I think it was Alan Gerding who, on a podcast, quoted somebody else by suggesting the definition of art is (paraphrased) “the thing or things you care about” which is about as catholic a definition as I could expect for such an otherwise-vague concept.
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It’s certainly true. But “cultural artefact” is so broad a term that I’m not sure it tells us anything useful. I mean, if you asked me “what are birds,” it would be a lot more helpful if I said “they’re tetrapods” or “they’re vertebrates” than if I said “they’re eukaryotes.”
There’s a human response that I’ll call “aesthetic pleasure.” And it can be taken in all sorts of things. An attractive person can produce it; so can a tiger, or a snake, or a dragonfly; so can a well designed tool or building; so can an action in an athletic contest; so can a mathematical theorem. But these things are not all humanly created, and those that are humanly created are not primarily created to be objects of contemplation and sources of aesthetic pleasure. A sword is made to inflict injuries on people; that well made swords are beautiful is secondary to whether they’re functional. And a theorem is meant to show that something is true; that a good demonstration is elegant is also secondary.
But art is created specifically to be contemplated and to give aesthetic pleasure; that’s its primary function. And in particular, it addresses not just the abstract sensitivity to good design, but the audience’s emotions.
Games are created to be played, and good game design enables good play. They’re not primarily meant to be contemplated. That’s probably the central reason that I don’t consider them art.
I fail to see how a primary function of play somehow disqualifies it from being art. The very nature of games are to be contemplated (admittedly not in the same way we’re discussing here by default) and even in ancient times, great effort was made to produce these games (chess, go, etc.) as beautifully as possible, to say nothing of the efforts made today. Ludology has come a long, long way and there is plenty to chew on with this subject.
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The pieces are not the game. The Game of Twenty Squares had some really beautiful boards, but you could play it just as well on a plain clay tablet. Or, these days, on a computer screen.
Sure, but tell the king his jade and onyx chess set isn’t art and it’s off with your head. Modern discussions demand modern sensibilities and I suspect there’s a disconnect on account of the focus on games here (and your admitted lack of experience with modern games).
This is the kind of conversation that happens more and more with video games as well, where it’s an easier pill to swallow due to their aural, visual and narrative parallels to other established forms. But there are plenty of examples of board games worthy of this kind of discussion and consideration as well (something we’ll see if this actually gets rolling).
Worth adding is that I personally feel that games have a unique voice in the art space (if so used) and that games which best exploit their “gaminess” to express themselves end up being most successful.
I think there’s a confusion of categories here.
Whether or not the chess set is art is irrelevant to whether the game of chess is art. It’s still the same game if you play it with cheap plastic pieces on a cardboard board, or with little cardboard squares labelled K and Q and N on a sheet of butcher paper with squares drawn on it. Saying otherwise is like saying that a copy of Casino Royale becomes a major literary classic if it’s printed on acid free paper and bound in fine leather with beautiful typography; it’s confusing the content with the packaging.
As to what the king would think, it’s not clear that an ancient king would even know what “art” meant as a concept. But he might appreciate the elegance of his chess set even if he had never played a game of chess; or conversely, he might enjoy chess but not especially notice what his chess set looked like.
Yes. Music in no way makes any kind of statement. It exists entirely in a vacuum. Without context and entirely devoid of anything to say because it doesn’t use words. It is nothing but pitch and duration. Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is therefore saying the exact same thing as Heavy Action by Johnny Pearson.
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That was kind of my point there. We’re dealing with modern conceptions of what art can include, within the framework of modern games and game design. I’ll assume no one else was jumping in here to discuss chess and go.
Only if by “saying the exact same thing” you mean that neither of them is saying anything. The null set is the null set.
Good to know that the entire history of music theory and analysis is meaningless.
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Only if you assume that “does not assert propositions” is equivalent to “is meaningless.” Not being a Cartesian, I don’t believe that to be so.
Really, I don’t understand why you think it’s problematic to say that the Fifth Brandenburg (for example) is not made up of words but of musical notes; or that it does not assert propositions (which are statements made up of words, spoken or signed); or that its theme cannot be expressed as a concept (that is, cannot be stated in words)—I suppose in principle you might describe that exact sequence of notes verbally, “quarter note B flat in the second octave above middle C” and so on, but it would be impossibly cumbrous and even a musicologist probably wouldn’t get anything out of it until they put it into musical notation. All of these seem to be obvious truths about music and don’t seem to denigrate it in any way. And I picked the Fifth Brandenburg because it’s one of my favorite musical works and means a lot to me—but not a meaning that can be stated in words.
“Different in kind” does not mean “inferior in quality.”
I think that wordless sounds often make propositional statements, as they are often substitutes for words. Like how ‘AAAAH’ can mean a whole pile of things - like ‘I’m very scared right now’. Also, just because you cannot explain what something is propositioning (perhaps because it is something extremely vague like the Fifth Brandenburg), doesn’t mean that it isn’t propositioning something.
Words themselves are just lines on a page or vibrations in the air - we impose value on them in order to communicate. Just because music is (usually) a much more complex sound than the sound of a person speaking, or that people may interpret the sound in different ways, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t communicate a statement.
An example that comes to mind is the New World Symphony. It makes this proposition through the sound it makes: ‘This is what the new world is like’, and a whole pile of smaller statements in each movement.
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Well now @Sagantine has gone and said most of what I was going to say 
.
While music, not having words, does not convey a written statement, and would not be considered “logic” per se, it does convey information, and hence meaning. Music is unique in that the statement it conveys is pure emotion, however, this does not devalue its ability to use a logical progression of sorts; for instance, if one progresses from “conflict” to “determination” to “happiness”, then one is making a very different statement than if it went “conflict” to “determination” to “destruction”. Of course, this kind of emotional logic is unique to music.
