My book, "How a Game Lives," is available for pre-order now. The deluxe edition- which includes prints and a vinyl album- will only be available until May 10! www.lostincult.co.uk/howagamelives
Please tell me there'll be an audio version for blind people! Though, unless it's narrated by you, hearing your thoughts in anyone else's voice will be a trip.
In college, there was an art exhibition on campus focused on the impermanence of art. One of the exhibits was a bowl of ashes titled "this painting was destroyed before the exhibition." Next to it was an oil painting titled "this painting will be destroyed if it is not taken by the end of the exhibition." I visited the exhibition every day, and nobody took the painting. On the last day, the painting was still there. I couldn't bear to see such craftsmanship destroyed, so I took it. Now it hangs in my bedroom, where only I can see it. Lately, I find myself looking at it and thinking "I'm the only one who ever sees this painting. Is this any different than if it were actually destroyed?" Edited to actually close my quotation marks
Personally, I think it matters a lot. You preserved something that would otherwise have been lost, and perhaps it's loss would have been fine too... But it wasn't, and now it lives on for those that happen to glimpse it in your home and more importantly: for you. I can't put to words what that feels like to read, but it seems important somehow.
I had a lot of talks with artists of the pros and cons of both physical and digital art. And one thing I’ll say is digital art will always exist for the people, nothing can truly destroy it if you know what you’re doing and it will continue to be there for 1-2-100-1 million people that may want to see it and have a piece of it. No one can take it and hide it away from others in some private collection. Though you did the right thing. And you enjoying it is more valuable than it being gone imo.
from the creator of such masterpieces as 'Fear of Depths' and 'Fear of Cold' may I present the esteemed Jacob Geller's latest perfection - 'Fear of Concrete'
Cannot describe how excited I am for the book. You've got me thinking a lot on the preservation of media and I'm thankful to be able to keep a part of yours now no matter what happens to this site
After Syd Barrett left Pink Floyd, he returned to his birth name Roger Barrett and spent the rest of his life in reclusion painting. The vast majority of his work was never seen by anyone but him and maybe his close family, because he destroyed most of his paintings upon finishing them. It's an incredible contrast to the exuberant displays and mainstream visibility that Pink Floyd went on to do those same years.
I feel like this answers to me what makes City feel so wrong to me. The arrogance that you can lock away a part of the earth even after you die, or lock away pieces of music in a vault, or whatever, falls away if the person actually commits to that and destroys it themselves before they die. I suppose there's a discussion to be had about the boundaries of art and privacy. You could write a sequel to this essay about the disclosure of historical letters between figures, to the ethics of leaking online DMs, to the joke about asking your friend to clear your browser history if you die. That last one speaks about how we are remembered, and how much say we ought to have in our legacy. The ancient Greeks thought part of living an excellent life had at least something to do with your legacy and memory, so there's a real cultural throughline from then all the way to now.
i don't know much about pink floyd but i know a little bit about syd, as he is one of my boyfriend's biggest inspirations. they're both neurodivergent and share a lot of similarities. this comment made me feel quite emotional (or maybe i'm just high LOL)
@@iluvxtc0 becoming debilitatingly obsessed with Sid Barrett was instrumental in me learning I am neurodivergent lol so it's quite an emotional topic for me too
There's a similar notion I've been mulling over for some time now. When I read a book, I create a movie in my mind. All the characters and locales take on a specific shape that my brain forms from the writer's words. My own unique, non-transferable version of the universe and the people in it. However, once a film or TV show is created, those people and places become fixed. Daenerys Targaryen now looks like Emilia Clarke. Aragorn will forever be Vigo Mortensen. Every film adaptation invades a little bit of my mental real estate.
This is the exact reason I avoided watching the Harry Potter movies for so long. Rarely do the characters and scenery depicted in movie adaptations match up to the ones envisioned in my own brain-scape. In a very real way, this disparity ruins beloved stories for me. It's like being told you're wrong about purely subjective material.
film adaptations of everything is definitely a factor in my visual aphantasia. it's corrosive to the imagination in the extreme to so often be given the visions of others.
