(this article was transplated from an anime-centric blog I had)
…and by opinionated I mean all anime fans and college art students. That means you! Maybe twice!
But first off I whacked together a short DJ mix, this time with R&B/pop mixed in. Pop is harder to mix than techno, simply because straightforward dance tracks are made to be mixed while pop is meant to stand alone. If you ever wondered why techno tracks tend to have long, boring lead-ins and dry, predictable progressions, that’s because they’re engineered to be mixed and manipulated by a DJ. Pop is tough though… I was lucky enough that Golden Diva happened to work so magically with Let it Go at the 6 minute mark.
I’m far from being (or wanting to be) a pro DJ… I just put a mix together every once in a while. It’s a fun way to explore your music collection. The set list is in the MP3 metadata comments field. Before you ask IS DJ-ING A LEGITIMATE ARTFORM?, let’s get this bloggish article going. I spare no parenthesis:
Anime, being an offbeat, alternative form of entertainment (from the perspective of the international fandom), tends to create highly opinionated, sometimes ghettoized fandoms. These fans have strict criteria for what they see as legitimate use of the art (popular pick: oldschool mecha anime) and what they see as empty commercial wankery (popular pick: moé aesthetics). The same tends to be true for any offbeat category of taste– music is a great example, where fans aggressively box themselves into genres and cling to obscure bands while shunning everything else as pedestrian, and any musician from the mainstream as a sell-out. This elitism goes as deep as piracy vs. purchasing, CDs vs. vinyl records vs. MP3s**, and even recorded vs. live. Also when new technologies (say, computers) enable new degrees of expression in an art form, traditional artists will often take an elitist stance and say the evolution is either illegitimate or cheapens the art form. When deeply embedded fandoms get involved in an all-out over-intellectualized flame wars, the issue often boils down to one question: What is art, exactly? What makes something “more art” than something else? People like to say that defining art is impossible, but that’s not true at all. There is a definition to art, but it doesn’t bring the black & white clarity that elitists need to justify their elitism.
Art Defined: Art is the application of taste with the objective of striking emotion. Art is taste applied. That’s the best I can essentialize it anyway. Emotion must also be defined in a very broad way. Any time you’re doing something and considering how your work strikes the emotions of you or anyone else, you are creating art. The more you are shaping emotion in your product (whether deliberately or unconsciously), the more artistic the work is. Why is this an unsatisfying answer to some? Because they’re looking to place a dividing line on a gradient. There’s no true cut-off point for “is art” / “isn’t art”. If it’s man-made, it likely has aspects of art. Where you place the dividing line is a meaningless, arbitrary gesture. With that in mind, these normally challenging, divisive questions suddenly become answerable:
Is a soup can art? Yes, since someone thought about whether or not it looks good when designing it. If it’s not aesthetically pleasing (does it make people think of tasty soup?) then it won’t sell.
Is a soup can less artistic than a song? Usually but not necessarily. You’d have to pair a highly technical piece of academic computer-generated music with a particularly awesome soup can to demonstrate the reverse.
Is advertisement art? Often yes… in this age of increasingly abstract advertising and branding, advertisements reach more for the heart than the rational mind. This shouldn’t stop you from hating on them though. A similar argument can be made for things like political speeches and emotionally-charged political editorials.
Is photography art? Yes. It may be, on average, less “art” than painting, but there’s still a man behind the camera using his taste to determine the best angle, framing, focus, lighting, shutter speed and so on… and usually he culls his output to a few of his best photos. There is a good amount of taste involved in that process, even if you’re doing something like journalism– e.g., how do I best frame this picture to immerse readers in the scene that is unfolding in front of me? That type of consideration, how to most powerfully and vividly convey an event, is art too.
Is Andy Warhol’s painting of a soup can art? Yep.
Does art need to have a literal meaning or message? Nope. It just needs to strike emotion, which can mean conveying an experience, even an abstract one. For films, having a strong storyline doesn’t necessarily mean it is “more artistic” or higher quality than films with a weak story. Story is only one path to strike the emotions of audiences, so to limit your assessment of art to “story” and “meaning” is a one-dimensional outlook.
Is recycling old art to make new art… art? Like what hiphop does all the time– sample old records and throw a beat, some raps, and a bassline over it? Of course that’s art because there’s taste and aesthetic consideration involved in doing that. The hiphop artist expresses his world by sampling and recontextualizing old art.
