A Letter About Art
‘So this is going to be way too specific to be something that I can directly reuse, but whatever. I think the issue underlying lots of what came up in our conversation is something like this:
There are two commonplace 'pictures’ of what art is that we use to justify the pursuit of art. One pictures says that great art describes the human condition, or expresses our innermosts experiences, or connects us to our unattended thoughts and feelings, or allows us to reflect on our life and memories and circumstances, or to empathize with others or to commune with the cosmos or to understand material conditions of life or whatever. Apart from being kind of old and uncool, this picture’s inconsistent with how crucial 'gaming’ the cultural moment is for making good art. Or, at least, it’s inconsistent with how crucial gaming the cultural moment is for making good art in spheres like pop music, visual art, film, and avant-garde literature – there are also spheres like literary fiction, or lyric poetry, or off-broadway theater, where gaming isn’t as important and the 'express human condition’ picture sort of holds, but weirdly these spheres seem *less deep,* not more deep, than the spheres where gaming is the life-blood of good art. This is where the second commonplace picture of what art is comes in: the second picture says that there’s a thing called 'culture,’ which is a sort of social structure that’s formed out of the interaction of everyone’s world-views and desires and beliefs and in turn structures the evolution of everyone’s world-views and desires and beliefs, and making art is a way of intervening in that structure. So on this picture art is a form of politics, in the sense that making art is making a historical intervention in a collective structure ('culture’). On this picture, it makes perfect sense that whether art is good or not depends on how it games its cultural moment – the meaning of the work of art is the dent it makes in culture. But this picture’s not consistent with the fact that most the really crucial gaming happens at the level of choosing what reverb to use or of one-upping every other rapper by making a rap track with no drum loop: aesthetic gaming might be a historical intervention in culture, but it mostly intervenes in the art part of culture, so if we don’t have anything to say about what the significance of art is other than as 'intervention’ we get weird closed-circuit masturbation. (In the visual art world and the avant-garde literature world people deal with the short circuit of the second picture by proposing that aesthetic form has sympathy, in almost the alchemical sense,with the most abstract, long-term aspects of politics, so keeping your shit aesthetically restless is crucial for the longterm possibility of utopian political projects. I respect this but don’t buy it enough to, like, base my life on it.) When I said at lunch that the way cultural elites treat art became more 'zoomed out’ I meant that years ago the first picture dominated how overeducated young people talk about art and nowadays the second picture dominates. I think the second picture gets something deeply right – the artworks I admire the most put their gaming front and center – but gets muddled by the instinct to equate 'gaming’+'meaningful’ with 'political,’ like in order to explain how something can be both gaming and not-just-a-trend we have to say 'by being politics’ cause trends and politics are the only two kinds of intrinsically gaming things we can name. OK this got long. I’ll get to the part where, shockingly, the true picture is revealed to be a synthesis of the two imperfect pictures. Basically I think that gaming in art is a lot more like mathematical progress than like political progress:
As we can see from the above case study, the very best examples of good mathematics do not merely fulfill one or more of the criteria of mathematical quality listed at the beginning of this article [see page 1], but are more importantly part of a greater mathematical story, which then unfurls to generate many further pieces of good mathematics of many different types. Indeed, one can view the history of entire fields of mathematics as being primarily generated by a handful of these great stories, their evolution through time, and their interaction with each other. I would thus conclude that good mathematics is not merely measured by one or more of the “local” qualities listed previously , but also depends on the more “global” question of how it fits in with other pieces of good mathematics, either by building upon earlier achievements or encouraging the development of future breakthroughs. Of course, without the benefit of hindsight it is difficult to predict with certainty what types of mathematics will have such a property. There does however seem to be some undefinable sense that a certain piece of mathematics is “on to something”, that it is a piece of a larger puzzle waiting to be explored further. And it seems to me that the pursuit of such intangible promises of future potential is at least as important an aspect of mathematical progress as the more concrete and obvious aspects of mathematical quality listed previously. Thus I believe that good mathematics is more than simply the process of solving problems, building theories, and making arguments shorter, stronger, clearer, more elegant, or more rigorous, though these are of course all admirable goals; while achieving all of these tasks (and debating which ones should have higher priority within any given field), we should also be aware of any possible larger context that one’s results could be placed in, as this may well lead to the greatest long-term benefit for the result, for the field, and for mathematics as a whole.
- Terence Tao
Art as a whole is valuable because of the non-gamey things we praise works of art for – the things from the 'first’ picture of what art is, and some cooler things involving vibes and relations between vibes – but our sense that a work of art is 'nailing it’ isn’t just about whether a work is doing these valuable things, but about whether its game catalyze windfalls of artworks (that catalyze windfalls of artworks that catalyze windfalls of artworks) that do these valuable things. Or at least this is an OK proxy for what this sense is a sense of – it’s probably not so much about the expectation that good things are coming in and of itself as it’s about the panoramic look you’re getting at their silhouettes on the horizon. Or, at least, that’s my philosophical best case scenario.'