Beauty in the Eye

Art is in the imitation of nature (Pere Andre Batteux 1675-1764) uniting the beauties of nature is what an artist does, and a game unites more than any other (Pagano 1748-99).

Although undoubtedly some games could be construed as visually beautiful, what is beauty? Where does it come from?

The beauty of art comes through the senses, all of them, so food becomes an art because of the beauty of taste as well as hairdressing and tailoring through the senses of touch and sight, perfume making through smell. All become arts because they give us pleasurable sensory information but beauty also is undefined. There is no rigid definition of beauty, it’s regarded of as is religion, that it is so obvious it doesn't require discussion, which is obviously just a lazy explanation. Then why isn't hairdressing and architecture and cooking and video games considered an art? Surely video games should be a super art because it gives off so much sensory information more than any other form of art, more than all the arts combined because that’s what games basically are.

  Games are like a Frankenstein’s monster of art, you get visual art like you would a painting, music as of an opera, storyline and acting as of a play, topped off with the film arts of cinematography and editing and one more of its own which is game-play. So where as art usually just stimulates the eyes and the ears and the imagination, games also stimulate that feeling of touch and control.
 So it’s like watching a play or looking at a painting but you can touch and play with the painting, you’re not on the outside looking in, you actually take part. Games only lack the ability to stimulate the senses of smell and taste but who knows what innovations await us. Smell could be the final frontier of video game immersion. Home defined beauty as;… that which is pleasant (Home 1696-1782). When all is said and done; beauty is a matter of taste and what is taste is impossible to determine.

Beauty in its highest form is expression regardless of good, beauty has no morale consciousness as art itself might have. What is pleasant to an individual could be abhorrent to another. Beauty is like the old adage of the tree falling in the woods; does a tree falling in the woods make a sound if there’s no one to hear it?
 It’s the same with beauty, how can it exist if there aren't humans to recognise it? How can it be good and evil if there’s no one to define it as such? That could mean beauty is not something external but something innate in humans, something internal, a filter we place on the world.
 We look at something like a waterfall and whereas animals or a machine might just see water we see something magically beautiful a gift from god or allah or budha or whomever is or isn’t killing us. Beauty is a comparison between our limitations and our idea of being free, in real life we are limited and fragile in games we’re immortal, we can fly, choose our bodies our skills, our potential is limitless in a game, exceeding our limitations is the essence of beauty (Fichte 1762–1814). Beauty is the gap between who we are and who we want to be.

“the aim of art, as with Kant, is beauty, the source of which is pleasure without practical usefulness. So that art may be called play, though not in the sense of a worthless occupation, but in the sense of a manifestation of beauty of life itself, which has no other aim than” 

Tolstoy(1828-1910)

The German philosopher Kant saw beauty as something pleasing that has no practical use, if something is perceived as beautiful it just is, it’s beauty is subjective and thus serves no real purpose, it is pleasing just because it is.
 Play is beautiful because it serves no other purpose than to conjure up the beauties of life. Obviously one major drawback of this idea is a games sole purpose is not just beauty but also money. That doesn't change the fact that games are designed and crafted for the purpose of manifesting beauty and thus creating pleasure from that beauty, but it raises questions around the conflict of art and business which I intend to discuss at a later date (Schiller 1759–1805).

Ars Gratia Artis

Or art for art’s Sake. To answer the question that plagues video games namely whether or not they are an art on a par with plays or paintings you first need to answer the questions ‘What is art?’

You often hear people say, ‘you have to suffer for your art’ but why? Surely suffering for the purposes of entertainment is just suffering for the sake of suffering. It’s not like someone’s life depends on whether an opera is any good, just someone’s evening, so why all that effort? Does anybody like opera, does it make any sense? Who does ballet appeal to? What do they represent? Does anybody real act the way they do in plays or in movies? Do games represent real life or parody it, make a mockery of it? Does any of it matter?

 Actors and dancers are treated like performing chimps, for what? What is the meaning of art and why is it so important? The truth is there is no meaning of art, no definition that isn’t so convoluted and vague that not even the people describing it fully understand it. Is the importance of art dreamed up or is it real? Its possible art is like currency, or love purely important because of the importance placed upon, it has no real value on its own, just as money is just paper without people to spend it.

 The point I’m trying to make is that so much importance is put on what is and isn’t art, that the meaning of art is completely lost and instead it just becomes an impossible standard attainable only by those art forms that defame and kill off all the others.

 “like theologians of various trends exclude and destroy each other… In poetry, the old romantics deny the Parnassians and decadents; the Parnassians deny the romantics and the decadents; the decadents deny all their predecessors and the symbolists; the symbolists deny all their predecessors and les mages, while les mages simply deny all their predecessors; in the novel, naturalists, psychologists and naturists deny each other. And it’s the same in drama, painting and music”

 Tolstoy (1828-1910)

 Art is like a virus, it attacks and consumes all its rivals until it becomes the highest form of art and anything else is just swept away. Art is territorial like an animal and that’s why it refuses to acknowledge video games as an art, just like it refused to acknowledge films before it and Jazz before that and even plays because it fears for its own survival.  Art is just this conceptual mess of nonsense telling everyone else that they’re not the same as it, when art itself has no idea what ‘it’ is.

Art is the emperor’s new clothes, it’s nothing, it stands on the shoulders of the other mediums it mocks. This by no means answers the question ‘what is art?’ it just sort of tip toes around how the art community thinks, If anything it raises more questions. It’s often the case when you try to solve a riddle as old as this you find more questions than answers because the meaning of art is as elusive if not more so than the meaning of life.

 The true aim of art or what should be the aim of art is self preservation through commonality (Burke 1729-97). Much as with games, there are stories the world over of people making friends and getting married through games because what links them is commonality which is more powerful than the usual bindings that tie people together like money and convenience. Art is an educator, it teaches us about culture and people and more importantly how to be, it socializes us.


 “The aim of the whole life of mankind is the welfare of social life”
 -Sulzer (1720-79)

 It’s argued that the main aim of art is in fact beauty but it’s not as much beauty as it is ‘good’. Art’s ideals run in parallel with mankind’s in that they aim to improve life but beauty is not restrained by good nor evil, beauty is just beauty. Beauty could be a baby penguin feeding it’s chick as much as it could be a mallard duck gang raping a female mallard if you’re in to that sort of thing. So beauty is not a good way of defining art as it lacks intention and it can be found everywhere, in other words; beauty has no agency it’s ethereal, it’s subjective, art needs to have purpose behind it, it needs to make a point and convey some meaning or emotion from the artist.

 It’s important as a subject because being an artist and creating art is the closest to being god and even though I don’t necessarily believe in god I use that term because it adequately encompasses what I need to say. An artist is a creator; he/she is trying to encapsulate what was made by nature and what is captured by their senses, uniting not only the beauty of the natural world but the beauty of their perception of said world in something that they have created that they can share with the world. In other words their trying to make sense of the mysteries of life by duplicating them, they create to discover the meaning of creation.