Is making a mix tape art? Yeah… not as much as making your own music of course, but making the playlist is all about emotional consideration. DJ-ing is, to a lesser or greater degree, a more advanced and creative version of that. On the higher end of creativity and virtuosity, you have things like scratching and mashups.
Now it’s time for the hard questions: Is talking art? People often talk to convey their emotions and experiences. As weird as it sounds, it is. Like a doorknob though, it usually isn’t the primary purpose of everyday communication to strike emotion and convey experience (instead it’s more often used to coordinate mundane activities and describe intellectual ideas), so talking is not practically thought of as art. Chatting however can very quickly get into informal storytelling, and that is more easily considered artistic. Even if you’re just trying to be funny, you are shaping your words to incite an emotion.
Is punching someone in the face art? I wanted to inspire anger after all. I guess I have to say yes technically, especially if your primary goal was to inspire emotion rather than get something out of it or defend yourself. Ultimately everything you do has at least some very minute amount of “art” in it, because you express your taste and personality through it.
Is erotica art? Is porn art? If arousal is an emotion then yes, there are all kinds of aesthetic decisions to be made in the name of heightening arousal. Vanilla video porn is pretty low brow in the sense that it only serves to strike one very specific emotion in an unsophisticated, unchallenging way, as if you had a 1hr video tape of Hollywood explosions all strung together… that doesn’t stop it from being, in essence, art though. If you’re unconvinced, the lines blur when you have otherwise sophisticated films and novels with erotic scenes, along with explicit illustrations and comic art that exhibit strong, creative aesthetics — which suggests there weren’t any lines between “art” and “erotica” to begin with. It’s all aesthetic to shape emotion, no matter what that emotion may be.
If a computer spits out a bunch of random numbers, is that art? If the numbers are truly random, then probably not, unless the programmer was trying to inspire something with his decision to write such a program. Again, it all comes down to control and emotional consideration.
Is a tree art? No. A tree is a very complicated, self-organizing system designed by an evolutionary process… but if you believe in some kind of emotionally intelligent creator, then necessarily the world would be “his” art (as an expression of “his” taste).
Is a whale song art? That boils down to whether you limit art to human intelligence or emotional intelligence. Whale songs likely try to convey an emotion or experience to fellow whales, just as humans do with speech sometimes. I like to consider whale songs and such as “art” on a technical level. Intelligence, after all, exists as a gradient too. There’s no “is”/”is not” intelligent, there are just shades of intelligence spanning more than one dimension. As the technological singularity quickly approaches, you’re going to see the advent of strong AIs gaining emotional intelligence and being able to create art themselves. The lines will become increasingly blurry (or rather it’ll become more apparent that there were no “lines” to begin with).
Is an anthill art? Not really, because an anthill is about as intelligently designed as a tree. Ants are pretty dumb. Even though the colony may seem intelligent, colonies are actually just self-organizing systems (in other words, no ant, including the queen, is making intelligent decisions).
Why is painting considered more artistic than photography? It has to do with degrees of expression. There’s more control, more things to consider, more ways to shape expression in a painting. Of course this is all very arguable, since none of that opinion is measurable in any substantial way.
The reason why is: art is subjective. Why is art subjective? The development of the brain is shaped by life experiences, thus people are wired to see the world and process information in fundamentally different ways. An aesthetic that may strike the emotions of one person may not have an effect on the other. When watching a movie, some people (like my blatantly INTP self) derive more emotion from “atmosphere” and the accumulation of technical details and background elements, while others like an ESFP friend of mine, derive more from the direct story and the plight of the characters (if we both like something, that means it’s off the hook guaranteed). This is the basis for subjectivity. It seems obvious, but people often forget about it when they try to assess a film solely on elements like “story” or “character development”. Singular aspects like those aren’t sure-fire routes to eliciting emotion. The best critics understand that and, rather than try to convey their subjective opinion, try to describe the aesthetics and the experience of the art in question. What is its emotional goal, and how does it meet that goal? Who will its best qualities appeal to? Who will be turned off by its shortcomings? If you see a critic spewing too much hyperbole and praise, or fixating too much on a few negative aspects, that’s the sign of a poor critic (or an industry cheerleader).
