Art and us

Back in the early months of doing this blog, I wrote a piece about art. Having reread it, cringed at the multiple grammatical errors, its startling brevity and ill-formed ideas, I decided it was time for an update. This is not, however, a rant about Modern Art, although I’m still not exactly comfortable with much of the art produced by Post-modernism. In fact this is not even about art in the narrow sense of visual art. This is about all art, about how we interact with it and about how in effects us.

The definition of art has been much disputed. It is a debate about which there will never be a consensus, because art is different for everyone. To the artist, art is all about expressing oneself, to the consumers of art, art is all about how the work effects us. As a consumer I believe that art relies on an emotional connection being forged between the art and me. I want art to induce an emotional response in me. Art is successful if it makes me happy, of makes me sad, or makes my pity the subject, of makes me hate the antagonist. As a creator, I want to show someone, something about the world. I want to make a statement about the way we live, the way we interact with each other and the world around us, about life, death, war, love. Art is an expression of life. Creating art involves giving away a little bit of yourself. We pour heart and soul into the things we create; we reveal a little bit more about who we are by the art we create.

That is not to say, however, that art is simply an expression of an opinion. Art is not an answer to a question. Art should not tell, or even show, its consumers what the artist believes, or what the artist wants the consumer to believe, in a way that presents it as irrefutable fact,. That is the role of propaganda. And while propaganda can be art, art is not propaganda. Art provides questions. It is, quite literally, food for thought. A consumer should take from a piece of art, not answers, but questions. It should provide him with a new way of looking at the world, a different perspective, a dilemma. The best pieces of art present a conflict, a spectrum of ideas, none of which are wrong or right, but all of which are engaging and fascinating.

Because art is riddled with conflict, and because good art wraps those conflicts up in itself, art requires analysis and critique. Not only is critique unendingly helpful for a budding writer, it is also an integral part of how art should be consumed. Of course we do not have to go digging; good art should be accessible and interesting on the surface, as well as having a lot more depth. We can choose to interact with art passively, allowing our unconscious brains make the connections which create emotional responses, or we can actively study the art and try to look deeper at the themes and motifs, appreciate what the artist is trying to say and, to go a little deeper, how he is saying it. This is the fascinating thing about art. The thing that means we keep coming back to it. Why works of art continue to be incredibly popular, long after their time.

When we analyse and critique art, we study what the art is saying to us, how we interpret what is being said and how that interacts with is. We interact with it. Not the artist, but the art, itself. We bring a little of ourselves to the table when we study a work of art, usually a little more that we anticipated. There’s no right or wrong in literary criticism, because art interacts with each person differently, and each person interacts with art differently, so one work of art is different depending on who is studying it.

For an artist, this is scary stuff. When we create, we specifically intend a certain reaction from what we create. We want people to think certain things upon consuming that work of art. So when people begin to find things in our work that we didn’t even realise we’d put in there, that we’d never intended to be in there, we realise that art is not inextricably linked to the artist. Once we have created a piece of work and released it into the world, we cannot dictate what it means to people anymore. Art evolves and changed, it is out of the control of the artist.

This is why works of art outlive their artist, by thousands of years, in some case. Each new generation looks at art through new eyes, with different prejudices, different ideas and different assumptions. The artist and what he intended no longer matter, especially when the artist is long dead. His work survives him, and it is by his work that is he is remembered. The art keeps changing, keeps evolving. It is renewed and given new meanings with every different person who studied it. And yet the art remains the same. The words, the shapes, the colour, the sounds, don’t change. The things that make up the art remain constant, but what they mean changes.

This is even more poignant when we consider art that is performed. Concertos, plays and song exist on paper, but to truly appreciate them, they have to be performed. This requires the input of directors, conductors, actors, musicians and audience. Each of these bring something new to the table, they bring their own interpretation of the piece into their own delivery. They change it to reflect themselves. Art evolves and changes with the context in which it is put.

