bea's bad blog

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3gKp5Og4qA

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I am not apart of the discourse that thinks we should stop using the word "content" because, to be blunt, a lot of what people bullishly refer to as "art" is indistinguishable from "content" or even "slop".

There's an old discussion about games in particular that asks "how can hundreds of artists spend years making something and it not be art?" and that strikes me as a very legal or binary way of looking at it. Do you really think something that exists solely to manipulate people into spending hundreds of dollars on PNGs is art just because it has illustrations in it? What about a movie with nothing to say that exists as a corporate toy commercial montage?

A lot of media that has been made in the past 30+ years, particularly media that has been made with the employ of 2D artists, has been made solely for economic reasons to simply take up space between now and when you die in the hopes you'll buy some plastic that will end up in a landfill. Sometimes you get something very cool out of that exchange, and sometimes you even manage to get people that elevate that into something that moves you, and that's a wonderful thing, but a lot of it really is just "content".

I don't even necessarily think "content" is an inherently negative term. This post? Content. It sure as hell ain't art just because a person wrote it. This website is chock full of slop content that isn't far off from what gen AI can produce, and that's simply just reality, and that's also just fine.

Talking of games, I would consider 'Elden Ring' a work of art, for example, that you could very easily interpret as anti-status quo or anti-capitalist, but it exists as a product to generate profit within the capitalist status quo, and while Fromsoft games have an impressive ratio of things in their games that exist for a reason, some of it is just padding, or 'content', to create more value so it can be a better product. You could easily remove at least half of the crypts in that game without the game saying less.

I understand the push back, but it's a word with utility, and I'm less and less interested in binary stances or catch all terms, particularly ones that elevate mediocrity into something that should be revered simply because a pencil was held at some point in the process. I do also want more art and less content, but that requires more than demanding people simply change one label to another one.