Monday, December 6, 2010

Followup on Last Week's Art Talk

Several blogs took my post to task.

Here are the links to a couple of those blog, with my responses to them in their comments.

Go Make Me a Sandwich.

Discordia.

And as always, Your Dungeon Is Suck. How funny is it that people keep telling me that they think I'm behind that blog as a vehicle for self promotion?

Rollspel.nu also has quite a thread on it.

You know what really surprised me? I thought by talking about the Grindhouse edition coming out with all the new artists I was putting the nail in the coffin of the Deluxe edition - I'd purposefully been delaying talk of the new stuff until after Dragonmeet to give current vendors time to sell through the current version. Well... LotFP Weird Fantasy Role-Playing is once again in Noble Knight's Top 5 (or was when I checked yesterday), and one of the Finnish vendors carrying the game sold more in the past week than they have the entire time it's been out.

There's a lesson there that for dignity's sake I need to ignore...

Happy Independence Day everyone!

2 comments:

  1. I think that when we reach the point that we as 'artists' or 'creators' are thinking more about endearing ourselves to the viewer and trying to reflect back some vision of 'society is really fair' than anything else that we betray the point of creativity.
    I'm never sure where "ART" (as in the stuff that hangs in museums and aspires to translate the meaning of life into pictures or whatever) and "art" (as in where a cigar-chewing Raggi grabs the phone and says, "I need a picture of a dame getting grabbed by a giant ape... and I need it YESTERDAY, see?" and then some hack like me in his cold garret grabs a pen and starts scribbling away, hoping to have soup tonight)--- I'm never sure where "ART" and 'art' diverge --- and, honestly, it's not a question that interests me.
    But as an aspiring artist (as in, I aspire to keep doing my stuff), I don't know why the artist is sometimes burdened with having to try to be 'fair' inside his/her pictures and reflect some ideal when life is not that way. And that goes double for make believe stuff.
    Counting nude females in any work of art and seeking to balance them with the same number of nude males (or vice-versa) just because you wish to make the viewer think you are being equally exploitative of both sexes or whatever is, in the end, a ridiculous goal simply because it places yet another artificial restraint on the artist or creator and is a form of making the creator lie in order to make us like him/her more. It becomes another form of pandering.
    These comments should be viewed within the context of what goes on within my skull in regards to small-print run OSR rpg products. I think we have a chance to set ourselves apart, for good or ill, as creators if we are just more blunt about what we are making and why. Like underground comics, it's a subset of a subset... unlike DC Comics in the silver age where lots of people people stayed up at night worrying if there was a gay subtext in "Batman and Robin" and if reading comic books would turn their kids queer (I'm not kidding about that; it happened). I'd be happier if the artist/writer came out and made them gay, or not, or just kept people wondering. But sometimes I think trying to give everyone a mirror (where they see their own world view, or at least a world view that tries not to offend them reflected back at them) rather than a "picture" underestimates people's ability to think about what they are looking at.

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  2. (as in where a cigar-chewing Raggi grabs the phone and says, "I need a picture of a dame getting grabbed by a giant ape... and I need it YESTERDAY, see?" and then some hack like me in his cold garret grabs a pen and starts scribbling away, hoping to have soup tonight)

    +1000xp for this, as the most awesome parenthetical statement of the month. This is hilarious!

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