Art is incredibly useful for historians. By studying the art of a different culture, we can gain an insight into what that culture valued and believed. Greek Tragedy tells us what Greeks expected from their art. Roman attempts to copy from Greek art, tells us the awe in which they held Greece, the changes they make show us what they did not appreciate of Greek culture. We can also look at what subsequent cultures made of art from their past. We can look at what survives and what doesn’t. More plays of Euripides survive than of Sophocles and Aeschylus combined, yet Euripides was far less successful that either in his own day. That tells us far more about the people who went about preserving these works than about the original recipients. We can learn what subsequent cultures thought of art by studying what they preserved and what they did not. We can also learn a lot about our own culture by looking not just at what’s popular, but what isn’t.

We do not just affect art. Our interpretations and analysis of art does not leave us unblemished. Art affects us. Art makes us think, it makes us feel. It changes us. Art makes us think about something new, something different. Art makes us consider the world in new light; it makes us consider ourselves in a new light. The scary thing about art is that, whenever we expose ourselves to it, we allow it in, we drop our guard and we let it change us. We let it alter our perception of the world, and we let it cast a light into ourselves.

But that’s not always a bad thing. Art inspires. Art moves us to produce it, ourselves. Art makes us think about the world in a way we never have done before. It forces us to explore different paths, both into the world and into us. Art gets our creative energies sizzling with new possibilities and new angles into a part of life, a part of us, that we’ve not explored before. Art inspires us to create more art, to pour a little more of ourselves out onto the canvas.

Every single person sees art differently. Art is individual. Each person brings something different to the table, and takes away something different. Whether as a creator or a consumer or both, we all gain something and give something away through art. Our experience grows, art grows. We change and art changes with us, or does art change, and we change with it? Probably a little bit of both, because art is a barometer and a counterpoint to culture. What is popular is what we interact with most, so that is what changes us the most. Art is democratic. But then what is popular changes because someone creates something new that people prefer to what is old, and there’s always a few who refuse to be drawn by what is popular. Art is individual.

The definition of art depends on who you are and how you perceive it, so trying for a definition is pointless. Art is as diverse and as varied as people. Despite this there are some things that remain constant; we are all affected by art and well all affect art. We are all drawn by art, and we are all drawn to create art. Art is an integral part of everyone’s lives. We cannot ignore it and we cannot stop it. We can only enjoy it and hope that it doesn’t change us in ways we don’t want it to.

It's in the Game

This week EA Games released the new Medal of Honour game. Normally I’d ignore such news because I’m not a huge fan of shooters, especially online ones. However this particular release has caused a media storm because it allowed the player to play as the Taliban against allied forces online. I said ‘allowed’ because EA have since backed down and renamed the Taliban ‘The Opposition’. This was a terrible decision and indicative of a wider problem with Video Games as a medium

The problem has to do with Video Games in the popular imagination. People see them purely as entertainment and not as art. People do not see that video games can make an interesting or profound point about the state of the world. Nor that they can tell a moving and engaging story. People who don’t understand video games think that they’re only there to entertain people. Games like Medal of Honour and Halo suffer from this especially because they are primarily online games in which no real story is told once the painfully short single player campaign is done with.

It does not need to be said that this assumption is entirely untrue. While there are some who would still dispute this, to most commentators in the industry, Video Games are most certainly an artistic medium. That’s not to say that every Video Games is a work of art and certainly not to say that the industry has produced as many great works as the film industry, even when you take into account their relative life spans, but the fact that Video Games can be used as a medium to tell as story and invoke an emotional reaction in the player means that they most certainly qualify as an artistic medium.

This popular misconception means that, whenever a video game has some content which is controversial, the media does not see it as an attempt to make an artistic point and make people think about the issues being raised, but simply an attempt to increase sales in some clever popularity stunt. This problem is compounded when the game itself is seen as rather juvenile; the image associated with a shooter like MoH is of an adolescent sitting in a darkened room getting over excited over shooting someone through the head. It’s not a great image and certainly one which acts as a barrier to viewing something as an attempt to make a mature comment on current affairs.