I'm stubborn af and my mental image of characters and scenes from books are often unchanged even once a TV series/Movie is created. But I am always so disappointed when characters, places, stuff are finally depicted but aren't as cool as I imagined them.
Sorry Jacob, but true art for noone is my 50 word docs and 4 premiere pro projects that I refuse to release because it isn't perfect yet, but refuse to work on it because I can't make it perfect yet
They will never be perfect. 'Finished' is a chimera. So the question is really, when will they be good enough? Is them being wrong really worse than their non-existance?
If you never work on it them because they're not perfect yet and you're not good enough to make them perfect, then you'll never get good enough. Much better if you work on it then later throw away what you don't like
All art is in conversation with other art and with the world. In an abstract way, I don't think it's possible for an artist to direct all their energy inward
@@biancahertzman6539 I define art as only something humans can give and derive meaning to and from. You could sing a song to the sea, but no one besides you would derive meaning from it. Also, if the artist dies with a piece undiscovered, it can’t enter the zeitgeist and is inconsequential. I kind of get what you mean, but if you endow the existence of a solitary piece with an “energy” that resonates with the universe. That’s something that hasn’t been quantified and will not take seriously.
This is a great essay, but I also want you to know that I was housing a giant burrito in my face for dinner when Saturn Devouring His Son popped up and I felt weirdly called out.
I get the feeling that the real ‘City’ was occurring while they were creating the piece. Planning, construction coordination, calling in favors for machinery, those sounds are all so common in a city. The constant development and upkeep of all the infrastructure is a major aspect. During the construction, it probably felt like a whole city working to make this art
11 years have gone by, and yet, the concept of "Art for No One" still brings me back to 2013, when the creator one of Yume Nikki's most popular fangames at the time, LcdDem, simply vanished and told everyone not to talk about the game publicly, not to contact them, basically, to forget it existed. Same thing happens with all of their music - they deleted it off the face of the internet. One part of me still wishes I could've told them how much LcdDem inspired me to create my own work - in fact, I might not have made my own games at all if it wasn't for LcdDem. Countless posts posing as this person have surfaced, under a veil of anonymity, indirectly claiming to be them, but it's never final. Of course, everyone has the right to anonymity. The only thing that stings is, having to feel guilty just for sharing an amazing piece of art, for mentioning it, talking about it. 11 years, and there was never any closure. I tell myself I let go, and I wouldn't say it's a lie, but it's not completely true either. But it inevitably comes up in conversation - the way it handles colors, the atmosphere, the music, the way almost no inch of game space is wasted (except maybe the orange maze). It's at the root of why I picked RPG Maker at all, it's the first Japanese fangame I've ever played. It's the core of why I made my own fangame at all - how can I forget such beauty?
I'm not to the end of the video yet, but the idea of "art for no one" evokes, for me, the reality of everyone's singleplayer Minecraft worlds. An idea implied in "for no one" is "(except the creator.)" There are probably millions of beautiful, intricate, or personally meaningful things people have created in singleplayer game files, only to never touch that world again, to lose it on a broken hard drive, or at least, never made accessible to the public. I'm not fully comfortable equating Minecraft with art, but it feels analogous.
In this example, I think Minecraft is more of a tool used to make art (wether the game is art itself is another question). Kinda like Paint, I guess. Or Flipnote.
A very interesting point you made. About 5 years ago, my girlfriend's bird died and my friend and myself built a massive aviary in our Minecraft world, just for her. That aviary meant a lot to her and still means a lot to me. It's on my harddrive, somewhere. But only the three of us ever got to appreciate it.
Yep, had the exact same thought! I will say, though, that it does bring me joy to tour around my old minecraft maps and show it to people. It's a way to express myself I guess.
