Co-Opting Culture

I imagine everybody's heard about the Aqua Teen Hunger Force ads in Boston that the cops overreacted to. There's not much to say about it that hasn't already been said. But there's other things to it, like the relationship between street art and ads. Which Posterchild goes into here (Posterchild being a guy who does street art stencils and came up with the Mario Blocks. His main concern is about the impact it has as ads try more and more to be like street art, so people start to assume any street art's advertising, and ignore it the way we do ads.

And that, I can totally empathize with. Co-option is the most powerful weapon marketers of culture have. They have the money, and a lot of desperate art students who are pretty smart on their own. Which is not a real slag against art students who work for marketing, 'cause people gotta pay for living somehow, but still. It's like Microsoft, if something cool and new comes up they don't control, they can either buy them out or just set people to making something close enough to it they can give away, and drive the original out of business, so to speak. If DC comics starts doing "street ads", for example, how would you know if somebody's stencil of Superman was a fan thing, or a paid ad by DC? If it becomes common enough, people would assume it's an ad, and tune it out.

That's one of the problems with the insatiable marketing culture/entertainment industry. I'm not sure there's really anything that can be done about it, except what artists have been doing for years, which is just moving in once the ADD marketing moves on to a new fad and making something new out of it, until that too becomes a fad and snake of the entertainment industry eats its own tail once again.

Man and His Quest for Art (1/2)

A man wanted to be an artist. So he took his spare room and spent several weeks converting it into a studio, looking forward all the time to the day when it would be done and he would churn out art for the ages. When he finished, it was a wonderful studio, and he filled it with all the tools of an artist and set up an easel. But none of the ideas he had for art pleased him or felt worthy of the studio he had built, so he stood in his beautiful studio with no art to make.

Man and His Quest for Art (2/2)

( Hidden because LJ posts the most recent at the top and you should read part 1 first. )

A Game for You

I've been playing Ray Hound (link to a review, since the actual site's in Japanese) off and on the past two weeks, and it's fun, and pretty. You're a spaceship, in an arena where turrets spawn. You have no weapons, but you have a field that can grab the enemy lasers and make them follow you until you let go of the button, at which point they fly off. You can also boost, which deflects the lasers while you're boosted. But the biggest thing for me, is it's so pretty a lot of the time. Maybe I'm just mathematically amused, but with all the lasers arcing around in patterns it just can be really nice. And it's fun. Thankfully, every time you hit a multiple of 10 for levels, you can start from that level the next time. I'm stuck at 30 because after that point it starts getting kinda crazy and I haven't made it to 40 yet.