While this viewpoint is not without merit, it oversimplifies things. Calling the opposition ‘the Taliban’ probably was, in part, done because it would doubtless attract attention and increase media coverage and hence sales. No doubt many of the players would fail to comprehend the significance of playing as the Taliban beyond it being pretty cool. However for the majority of the audience, no matter how juvenile, the experience of playing the Taliban against the allied soldiers would be slightly more meaningful. Rather than the Taliban just being the bad guys who we all shoot against, the perspective changes and the allies becomes the bad guys who are shooting you. The realisation is that war is a pretty scary experience for them as well as for the allies. When you’re playing as ‘the Opposition’ it doesn’t quite have the same effect because it’s not rooted in reality and so the change is not quite so shocking.

Admittedly calling the opponent ‘the Taliban’ and allowing them to be played on multiplayer is pretty weak as artistic statements go, but if Video Games are ever going to be appreciated as an artistic medium, they are statements that have to be made and staunchly defended. If someone were to make a film told from the perspective of the Taliban fighting the allies it would probably be hailed as a racy and controversial work of genius. Sure there would be some who would oppose the issue, but most of the media would come to accept it in time. Indeed films like The Hurt Locker and Jarhead explicitly criticise Allied forces, but no-one bats an eyelid because films are accepted as a mature artistic medium. There’s no reason why a game should not be able to deal with mature and complicated moral issues with reference to current affairs without being criticised.

The fault here largely lies with EA, who rather weakly backed down in the face of media pressure. Developers have to stand up for video games as an art form or else the popular perception of them will not change. Indeed the industry has already shown how it is capable of weathering media storms; remember the controversy over the sex scene is Mass Effect 1 a few years ago? Now think how many RPGs have sexual relationships as part of them? Pretty much every RPG deals with sex and relationships in some way now. Perhaps if EA had decided to be a little braver many more shooters would be presenting modern conflicts with enemies taken from real life, rather than simply being set in ‘Oppositionstan’. Maybe even single player campaigns will start allowing you to play as the Taliban as well. I mean we’re used to playing as Nazis against the Allies, who’s to say we shouldn’t start playing as the Taliban as well?

The problem that Video Games have is that it’s not just the protagonist who is the Terrorist, it’s the player. Video Games are interactive media, so the audience is not just viewing passively, but actively taking part in the action on screen. This is a fantastic tool for emersion, but sadly makes any attempt to tell a story from a controversial point of view far too racy for the media to accept. This is a great shame because in terms of making an artistic point it’s fantastic. Any story attempts to put the audience in the protagonist’s shoes and nowhere is this done better than in Video Games because you are literally in the protagonist shoes. The potential for creating an emotional reaction is much greater because part of the work of creating an emotional connection is done for you.

Video Games have great potential to create an emotional response, indeed many of them do, however they have some huge hurdles, many of them self made, to get over before people take them seriously enough to consider them art. The most important one of these hurdles is the image of being nothing more than entertainment. Developers need to start taking themselves seriously and consider their games art. They need to stand up for artistic decisions and start making people appreciate games as more than just entertainment. I’m looking at you, EA.

Some hippie 'games are art' thing

Just recently I’ve been playing a lot more video games, due to an increase in time and ability to spend money online easily. As such I’ve started using Steam a lot more. Three games in particular have been taking up my time of late, BioShock, Half-Life 2 and Psychonauts. All three of which are really excellent games that you should all go and play if you haven’t already. And if you haven’t I warn you that this blog contains some spoilers for them.

Now these games have gotten me thinking about videogames as a story-telling medium. All three have really great stories (well not Half-Life so much, but it’s not bad), but I have issues with how they are told. Indeed I have issues with the way that stories are told in videogames as a whole. There seems to be fundamental flaws in the way games work that make it very hard to tell a story in a satisfactory way.