This reminds me of a story I heard on the internet, I can't remember where or how long ago. A young man made a friend on a minecraft server one day. After playing together for a while, his new friend revealed that she was dying of cancer. He continued to play with her until the end, and ever after, in each new minecraft world he made, the very first thing he would do is mine a diamond, use a name tag to put her name on it, and put it in an item frame in his base. In every world. There are probably thousands of little rituals like this in minecraft alone that would be completely inscrutable to anyone who is not the "author" of the ritual. Really drives home the point for me about the Beginner's Guide, and how much of a betrayal is really is to rip that kind of private work out of context and put it on display for the world.
One of my friends made a painting that his art teacher called the best piece he’s ever seen. My friend painted over it completely and now hangs the completely black canvas over his door. I have still never seen the original. Only my friend and the teacher have. And no one else will. I think about this more than I should. My friend never took a picture. And has said he forgot what the original looked like.
@@killkillzHonestly hell nah. I understand the sentiment but my art has so, so much love put into it and is a direct depiction of my mental health at the time. I can tell when and why I made each piece even if I find an old paper and do not remember actually drawing it
@bnsz8704 @killkillz when i was in middle school art, we were making small paintings on small canvas panel boards - about index card size. so, i made my piece of art like i was told. my classmate beside me, a fun and sassy girl, gawked at it and complimented me for my skill. i said thank you, and for fun, decided to smear my still wet painting, seeing all the colors muddle together like some sort of memory fading away. i had fun, but apparently she did not. she did not yell at me, but she definitely seemed a little angry or annoyed with my actions. i didn't know why, and i still don't know why. maybe she thought i was being rude to her. i still "ruin" my paintings nowadays. usually i think to myself that, "man, this sucks," or, "i could do way better." one thing that changed is that i now use oil paints instead of acrylics. painting with acrylics just feels awful to me, and with the combined quick drying time, i get frustrated easily. i dont know why im putting a piece of my life into a random comment section of a random video (or perhaps it's not random). i think i just wanted to share my experience with "[making] something good and then [destroying] it."
About the Rat King image from Plexus, I wonder if it's intended to display the violence of the action of revealing it. It is not simply splayed along the edges. No, it was complete in the pages. The reader splays it, in an effort to reveal what is inside you splay and cut through the plexus of the art created by the artist.
I KNOW I loved seeing that... and it could also be read as the inverse too! Rat kings are almost never alive, because 1. the substance tying the rats together is usually rotten organic matter and 2. being tied together makes mobility and food searching impossible. So in the context of familial trauma: does cutting through the Rat King allow the members freedom? When we cut ourselves off from people who hurt us- especially our blood relations- are we snipping off parts of ourselves, because now we are divorced from our context?
@@Scypek I love the idea of this, it still irreversibly alters the book, but it's done with the effort of at least keeping some semblance of the original
i've always found it interesting that the word we use for making art public is "releasing" like a bird from it's cage, like a prisoner from their confinement we set our art free so it no longer belongs to us
I want to scoff but I actually think this is really apt. The notion of ownership was on my mind throughout the video; how we may possess art by controlling knowledge and access, but just as our bodies are a stream of borrowed elements only briefly intersecting with our identities, so too do our creations belong to the universe once death forever relaxes our grip.
i agree. i’m a huge believer in the “death of the author” concept so every time i see something make a post about a headcanon they have or fanart they made, and someone else comes along saying “ermmm that isn’t canon the author said so ☝️🤓” i have to laugh
Another fun thing about plexus/book publishing: pre 1900’s books used to be sold much like plexus is, with connected or uncut pages loosely bound in paper or fabric. This was so the (wealthy) purchaser of the book could arrange to have it bound properly in leather of their choosing later (likely to match their library’s collection). If one was to read a book unbound like this, they’d have to slice open each page individually with a knife. When hearkening back to family trauma Helfrecht also may have been thinking about how her ancestors would have received and read a book like hers, down to the paper and the cutting. As someone who has cut pages that are like this, It feels solemn to do; not often to books require you to take a decisive step every single page you turn. But it also is made yours by the way you decide to shape each slice, if you trim the edges or not. You shape it, not just for yourself but for everyone who reads it after you.
