{"id":73,"date":"2010-09-07T07:31:56","date_gmt":"2010-09-07T13:31:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/?p=73"},"modified":"2010-09-07T07:31:56","modified_gmt":"2010-09-07T13:31:56","slug":"defining-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/?p=73","title":{"rendered":"Defining Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the webcomics I read and very much enjoy is Surviving The World<\/a>.\u00a0 Part of the reason for this, I confess, is that the author, Dante Shepard, seems to share many of my viewpoints.\u00a0 Beyond that, he has an amusing way of expressing himself.\u00a0 His webcomic is a little different in that it’s a “photo” comic.\u00a0 Basically, Dante takes a picture of himself in front of a blackboard which has something amusing written and \/ or drawn on it.\u00a0 Sometimes it is several such pictures, depending on how much he has to say on a particular day.<\/p>\n

In spite of his unusual style, I still qualify what he does as being a webcomic.\u00a0 It’s panel-based and expresses an idea in a brief, (typically) amusing form.\u00a0 However, in going through Dante’s archives, I found somebody who disagrees<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I read the article linked above and was a bit put off.\u00a0 The author, Jules Rivera, essentially states a comic is not a comic if it’s not reasonably well-drawn.\u00a0 This, in my humble opinion, is bullshit.\u00a0 They are trying to define art in a very narrow way, discounting stick figure comics as being too lazy, photo comics as, well, not being drawn, and “poser” (CG-program created) comics as being too unlife-like.\u00a0 The last option they list for “unconventional” comics is to (surprise!) hire an artist such as the article’s author.\u00a0 So not only is Ms. Rivera trying to give a narrow definition to a kind of art, she appears to be doing so to promote her own work.<\/p>\n

Let’s take this from the top.\u00a0 Ms. Rivera first denounces stick figure comics as being lazy.\u00a0 I don’t know if this is a fair accusation or not, but I don’t think it is significant.\u00a0 I don’t know the authors of the webcomics she specifically points out–XKCD<\/a>, Cyanide and Happiness<\/a> and Order of the Stick<\/a>–and I suspect neither does she.\u00a0 The artists could be well-talented folks who chose to use stick figures on purpose.\u00a0 Not out of laziness, but (for example) to prove they could make something interesting without heavy duty artwork.\u00a0 XKCD–one of my favorite comics, by the way–is terrible according to Ms. Rivera because not only does the author have the audacity to use stick figures, but it also does not have a regular cast.\u00a0 So what?\u00a0 Every comic strip has to have a cast now?\u00a0 Where exactly is that rule written?\u00a0 Cyanide and Happiness, not one of my regular comics but one I enjoy from time to time, is “even worse because it’s far stupider than XKCD.”\u00a0 This is a matter of taste, nothing more, but she makes the intelligence level of a comic sound like a requirement for it to qualify<\/em> as a comic.\u00a0 I think soap operas are pretty stupid, but that doesn’t mean they’re not a form of entertainment or a kind of television program.<\/p>\n

After trashing stick figures, Ms. Rivera gets into photo comics like Surviving the World.\u00a0 She will only qualify a photo comic as a web comic if special effects and some sort of non-photographic artistry has been applied.\u00a0 Again, I call bullshit.\u00a0 It doesn’t need special effects to be an art form or a comic; it’s the content and presentation that matters.<\/p>\n

Finally, she trashes Poser comics.\u00a0 This category is where artists use a 3D-modeling program like Poser to create their scenes.\u00a0 The problem is that many of them do not work very hard at texturing their models, so they end up looking very plastic and not very lively.\u00a0 Again, I ask, so what?\u00a0 Ms. Rivera even goes so far as to say that even if everybody painted their models well, “With enough people using this tool, the result would be a crop of comics that all look the same…”\u00a0 I disagree.\u00a0 Think about how many times you’ve seen your favorite actor or actress in a movie.\u00a0 Patrick Stewart has been both Captain Picard in the Star Trek<\/em> universe and Charles Xavier in the X-Men<\/em> one.\u00a0 Both productions are interesting, even though there is no mistaking the actor is the same man in both.\u00a0 Will Smith has been in a wide variety of movies, but that doesn’t make any of them less interesting.\u00a0 So what if the same face and body are in a variety of storylines as different characters?\u00a0 Ms. Rivera finishes her above comment by asking, “…I wouldn’t be a very responsible comic artist if I advised that, now would I?”\u00a0 Yes, you would, Ms. Rivera, as long as you made it clear the use<\/em> of those same models over and over again was different and (preferably) interesting.<\/p>\n

After putting down all of these art forms, Ms. Rivera extols the virtues of hiring an artist.\u00a0 I would like to do this, but I don’t have the money.\u00a0 I have many webcomic scripts which I think would be interesting to see online, but I can’t draw very well.\u00a0 I am looking into ways to get around this, but so far I haven’t found one.\u00a0 I admit, I wouldn’t want to do my story lines as stick figures, but the option is not without merit.<\/p>\n

And that, my dear readers, is the point:\u00a0 Merit.\u00a0 A webcomic–or any given art form–can have merit regardless of the techniques used to create it.\u00a0 Many comical folks have made fun in one way or another of the horribly expensive paintings hanging in museums which have nothing but splotches of paint on them.\u00a0 Are these somehow less artistic because the artist threw paint at the canvass rather than using careful brush strokes?\u00a0 Was the artist being lazy or making a point?\u00a0 (Or perhaps both?)\u00a0 I refuse to declare something artistic or not artistic just based on how much effort may have gone into it.\u00a0 I am more interested in the message it presents.\u00a0 If I get that, and I find it entertaining, nothing else matters.\u00a0 And nothing else should.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the webcomics I read and very much enjoy is Surviving The World.\u00a0 Part of the reason for this, I confess, is that the author, Dante Shepard, seems to share many of my viewpoints.\u00a0 Beyond that, he has an amusing way of expressing himself.\u00a0 His webcomic is a little different in that it’s a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions\/76"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}