Video games are, by nature, an interactive medium. They player controls the main character’s actions and, in some cases, choices. The main character moves through the story, controlled by the player; the player is essentially acting vicariously through the on-screen protagonist. This creates a unique level of immersion – the emotional connection to the main character can potentially be much greater than in any other medium because the player is acting through him (or her). However, with this level of control and immersion, it becomes very difficult to characterise the protagonist. I think Half-Life 2 suffers most of the three games I mentioned at the beginning from this. Gordon Freeman never talks, never interacts with the other characters and never actually makes any decision beyond which gun to use. Freeman simply does as he’s told by Alyx and the other members of the resistance. This is particularly obvious at the end of the game (or is it at the start of episode 1? I can’t remember), when Alyx is talking about how thankful she is that Freeman came to save her father and that he didn’t have to do it. The thing I couldn’t stop thinking through that scene was ‘yes he did’. Freeman never actually made the choice to go to Nova Prospekt, he was just sent there by Alyx to save her father. Freeman is little more than a puppet. He kills the Combine because he is told to do so. I can’t name one character trait of Gordon Freeman’s because he is not really a character at all; he’s an empty shell, a plot device that gets things done by shooting it. He does not drive the plot; the plot drives him, and thus the player, through the game. BioShock has exactly the same problem, but then the principle twist is built upon this fact. The protagonist is actually a puppet. He does what he is told because he is told to do it. He is, in the words of Andrew Ryan, a slave. The writers of BioShock had the self-awareness to play on this fundamental flaw, which is why it is one of the best written games I have ever played. Most games however fail miserably to do this, leaving them unapologetically lacking a main character.

There are a number of well trodden solutions to this problem, some of which are more effective than others. The first and most obvious is to wrestle control of the main character from the player and put all the characterisation and story development into cutscenes. The problem with this is that it’s just like putting scrolling text or voiceover into films – it’s not making use of the medium. You don’t go to the cinema to read a book or listen to an audiobook, you don’t sit down at your computer and fire up steam to watch a film. Japanese games are particularly at fault here – I’m looking at your Hideo Kojima. When gameplay gets interrupted for hours on end so you can sit and watch the story being told to you, things are going wrong. This leads to games being divided into gameplay and story – your task as the player is to safely take the protagonist from one segment of the story to another, the player is not involved or immersed in the story at all. Video games are an interactive media, so the story should be told in an interactive way, not by taking control away from the player. This completely breaks emersion and means that the player is no longer experiencing the story in the same way as he is when playing BioShock for example. I don’t think that cutscenes should necessarily be completely removed from videogames, but I think they should be used with extreme caution and very infrequently. The confrontation with Andrew Ryan in BioShock is a perfect example of when taking control away from the player works really well. When a cutscene there is a place in gaming for cutscenes, but they should be short and used sparing. A good example of well used cutscenes is Psychonauts, in which they are short and occasionally require you to make dialogue choices, which keeps some player involvement, not that these choices actually influences the game in any meaningful way.

This leads me neatly into the second solution to this problem – the RPG. Rather than taking control away from the player, RPGs give him altogether too much control. The player now creates the character entirely; looks, personality, gender, character traits. They make all the choices within the game; the main character, created by the player, decides which way the story goes by making choices based on the character he is playing. Problem solved, right? Wrong. Well the problem of characterising the main character is solved, but in a way that raises completely new problems.

The thing about a well written, interesting character is that he has to have a character flaw that leads him to making mistakes, which are what drive the story. As the character tries to resolve the problems of his own making, he realises the errors of his ways and develops as a character. When you let people create their own characters, this character development cannot happen. The character will not act according to his nature, but according to the whim of the player. One minute the character may be an angel, the next he may be a complete bastard, depending on how the players is feeling at the time. Through most RPGs you get the chance to help various people out, or kill them and take their money (ok it can be more complex than that, but you get the idea). A good character would always do one, or other of these things, whereas it is perfectly possibly for a character in a RPG to help one person and then shoot the next for no reason whatsoever.