I was thinking about that, too! It’s something I remember thinking about as a very evocative act, but just recently I read about it again when reading an article about the artist Julia Morison. She makes abstract works, but they’re often based on Kabbalistic structures, more out of the desire for an interesting formal constraint than as a practitioner. The article describes how she was researching something else in a university library, and found an uncut volume of Hermetic writings. The writer compares her act of cutting the book to her artistic practice: “the handheld intimacy of the object; the promise of overlooked and undervalued knowledge; and the need to make repeated cuts in a fragile surface before gaining access to that knowledge.” The footage of Jacob cutting into Plexus brought those ideas very vividly to mind.
The Nazca lines are completely viewable from nearby hills. The concept that they are only visible from the air is one made up by ancient alien conspiracies - although the effort to make them properly proportioned to a perfectly down-ward view may imply that the goal is to be viewable by the heavens/stars/gods
also, humans are smart enough to design things to be viewed from the sky without reaching the sky ourselves. the "aliens" conspiracies undercut the power of human ingenuity.
@@toricon8070 Yes it discredits the humans that made it, similar thing with the pyramids. As if the humans of that area couldn't possibly be intelligent enough to make something like that.
@@aersla1731 Deep down those "ancient aliens" people are just racists. Do you ever notice how they always talk about African or Native American buildings? No alien help was needed to build the Parthenon or the Colosseum of course, but the Pyramids and the Nazca lines? There's no way humans built those...
im very fascinated by your comments on the anxiety of not "getting it" when going to city, the anxiety of coming back without a "worthwhile" experience, something to write to home about, etc. the topic of "getting" art is something that pops up in your videos fairly often but i wonder if you'd ever make a video solely about it. it would be phenomenal coming from you of all people
I'm so interested in this concept. I'm a creative writing teacher and one of the fundimental things I have to tell students to bear in mind when approaching texts is that 'getting it' is not necessary. Some works are not open to us all, or cannot be fully understood - and that's fine. And then we can talk about what it means for our own efforts and choices in creating fictional works. I'd be thrilled to see how Geller would explore this idea in his own essays (and in anything else he chose to touch upon)
His Hotline Miami 2 video touched on this, even down to the title "I Do Not Understand Hotline Miami 2". Although the discussion there is pretty heavily in the context of that specific game rather than the plight of attempting to understand art as a whole, from what I recall.
ig on some level that’s part of the job. If I were in his position, it would be a dream job, but I’m not sure the underlying stress of needing to have an idea to make a video abt would ever go away.
@@helenmcclory5676A professor I have a class with rn specializes in shakespeare (and teaches creative writing) and she has expressed many times about how students are put off from her classes or reluctant to participate for fear of "not getting it" or having not "gotten it" prior. Your comment has me thinking about the role of the author in making things 'gettable' and how that conflicts with subtlety and style. This is all a bit rambly but its on my mind for some writing i need to do myself
Probably the most damaged of Goya’s Black Paintings by institutional interpretation is the painting “Drowning Dog”. It is the most minimalist of Goya’s paintings, but very emotive, with all matter being held in the bottom-left corner the little dog is, with its eyes held up to the majority of the painting, a swath of off-white near-emptiness. Despite this, it’s held at the prized end of the “Black Paintings” hall in the Museo del Prada, with its plaque proclaiming it to be the best work of this series and definitively a drowning dog.
I looked it up and at first I was like "what, that's it?" then I lingered on it for about ten more seconds and when I tabbed away I felt the need to take a nice deep breath. Art's pretty cool
Seeing this painting in person was definitely life-altering for me. I didn't know about it before I got into the Pinturas Negras space, and it instantly became my favorite. Seeing both this painting and "Juana La Loca" were trascendental experiences I don't often have in museums. Can't recommend Museo del Prado enough.
