What to do about: True Art

I've adjusted the index page and True Art Is Incomprehensible to show the tone change needed.

Whew, by the way. Somewhere along the way those articles lost their good-natured-ribbing quality and slopped over into Joe Sixpack's hater rant against people who would rather have wine than beer.

Ugly.

edited 21st Jan '12 11:16:24 AM by FastEddie

Looking around at things that get tied into "True Art:" the Poetry page's article is pretty bad too.

Poetry? I don't know. Looks mostly okay. What do you think is bad about it?

Thanks Eddie!

@ Bobby: Sorry for asking you to write this out, I probably couldn't have made an OP that good myself. Although I do agree with having them applied to in-universe as opposed to real life examples.

Oooh, could we get a "No Real Life Examples Please" note on any of the index pages?

Could we fix the description for True Art Is Realistic please? This in particular reads a lot like natter to me:

edited 21st Jan '12 11:43:01 AM by Firebert

Go for it. That is the default state. We only allow Real Life examples in cases where they aren't any trouble.

I'd say cut examples except for in-universe and maybe also list authors and creators with such opinions.

Cut real life example, yes. List real life people with that opinion, nope. Our article is not about the opinion, it is about the trope of portraying that opinion.

IMO the problem with listing authors as examples (or talking about what a vague group of "the experts" or "artists and critics" think, for that matter) is that unless you have an actual quote of somebody saying something stupid, it's probably a strawman. Art is on this site so we can describe the tropes it contains; it's not here so we can accuse the people making it and studying it of being morons.

I'm not calling for a Wikipedia-style citations list, but I do think that, if you can't or won't say who an opinion comes from, you shouldn't allege that real people hold it. That's misleading and insulting.

If anything, the existence of this thread has made me think that rather than cutting these, we need to expand them by making a True Art Must Not Be Mocked trope.

I'm not saying you can't mock it - providing you know what you're talking about and aren't just completely missing the point ("I don't understand this, therefore people only like it because it makes no sense!"). I have no problem with informed mocking, but that's not really what our pages are for, is it?

edited 21st Jan '12 12:56:19 PM by BobbyG

Why keep on page about True Art that says it doesn't make sense? Because its funny and true?

Where is the straw man. Everything made by humans is art. Art comes from Artifact, all drawing are artwork. Well done artwork maybe not but artwork none the less. What amounts to good and bad is opinion but true art? See No True Scotsman or The Alleged Car. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean its not real or "true". Citing angry high school students is just as much of a straw man then.

"Looks pretty for the sake of looking pretty" is a dumbed down statement about it to the point of just being inaccurate, it's like people thinking that the Simpsons quote about postmoderism being "weird for the sake of being weird" is what postmoderism actually is. (On that note, poetry's structure is more about how it sounds than how it looks.)

Text links to True Art Is Incomprehensible, has a sort of anti-intellectual "if you don't already understand it don't bother trying to" vibe which is really unneeded.

This sentence is pretty unnecessary, but the word "pretentious" in is is especially unneeded as it just gives the statement a more bitter tone.

That poetry page could be worse but could be better; it's not hostile, merely wrong.

The claim that "the experts" think True Art is True Art because it doesn't make sense, which is an unfounded allegation.

With all these pages, there seems to be the assumption that, because our readers aren't looking for formal analysis, they want to be talked down to, which seems wrong to me. Informal explanations are great, but that's not what we're doing. We're heaping scorn upon a strawman, then going "Art? Poetry? Pfft, who cares, you won't get it and the label is dumb anyways!"

edited 21st Jan '12 1:23:01 PM by BobbyG

Though 'wrong' is, of course, a pretty big deal for an information repository like TV Tropes.

Well, yes. Which is the biggest problem with the True Art pages, for that matter.

The thing is, there's no point in acting as if critics and academics are wrong for having a preference. And that's assuming they have such a preference, anyway. Because really, if I've noticed anything in my own experience through college (And noticing what other people have noted from their own experiences) academic professors are not prone to dismissal.

You guys are talking about these things like tv tropes is espousing them. Just recraft the article so that it is clear that it is about the trope being used in a work of fiction.

People seem to get their conceptions of what professors and literary/art critics are like more through fiction and jaded high school teachers anyway. A lot of complaints about high art, pretentious professors, etc just have a "jerkass teacher wouldn't let me do my book reports on my 40k novel or manga" tone half the time.

^^ This. Just clean them up.

They are attitudes that are given to characters as a way of nudging the audience toward a particular response. They're tropes, in that sense.

The fact that people have chosen to make the pages into rants and op-ed pieces doesn't make the characterization in fiction any less of a trope.

Really, I'm not saying we should go and generalize "critics" or any other group but then the same thing is done to "high school students". I'm not even saying we should get on Roger Ebert for saying some internet game wasn't art or attack anyone specifically. It is just there are people who believe in some idea of true art, as much as their are people who use No True Scotsman "reasoning". Cut the other pages but leave one detailing why the idea of "true art" doesn't make much sense. That shouldn't be a problem.

dude, academics have been arguing about that shit for the last century, at least. we're not gonna enter that debate nor make a stand on that.

...unless the other ones agree, i suppose. But it's a bad idea.

Well, depends how you're defining 'true art'. It's not just a matter of subjective quality - in many cases, it's more like pointing out that a cat, whilst undoubtedly a very splendid cat, is not a 'true dog'.

If you guys want to argue the definition of true art, take it to Trope Talk. This thread is about fixing articles.

edited 21st Jan '12 2:05:34 PM by FastEddie

I don't think trope pages are the best place to debate the definition of art. Either way, though, the debate doesn't boil down to "everything is art" vs "this is art because of this arbitrary quality, everything else is shit". That is a strawman.

Ninja'd.

But yeah, I don't object to making them fictional examples only, just the current tone of and claims made by the pages.

edited 21st Jan '12 2:08:41 PM by BobbyG

I couldn't see a way to save anything for the other rants on the topic, so I cut them.

This one is over. There is no need to let stuff like this just sit out there. If we have more rants disguised as tropes, bring 'em up.