This leads onto another problem, specifically morality systems. If you choose to help the person, you get good karma (or some equivalent), if you chose the kill the person, you get bad karma. Often the resolution of the story will depend on how nice you’ve been to everyone through the game. Oddly enough, this is not how morality works in the real world. Evil people are not evil for the hell of it. Usually in such situations you don’t get much more reward for being a bad guy than for being a good guy, neither is the bad guy option any easier (indeed in many cases it’s harder, as in Knights of the Old Republic. Because of this there is no reason, as a player, to be evil other than just being a dick. People do evil because it is easier than doing the right thing, or for selfish reasons of wanting, or even needed something that another person has. BioShock is slightly better done in this regard – the decision to rescue the Little Sisters or harvest them for Adam – however it is slightly ruined by all the lovely gifts that you get for rescuing the little buggers every now and then. There’s no reason to mercilessly harvest them because you get the same amount of Adam either way. If games are going to have morality systems, they have to make doing the wrong thing pay better than doing the right thing, so people have to chose between an easier ride in the game or actually doing what is right.

Characters in RPGs are, by necessity, simplistic. When it comes to character creation, game developers have to give players a limited number of options as to what kind of person the character is, in order for all the different character archetypes to fit with the story. Take as an example Mass Effect, in which you are given 3 different character histories and resulting traits to chose from. In terms of creating a unique and personal character this is pretty sparse. Often you don’t even get this option at the beginning (meaning games have to play the ‘I lost all my memory’ card at the start, which is one of the most tired and unoriginal tropes out there), but you get the odd dialogue choice which serves for characterisation. Again these tend to be pretty wooden, boring and lacking in variation. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve not really liked any of the choices I’ve been given.

RPGs also create a massive problem in storytelling. Specifically pacing becomes neigh on impossible, especially in games like Fallout 3 or Mass Effect. It is so easy to get bogged down doing side quests and gaining experience that you lose track of the plot. It becomes almost comic when you get told that you need to hurry before the token bad guy destroys the universe, but you then go off to dick around is not backwater planet or town helping locals to dig plantations or collecting animal heads, yet you still get to the bad guy’s lair just in time to save the universe. This is much more of a problem with more recent RPGs, which give the player far too much freedom to do what he wills. Sure this allows developers to show off the beautiful setting they’ve created, but at the expense of a well paced story. Some RPGs do get around this problem by being far less open – games like Knights of the Old Republic have a number of different locations you can go to, but it’s pretty limited and occasionally you get taken off to somewhere to complete something necessary to the plot that you don’t get any choice over. You still end up with a bit at the end where you can go finish off all your side quests, before finishing the game, but at least you do get some semblance of pacing. Either way you still end up with a poorly paced game – you tend to get a compulsory bit at the start, which tends to be quite well paced, then it opens out so you have a massive chunk in the middle which just meanders as you complete all the disjointed plot points between dicking about on side quests, then it all rushes to a conclusion. Hardly a steady acceleration to a climax.

I’m not trying to say that RPGs are bad games, or even a bad way of storytelling, just that it is not completely satisfactory. You get really big problems with characterisation and pacing which really need addressing. Small changes to the format could easily make RPGs a much better way of telling a story. For example the options you get need to be limited by what you have already chosen – so if you have been evil previously, you get more evil options and fewer good ones until you get to the point where you have a really evil option and a slightly less evil option and vice versa. In many cases morality systems need to be far more ambiguous, so it’s less clear what the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ options are – the player has the think of the consequences of a certain action and decide whether that is right for the situation, you know, like how the real world works. More importantly games need to be less open. It is very bad narrative progression to allow the player to go wherever he likes whenever he wants. Sure have different choices and options, but this should be along fairly linear paths, rather than being completely open. Games like Fallout 3 tend to focus too much on the absolutely fantastic setting, rather than the story. It works in Fallout because the setting is so good, but I think the game would be much improved if you simply experienced the world while completing the story, rather than completing the story while experiencing the world. Knights of the Old Republic tends to get this just about right, although it could benefit from being even more linear.