I'm not the creative type, but I am a biologist, and many of the things you said in this video stuck with me. Despite all the technological advances the way many of us learn anatomy is still to take a razor to a corpse like you did to that book, open that which was mean to remain closed, and take the things inside out of their intended state. The concept of *in situ* - in its natural state - is a sort of holy grail for those attempting to understand our bodies, because to observe something is to change it and to be able to see how life works is in many cases to damage it. This is especially true in the case of the brain, which is simultaneously one of the most important and most fragile parts of us. Nobody has ever truly seen a plexus, just crude imitations or dead tissue. Perhaps the divine art is also for no one.
I'm a zoologist myself, and... I think a lot about species that went extinct before humans got to see them. What we have left are fossils, and that's only if we're lucky. There was beautiful life out there that we will never get to see, except for in echoes left behind in stone, if even that. Who's to say how many more species were never fossilized, and will likely never be known? And yet without creatures of the past existing as, among other things, evolutionary stepping stones, we wouldn't even be here. We, and all the life around us here and now, are living proof of the fact that they were here. And even if we never get to see them or know them, we carry them with us.
I'm an aspiring biologist and I so often long to see the natural world as it exists *without me.* I want to experience nature I'm not a part of, to see what happens when all the animals are just existing without any person as a blip on their radar. But it's impossible. At least outside of limited snapshots captured by cameras that are still *there*, just unnoticed by the wildlife
@@ParadoxGavelIts crazy to me to even think about the life currently existing on our planet that we have yet to discover. The earth is so vast and diverse and we’ll never truly get to know every secret it holds.
Well, but he's definitely not wrong. You gotta admire how commited Vegas is to its theme: Perversion. It perverts nature, it defies its own environment (who would build such a huge city in Nevada of all places?) and even its reason for existing at all is questionable. It's so over the top wrong that it wraps back around to being amazing in a twisted way.
33:34 For a moment I thought this was going to lead into some sort of Da Vinci Code-esque crime drama type scenario where Jacob either goes looking for Goya’s skull or reveals that he was the one who had it all along
I really like the idea that if Jacob found a famous, lost historical artifact, he would reveal it 3/5 of the way into an hour-long essay as part of a transition linking painting and sculpture back to gaming, all in a video where neither the title nor the thumbnail is related to the artifact. I would be disappointed by anything less.
As an artist who has been destroying my paintings over the last 20 years, this spoke to me very highly. I would take photos of them before I destroyed them, but very, very rarely would I show the photos to people. A few years ago, an ex-girlfriend would watch me paint, and she convinced me that I should stop destroying my work. Only in the two years since have I started to not burn or paint over everything. It has been an interesting shift, as now I make a bit of money selling them, but there is also an unsettling feeling that the part of my soul which I'd put into my work is still out there. The catharsis that I would get from destroying the trauma I'd put into a piece seems to linger.
When I was working on a comic project I hoped would be my masterpiece, I befriended someone who offered to assist me. At first I agreed, as any help with coloring and shading (my least favorite parts) is helpful, and everything would have been fine if he'd left it at that. As years passed my assistant became my co writer, adding his suggestions, then characters, then rewrites, then changing the genre and the very purpose of the story. I would kneel on the floor crying and begging him to stop but he would look down at me, wait for me to catch my breath, and continue pushing changes as though I had said nothing. Eventually his name went before mine on the creative credits. He was the main name on the websites. Then he talked me into turning one of my lead characters evil so he could be replaced with his own and I snapped. I did the only thing I still had power to do- I killed the project. Thus led to a two year mental breakdown where I couldn't draw nor write. He didn't understand anything I was going through. He still doesn't. A while back he suggested that we play The Beginner's guide together. It was... uncomfortable. Here was a game about an artist meeting a fan who gradually takes over their life, changing the works against the creator's will, and not understanding what was wrong. I looked at my former co writer, wondering why he wanted me to play this as it MUST be a sick joke on his part, and I saw... nothing. No recognition. No flicker of recognition on how closely this game matched our own experience. He thought the game was about bad internet critics. I still don't know how to process this.