So let’s get back to the old elitist arguments. First of all, what does it mean to sell out? It usually means to compromise an artistic vision in order to appeal to a broader audience. Does that make it less art? Not really, since there’s a lot of emotional consideration in going that route, so it’s simply a different route that requires different artistic decisions in how to shape the work. However, a lot of consistently bad decision-making in mainstream art, whether we’re talking about the homogeny of mainstream music or studio edits of otherwise great films, comes from underestimating the intelligence and sophistication of the audience. It’s not so much trying to get sales with your work that’s bad (a lot of artists work best when thinking about their audience), it’s assuming a dumb audience, because you necessarily make dumb art, with not much more sophistication than a 1hr videotape of Hollywood explosions. Going mainstream, or even reaching for the mainstream, is not necessarily a bad decision that cheapens the work. Sometimes artists want to break out of their shells and create things that can get large audiences excited, you know… where ever it is they find inspiration to produce good work.
Does the advent of technology X cheapen the art of Y? No, it expands it beyond its old definitions. This usually sends traditionalists in a scramble as they fail to understand the new dimensions of their art form. For example, music in the western world used to be all about sophisticated notation and virtuosity in performance. As recording technology advanced over the past century, mainstream music increasingly edged towards sound aesthetics (e.g. distortion, beats, etc.) because that became the new thing, and it carried greater appeal to audiences less familiar with sophisticated music theory. Of course the old-timers who understood music only in terms of notation and performance questioned whether things like synthesizers and sophisticated recording technology was an assault on the integrity of music. Instead it was an assault on their definitions (their dividing lines) on what constituted “proper” music. As dimensions expand, dividing lines lose their relevance. The advent of all this recording technology robbed the genre of orchestral music of its previously chart-topping status (as the only game in town), but I doubt it reduced the number of people interested in traditional music theory, notation and classical performance. It’s not like all those kids listening to Soulja Boy would’ve cared about orchestral otherwise, so no, the art form is not really cheapened by all that. The base of participants continues to grow as technology makes the art more accessible, and the dimensions of expression continue to expand. The world of music is much more diverse, interesting and accessible than it was in the past. The traditional values still survive, and they often mix, blend and collide with the new too. I’ve written more on this topic in The State of Art.
Everything that isn’t My Favorite Genre (X) is crap! No, you idiot. You in particular respond best to the aesthetics of Genre X, but Genre X is not the standard of which you can judge Genre Y, Z and so on. And what will you do when your favorite genre grows stagnant (if it hasn’t already)? You can’t cling to it forever… or well, you can, but then I pity your world.
What does it mean to be pretentious? This is a tough question, since hardly anything is pretentious if you think about it. Even The Matrix 3, with all its absurd comic book convolution in its thinly veiled attempt to appear sophisticated and profound, is arguably not pretentious. It may “pretend” to be sophisticated, but it does so in order to convey a sense of profoundness, which is a genuine emotional goal. It deliberately uses the “aesthetics” of sci-fi and philosophy to elicit emotion. Some people enjoyed it, fully aware of the illusion. If you don’t believe in the illusion of art, then all art is pretentious, as it tries to illustrate an experience that doesn’t actually exist. At best, you can criticize The Matrix 3 for failing to meet its emotional objective, or just being plain stupid and not very well thought out. As a more blatant example, let’s say someone has a blank canvas in a museum with an info card next to it explaining the profound meaning behind the piece (lame!). However if the artist was truly inspired to create such a piece, it can’t be called pretentious (it can still be called daft though). The only thing that can be called pretentious is when an artist goes against his sense of taste– he deliberately creates something terrible and uninspiring to him and his perception of an audience, something totally against his better judgment, and ships a consciously low-quality, no-impact work to audiences for whatever reason (outside of deliberately aiming for a negative reaction, which is indeed an emotional goal). That’s the kind of self-centered attitude that I find pretentious. It’s always sad to see a production that conveys the apathy of a headless production crew. If nobody cared about making a good product during production, why would distributors try to present it to audiences as if it were something worth seeing? If the artist (and the museum curator) placed a blank canvas that inspires neither of them, simply because it was the “in” thing for art exhibits to have, then that too is pretentious. It pretends to be art worth seeing.
The main lesson here is everything in art & entertainment exits in a multi-dimensional gradient. You can’t fence off an area and say everything on this side is A, and everything on that side is B. To make matters more confusing, art cannot be measured in a precise fashion, making artificial borders inapplicable to begin with. Its peripheral effects, like sales and viewership, can be measured… but that doesn’t carry a direct correlation to the quality or effectiveness of the art, because the fundamental objective of art is not to make money but to strike emotion. The best you can do is take highly generalized averages Rotten Tomatoes-style, but even those fail to adequately describe the work.