Every art form works differently; just because games do not function the same as paintings does not mean they are not both art.
Writing, obviously, makes the most directly intellectual statement, because it is exclusively words. Music makes an emotional statement. Painting makes an initial statement, which because it generally lacks progression, can be taken different ways, to different conclusions. And games themselves, (separated from the works of painting, writing, sculpting and crafting which generally accompany them) still make statements in their own way.
For instance, Chess propounds the value of conflict and victory. Pandemic propounds the value of working together to get things good enough, but not perfect. Contrast this with Sudoku, where the expectation is perfection, and you can see they make very different statements about reality even by their very mechanics.
And while most modern games tend to not be “contemplated” in the same high-brow sort of way which paintings are generally regarded, they fit more into pop art, where the statements they make tend to be common and readily acceptable. Most people don’t really “contemplate” the works of Justin Beiber, or Aerosmith, but they are still artists, as are game designers; some, like Reiner Knizia, do expect their works to be contemplated, but because the statements are less readily acceptable, we generally just say “their games are mostly bad” and move on, in the similar way a pop-music fan would say that most classical music is “bad”.
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The symphony does not make that statement. If you just heard the symphony, without knowing the title, there is no way you would figure out that it referred to the New World in any way. And I think I would also say that it doesn’t even say the “is like,” because I think that if you had fifty naive people listen to it, they would say that it made them think of a lot of different things. Maybe not fifty, but there’s no way they were converge on one or two predicates.
If music is analogous to any linguistic entity, it’s analogous to interjections, the part of speech that cannot be either a subject or a predicate and that does not fit into the syntax of propositions, but is purely an expression of feeling, like “Oh!” or “Aaaah” or “Bugger!” But that’s analogizing the great complexity of music to the minimal simplicity of a cry of feeling, which does not do justice to music.
I really don’t understand this urge to treat music as if it were a form of language, instead of treating it as a distinct thing with its own properties and capabilities. Music does what it does extremely well, better than language could do it (there aren’t many linguistic structures of which you could say, “It’s got a good beat, you can dance to it”); but what it does is not to assert propositions and form them into arguments, which is one of the things that language is good at.
Oh, and I don’t think the Fifth Brandenburg is “vague” in any way. There are ways to be precise that don’t involve verbal concepts or propositions.
Yeah, things don’t have to have a universal contextless meaning in order to make a discreet statement. I don’t speak mandarin, and hearing it without translation/context is gibberish to me and millions of others. Give us a sentence of mandarin, and we’ll come up with countless possible meanings. The fact that it means something to someone (who isn’t me) and carries a message that can be understood in the right context means that speaking mandarin is communication, and it is capable of making statements.
I don’t think anyone is saying that music has to be bound to the rules of language, i.e. that it should be strictly classified as a language, only that it does share some characteristics with language. For example, that there is a communication of ideas, including specific statements such as the New World Symphony’s ‘the new world is wild, full of adventure and beauty’. Considering how deep the actual experience of listening to the symphony is, typing ‘the new world (that Dvorak imagined) is wild etc. etc.’ as the symphony’s statement certainly doesn’t do justice to the sweeping power and subtlety of it. But the experience is an unfolding of Dvorak’s desire to express that idea in a sonic format, and a listener will recognize that in the music if they understand the context (which the title supplies, but an understanding of the background behind the composition is better).
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I don’t think that’s a valid comparison. If you wrote the sentence in Mandarin that is the best possible translation of “The New World is wild, full of adventure and beauty,” pretty much anyone who could read Mandarin would understand that that was what you were asserting, even if they had no context. (The problem that prevents me from understanding sentences in Mandarin isn’t “lack of context”; it’s that I don’t know the language.) But if you played the New World symphony to someone who didn’t have the title to go by, and didn’t recognize it from having heard it before, there is no way they would extract that statement from it. That’s not a matter of not knowing the “language,” as it would be with the Mandarin statement; it’s a matter of music not being able to provide proper nouns, or indeed much in the way of nouns of any kind.
And I’m not convinced that music does communicate ideas. I’m not familiar with the New World Symphony, but I know the Fifth Brandenburg, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, or the Helios Overture. I find them powerfully expressive in different ways, but I don’t think what they express can be stated in words—or that a jury of 50 independent naive listeners would converge on a predicate such as “is wild, full of adventure and beauty.”
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I was equating the knowledge of mandarin to the knowledge of the musical context of a piece. Two frameworks of pre-existing knowledge that allow you to interpret and contextualize what is otherwise just vibrations of your ear drum. So, because I know the context of the New World Symphony, I can understand what Dvorak is trying to convey, similar to how a mandarin speaker can understand a mandarin sentence due to their knowledge of the language. Sorry if my writing was unclear!
The New World Symphony isn’t quite in the same genre as the classical music you mentioned. I believe that a good percentage of 50 naive judges would describe some combination of ‘wild, powerful, beautiful, exploration, adventure and probably something about seafaring’ for the last movement, for example. Then when explained to them that ‘this music is about the discovery of a new world’ they would say ‘ah yes that makes sense’.
It’s also been aped by every swashbuckling soundtrack ever, so there’s that too.
This reminds me of some work my wife did as part of her studies of medieval history. If we say “she looked like an English rose” that implies a particular sort of appearance of a person. In the 1300s there were lots of terms like that, all sorts of named plants that had particular associations through the English-literate culture, and if you read something from that period now without having the references you will simply miss a lot of the information that’s being given.
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That doesn’t seem like a very specific meaning. Compare Homer, who says in one sentence
Sing to me, Muse, of the man of many turnings, who strayed very much, after he sacked the holy city of Troy,
Which is not only far quicker, but far more specific.