Jesus, that sounds terrifying. Especially the part where he DOESN'T SEE that TBG is literally about what he himself did... That means that none of it was out of malice, but just emptiness. Zero emotional intelligence. I believe you, some people literally ARE that much of a blank void, and trying to ask them to change themselves is pointless. The only thing you can do is set boundaries, distance yourself, eventually leave. (I had a roommate like this, so I know.) I hope you are able to find other friends, if you can't yet cut yourself off from this empty void of a person, at least others can support you when things go wrong. That's the number one step for anyone in an abus!ve relationship - friend or boss or family or anything - expand your social circle, tell your story to people who will listen, and lean on THEM more and more, instead of this person who gives you nothing and just takes. And of course, if you can afford it, professional therapy. The point is to get other people to validate your experience - commenting on YT and hearing supportive strangers agreeing that what you went thru sounds awful is a really good first step! You can acknowledge that you suffered. Honestly, some people never get THAT far. You're already able to tell the story, and you don't blame yourself. You're on the right track. I think you're gonna be fine.
@@86fifty On the other hand, sometimes people are terrible at recognising this kind of thing, but they don't lack feeling. He isn't aware of what was going through OP's mind, just as OP isn't aware of what's going through his. It could be that, if he was made aware of what he'd done he'd be horrified. I'm reminded of the commonly believed myth that autistic people have no empathy, when that generally speaking isn't just not true, it tends towards the opposite. Hyperempathy is far more common than lack of empathy in autistic people, though both *can* happen. But they might not show it, or they might not see the signs that the other person is in distress. But when they do see it, they feel it far more strongly than the average person. Or alternatively they just don't get it. They don't feel it. Both can absolutely happen. Its unlikely this person is an empty void, is what I'm saying. They might just not see the signs. Not realise what they'd done. To OP, it was his masterpiece slowly taken over by an assistant. The the assistant, it was just some comic that became special when it became a collaborative work. Or maybe he really was a terrible person. We can't tell. But I'm always wary when people assign malice or soullessness to people like that when its far more likely to be both parties failing to understand one another. Nobody is a blank void.
I'm reminded of being a child and checking out an illustrated book from the library. A delightfully-drawn "mystery" wherein a bunch of anthropomorphized animals attend a birthday party only to discover that someone's eaten all of the food before the guests could make it to the dining room. The twist is that the book ends with all of the animals proclaiming their innocence with the reader left to guess at who's telling the truth and who's lying. The cliffhanger ending had one bit of salvation: a sealed envelope on the rear cover. My copy was sealed but the bigger problem is that this was a library book. Child-me agonized over whether I could cut through the paper and find the answer until my mom (thankfully) reminded me that the next kid to check this out would likely *also* want to read the answer. We opened the envelope together and found out which animal ate the feast. And I'm glad we did! The answer was that the mouse ate the food along with a few hundred of his friends. This book went from good to great as the letter also revealed that the hundreds of other mice were visible as texture in the painted backgrounds. Sure enough, reading through the book again brought a new joy. I'm sure the author and illustrator would have been glad for my petty act of vandalism. I think there's more of a parallel with Undertale rather than the destruction of Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue. What limits would you break to experience more of a good thing? An author-intended transgression that brings you closer to total understanding at the expense of a preconceived limit.
I did think about Undertale during this video. Where at the end of the best and happiest ending, a character BEGS you not to play the game again, not to restart it all so that you can experience the choices you didn't make; leave the characters to their happy ending. But of course many players do reset, often to get the worst and most painful ending afterwards, because their curiosity and desire to experience more of the art was greater than their respect for the fictional characters that comprise the art.