** BONUS ARTICLE: Which audio format is the best?
CDs, technically… or even SACD/DVD-A, but the “whole truth” is more complicated than that. CDs are measurably better than vinyl records in practically every aspect– CDs have a lower noise floor, less distortion, quicker response and aren’t prone to warping and degradation. Vinyl fans will often cite how records can theoretically reproduce frequencies above human hearing, but the sad facts are 1. Humans can”t hear it so no musician or recording engineer will utilize that aesthetically, 2. What’s the point with all that distortion, 3. You likely don’t own the necessary hardware to reproduce that freq. range, and 4. That theoretical level of quality is lost after the first playback due to degradation. After 10 plays, a vinyl record will be reduced to half the frequency response of a CD and beyond. Vinyl zealots will also talk about how CDs are digital so they lack the magical analog (mechanical even) phatness of a vinyl record. Here’s the deal: Vinyl records, due to their uneven freq. response and distortion, force their own character upon everything that is printed to vinyl. CDs don’t have a character at all. This means you can capture all the richness (lo-fi distortion) of a vinyl on a CD if you wanted to, but not the clean CD sound on a vinyl. Musicians and mastering engineers actually do something similar to this with distortion tools like harmonic exciters when producing a CD, so the idea of “lo-fi phatness” is already on the mind of anyone who wants to produce a good-sounding album. (Tube amplifiers accomplish this distortion on the playback end of things, if you’re wondering why some people have those) So does this all mean a CD will always sound better than a vinyl record? NO. You may have heard of the so-called loudness war which describes an industry-wide problem plaguing the field of mastering. In the absence of a loudness standard, pop CDs aiming for an aggressively “mainstream” sound will sacrifice aspects of its sound quality in order to obtain a louder sound. Vinyl records behave to “loudness” differently, which makes such foolish practices moot when mastering to a vinyl record. What this means is sometimes, a vinyl record will actually have a less compromised master of the material than the CD version. This is only beneficial when the CD master is tremendously compromised though, so it’s not _that_ common. All that being said, I have a few vinyl records. It’s a cool novelty format with its own character… I mean all is fair game in the name of touching emotion. I’m always blown away that a needle vibrating in the grooves of a plastic disc can produce decent levels of sound quality. If we lived in a vinyl record-less alternate dimension and someone described to me their concept for a turntable, I would’ve said you’re f—ing out of your mind, there’s no way that’ll sound good.
SA-CD and DVD-A are the failed successors to the CD format. They add a few new features and measurably improved levels of sound quality, but the problem is CDs already reproduce the full spectrum of human hearing. Nobody in a double-blind test on a high-quality reference system can tell the difference between CD and SA-CD or DVD-A. If you can’t hear it, then nobody on the recording side of things aesthetically considers it anyway.
MP3s and other audio compression algorithms all work by using the same fundamental technique: removing and simplifying sounds you can’t hear. MP3s gained an early stigma by implementations with poor or even flawed performance, turning the audio into a wishy-washy mess. However, the technology has come a long way in the past decade. Improvements to the algorithm and extensive tuning (via public double-blind testing) allows modern formats like L.A.M.E. MP3 and Ogg Vorbis to reach “transparent” levels of quality at bitrates that were once considered dangerous. Does audio compression damage quality? If you’re using a mature encoder at a decent bitrate (say 192 kbps VBR), then the answer is no. In fact, the better your audio system, the more transparent the audio compression will be (Crappy headphones with uneven freq. response tend to make it easier to hear certain compression artifacts). The stigma however still remains, hence the offerings of a tremendously wasteful 320 kbps CBR at certain stores. At least use VBR, FFS.
Here is IMO the order of things to do if you want to improve the sound quality of your system, things having the most audible effect first: Buy better speakers (try craigslist but watch out for speaker scams! Avoid things made before the early 90s), buy a subwoofer, place your speakers properly or differently in the room, put your system in a better room, treat your room with acoustic absorber panels ($ or DIY), buy a better amp & cables if they have audible issues, and select a better format if there are audible issues as well. By far, your speakers and the space you put them in make the biggest difference in shaping sound. However this is kind of an infinite area because, like art, it’s all about your taste and emotion. Isn’t it fun when the things that matter are subjective?