So of the three different ways in which stories are told in games: the RPG, the game with cutscenes and the game with the silent protagonist, neither is ideal. I think the solution probably lies in some fusion of all three. Control of the character should very rarely be taken from the player, however the protagonist needs to be characterised, so he needs to be able to talk and interact. There have to be conversations and confrontations with other characters, his choices need to drive the plot, not those of others, but these need to be done so that the player can still control the main character – very rarely should the player be sitting and watching things happen. There should be choices which effect gameplay and the resolution of the plot, but this needs to be done in a linear way.

Obviously this is would be a very difficult sort of game to make, but I think that, as technology improves and as games develop, storytelling will get better. The games industry is still young and working out what works. I hope sometime in the future we get it right, but in order for that to happen we have to realise that it is possible and focus on video games as a storytelling medium, rather than simply focusing on making gameplay as entertaining as possible. We can do both, but at the moment we are mostly doing the latter, and it seems to be working, so I don’t see a major shift in focus any time soon. We can but hope.

Feeling the Music

I mentioned in my review of Locked Out from the Inside and Only Revolutions at the start of the year, that I had been doing some thinking about what I think makes music good. This is linked with my distinct apathy towards the Arcade Fire, which I talked about a bit last June. That apathy has since extended (to varying extents) to Broken Social Scene and Pavement. You would think that, as big fan of indie music who even likes Neutral Milk Hotel, I would love these bands and any more like them that I’ve not discovered yet. I alluded to the reason why in June and I wanted expand on that a little more having given it a bit more thought. Today seemed as good a day as any given that nothing else has happened of note that I want to blog about this week.

The first thing that I feel I need to make clear is that I don’t dislike any of the bands I am going to talk about, or indeed any bands similar to them, in fact I do find their music quite pleasant. I just don’t love them in the same way that people think I should. When I first started listening to the Arcade Fire I thought I was missing something because they simply didn’t stand out in the same way I thought they should. The music didn’t grab me like music from Porcupine Tree or the Flaming Lips does. It took me a while to realise why the music was little more than quite pleasant but nothing special, in fact it took until I listened to You Forget it in People by Broken Social Scene.

One song on that album stood out for me; Anthems for a Seventeen Year-old Girl, the rest was ok, but nothing special. I soon realised that the reason it stood out was because it was packed full of emotion. Perhaps it was technically less interesting than the rest of the album, the lyrics are fairly simplistic and the overall message is pretty obvious, but that didn’t matter. For the first and only time the album made an emotional connection with me. I could feel the sense of loss and of regret, it was heart wrenching and I realised what had been missing from the rest of the album and from most of what I’d listened to from the Arcade Fire. It was what had been there in the Flaming Lips and Porcupine Tree. It’s what made bands like Nine Black Alps and Biffy Clyro stand out to me. Emotion.

Art is all about creating an emotional connection between the audience and the artist through the art. Good art is deeply moving because the emotions that the artist is pouring into the art are effectively expressed. Ultimately this is more important than creating complex, intellectually interesting art; complexity has to be aimed at creating deeper, more complex emotions, it is not an end in itself. A simple painting of a sunset which inspires awe is more effective than a complicated, technically brilliant painting which loses any emotion in the complexity.

This inevitably applies to music; a good song is one which invokes strong feeling in the listener. The purpose of a piece of music is to establish that same link between the artist and the listener through the music, so when I listen to the Arcade Fire and simply shrug apathetically I know that the music has failed. There is no emotional connection, there is no passion, and there is no reason to keep listening. By contrast I can listen to the Decembrists (a band that I have not mentioned yet, but rank alongside Porcupine Tree, Pink Floyd and the Flaming Lips as one of my favourite bands) and feeling the emotions that are surging through the songs. I can listen to the Flaming Lips and get feel buoyed by the sheer joy of their music. The more I listen and the more I pay attention to the complexities of the song, the stronger the emotional connection.

