve on. With that writing, one can feel more emotions, have that capacity to see issues better.
Art is a universal thing. Art is not supposed to be treated with a definition. Rules are meant to be broken. Cows grow on trees, and other commonly known quotes. This is not supposed to be used as reference to be used to check against other art. It is just a crystallisation of various thoughts I had, put to page to give an opinion. I love art, neocities is one of the highest levels of art in the world. Let this not be a justification to not make art, for art only truly survives if people make more of it.