When I listen to a new band I look for this emotional connection. I try to experience the emotions of the artists through the music. I don’t look for the technical quality or the lyrical complexity because that’s meaningless without the emotional connection being established. The kind of indie music which the Arcade Fire exemplifies is simply trying too hard. They over-think the music and end up sounding aloof and disconnected. The music might be technically brilliant, but it’s all for nothing because I simply could not care less. No emotional connection has been established, so all the technical brilliance is all for nothing.

Of course some of the song from the Arcade Fire and other such bands do have emotion and I can connect to them, it’s just that for the most part this is severely lacking. I am making very general statements and there are exceptions. It would also be a mistake to say that this lack of emotion makes these bands bad. I don’t dislike them; I just think they slightly miss the point.

Art is an expression of emotion, once you let technicalities get in the way of that expression; you have missed the point of what you are doing. In trying to be all clever and artsy, this particular brand of indie music has forgotten what art is. It doesn’t necessarily make for bad music, but it does make for bad art.

A stunning distraction

Due to a complete lack of any inspiration for a blog this week, I thought I'd just show you some really cool shit instead to distract you from my failure. This distraction takes the form of some artwork done on the sides of building. He takes bland buildings like this:

And transforms them into this:

Some other examples of his work include this wall:

Trasnsformed into this:

Or this boring concrete wall in a carpark:

Into this:

I wonder just how many birds fly into this wall every day.

It's hard to believe that this is actually a flat wall, his use of perspective and the realism of his architecture is phenomenal.

Loosing my Marbles

This week the Acropolis Museum was unveiled in Athens, just below the site of the world famous Parthenon; one of the most famous buildings to survive from the Classical World. The museum cost £110 million and was built to provide Athens with a place the display the city’s rich history. It is no accident then that it is placed next to the Acropolis, the centrepiece of Ancient Athens. The main motivation for building the museum was to provide a place to display the Elgin Marbles and other statues which formerly adorned the Parthenon. These statues are currently held in the British Museum, having been brought there from Athens in the early 19^th century.

The Elgin Marbles, named after the person who removed them from Athens and brought them to the British Museum, make up about 75 metres of the 160 metre frieze that decorated the interior of the Parthenon. This frieze has been recreated as the centre piece of the Acropolis Museum partly with the pieces which remained in Athens and partly with copies made of the pieces currently in London. It is the hope of the Greek authorities that the Elgin Marbles will be returned to Athens to be reunited with the rest of the frieze. They argue that it is a vital part of the Athenian heritage and was wrongful removed from the Parthenon. They believe that they have a right to possess them.

On the face of it this claim is simple enough; the marbles were originally made in Athens so they belong there. However by making this claim the Athenians make a claim about their own culture and heritage which is far bold than first appears. While Athens in name and geography is the same city as it was in the 4^th century BC, it is very different culturally and socially; modern Athens is in no way the same city as Classical Athens. For a start modern Athens is the capital of a Greek state then never existed in the 4^th century BC. At this time Greece was made up of a series of city-states more likely to fight each other than to cooperate. Even when threatened from outside they only cooperated for reasons of mutual self-interest, rather than any sense of national identity. The idea of a culturally and politically united Greek state was not even considered by the people’s of the day; it was a world of small city-states and large empires or leagues, not nation-states and united coalitions. Secondly the religion of ancient Athens was a polytheistic, anthropomorphic religion of sacrifices and frequent festivals. The gods were ever-present and took a concerted interest in the life of the citizens. This is far removed from the Orthodox Christian religion of Modern Athens, which can trace its roots back to a combination of Judaism and the philosophy of Plato. These two religions are so different that it is impossible to say that one is in any way the successor of the other. Finally Ancient Athens was the intellectual and cultural centre of the Mediterranean world for centuries, whereas modern Athens is the culturally and political capital of a poor, unimportant state in the south of the Balkans, one of the poorest areas of Europe. Modern Athenians can claim to link to ancient Athens beyond the geography. They are two completely different cities situated in the same place.

There is no reason therefore for the authorities at the Parthenon Museum to demand that the Marbles be returned to them because they simply don’t belong to them. They belong to a city and a culture far removed from the modern city. Given that the Parthenon was build by an imperialist power from the money taken from subject states, mostly unwillingly, ostensibly for their defence, London may be the more appropriate place for the Marbles. Beyond this cynicism the Parthenon represents the wider ideals of democracy and freedom embraced in 4^th century Athens in what was comparatively one of the most progressive societies in history. These are ideals embraced the world over and as such the Marbles do not belong to anyone, but everyone. They represent the expressive freedom which allowed the artistic excellence which designed and build them to flourish. As such there is no doubt that they should be on display in their most accessible and complete form.

Regardless the current state of affair is unsatisfactory; the frieze exists in several different parts across the world. They should be complete, no matter where they are on display. Given that it is the birthplace of democracy, despite the sad and insignificant pretence of a city with delusions of grandeur which now squats in its place, the frieze should be on display in Athens, next to the Parthenon; the building which is and will always be the enduring symbol of democracy.

The problem with Modern Art

My lashing tongue of cynicism this week turns to ‘art’. About a week ago now – yes I’m slow, I was going to do this last week but I was busy (read last week’s blog to find out why), Damian Hurst made a record amount of money selling his ‘art’ work at auction. Somehow he managed to raise £111 million by selling his ‘art’ work, now I have no innate dislike of people making money, it seems like a perfectly reasonable way to spend ones time, however it seems all Hurst needs to make money is a good taxidermist and a hell of a lot of formaldehyde.

Hurst’s ‘art’ is essentially a bunch of stuffed animals floating in Formaldehyde. He gives them weird names and sells then for six figure sums. Here is an example of the abominable rubbish he puts on sale. Seriously, I could do this and I have no artistic talents at all. I was under the impression that a piece of art had to require some skill to produce. Not any more apparently; any nutter with a too much spare time and a good sales pitch can sell any old crap for ridiculous sums of money.

Now it may seem that I am being critical of Mr Hurst here, which I am to an extent, however he is not the root of the problem; the root of the problem is all the obnoxiously stuck up progressive types who seem to have forgotten what art is. Art is an expression of value and a celebration of talent. The great art works of the past, the Mona Lisa, the roof of the Sistine Chapel, the Virgin on the Rocks; I could go on and on, while you may not like them, clearly take talent to create. They are and expression of the values on the artist and as such and can clearly be seen to have aesthetic quality. A shark in a tank of Formaldehyde does not and cannot match up to the quality of these pieces.

Unless you have not already guessed, I am criticising so called ‘modern art’. From the weird and wonderfully odd pieces of Picasso to Hurst’s stuffed animals, it seems that we have taken our eyes off the ball in terms of art. We want to try to do something different, do something far out that no one has ever tried before. People who want to seem cultured lap up the abominations that we create and so this dubious and tasteless art form has become accepted.

The worst thing is that people are becoming staggeringly rich off the backs of these morons. People try to create as many new and different ideas as they can and the public lap it up. With each innovation we move further and further from art and closer and closer to complete trash. If this trend continues I could do something original to the arrangement of my bed cover and sell it as art, saying that it represented something or other. If it is that easy to do then it is probably not worth doing.

Hurst’s art is aesthetically bankrupt, it has nothing to contribute to art except to show us were it can all go wrong when we reject objective value for art and embrace a sort of relativism that allows anything to be considered art and sold for an extortionate amount.

Let us just hope that postmodernism is on the way out and a new form of art will emerge which is of more worth than stuffed animals and Formaldehyde.