@@Roverdrive_XReminds me of the one and only time I played through undertale six-ish years ago. I got the pacifist ending, freed the underground, and have not touched the game since to leave all the characters at peace
Sounds like some of my experiences in Satisfactory. I guess what makes me not a true artist is that I don't have the audacity or money to do it in real life.
@@ixnayonthetimmay tbh I think Satisfactory art is just dependent on being able to show it off effectively. I definitely think that some builds I've seen became... _something_ alright and what is art if not living rent-free in someone's brain like Let's Game It Out's conveyor belt tornadoes of lag testing?
I don't know who said it first. Pretty sure my grandfather was quoting someone else. He always said, "There is music that's meant to be heard. But there is also music that is meant to be played."
I can't stop thinking about this video. Last week my grandfather passed away. He had been sick for a long time and was almost completely unaware of his surroundings. Just after he was diagnosed he wrote a letter to his wife, intended for her to only read after he died. But before he died, she would be diagnosed with cancer and pass soon after. He never knew, or at least never accepted it. Next week he will be cremated, with this letter. A letter, written by a dead man, for a dead woman, neither of whom ever knew the other died. We made the decision that no one would read this letter, but the thought of it won't leave my mind. No one will ever know what was in the letter, I doubt my grandfather even knew. It truly is art for no one, but only now.
“I also frequently wonder whether any of this means anything at all. Which is just the experience of making art, I think.” - Jacob Geller, The Best Games of 2023
in high school my art class went to an exhibition of "outsider art." the artist was henry darger. all of his work was discovered posthumously, including a 15,000+ page book. it was an uncomfortable experience for many reasons. his work primarily featured children, and violence against them. he was a devout catholic and most likely a repressed homosexual and pretty obviously struggled with sexual identity based on his depictions of the sexes. afterwards i couldnt stop thinking about how his art was probably made to process trauma and identity and all number of things, and now it was being picked apart by high schoolers to study for quiz questions.
@@sydneygorelick7484 nah that's not too bad, you're already dead so it's not like it would affect you anyway. No imagine if your vent art was discovered and picked apart by high schoolers while you're still alive...
@@DreamyAileen we like to think the dead are still alive. it’s easier to process death as someone “going away” for a little while, which is why our brain tends to show the dead sympathy.
I had never heard of this man before this comment. I read his Wikipedia article, top to bottom. Then I googled some of his art. I don't know how to describe what I'm feeling, but if I wasn't at work I might have a good cry.
I used to be homeless in Vegas, all of my time not spent day laboring on housing construction at the edge of town was spent crack climbing, bouldering, and soloing in Red Rocks. Your inclusion of all the different spots within the park's loop added such an extra point of subjective meaning to this video. Thank you for the unintentional (though very welcome) identity trip.
You are a Storyteller. This is what it must mean to be a Storyteller. Man, I could listen to you talk about absolutely anything. You use words SO well. You flatter each word. Thank you.
Something cool I noticed that wasn't mentioned is at 32:28 where you state "the giant is sleeping" is that all the little circles and shapes are all people, with a big ladder climbing up on top of him. A whole lot of tiny little people exploring this sleeping giant. (The most notable person is in his left eye! A little kid peeking in.
Could you maybe form a narrative out of the three colossi shown in the video? The sleeping giant woken up by little people, destroying their city in anger, then feeling regretful over it?
When you brought up Goyas paintings and called it Saturn Devouring his Son, my first response was to out loud say "That's not what it's called!". I was *overjoyed* when you went on to explain that none of these paintings have Titles. For me, that exacerbates the horror of that particular black painting. It's something monstrous, cannibalistic... and people looked at it and went "Clearly, that's Saturn devouring his Son!" Because if it's not that, not a myth that can be clearly categorised... then what is it? Ever since I learned that fact about that specific painting, I've been haunted by it. Edit: I think one of the most interesting parts about that piece of information is that... It's the one thing that even with the painting being revealed, Goya will take with him to the grave. Everyone has seen these paintings. No one will ever know what they are paintings of. Who IS this monstrous figure? Who are the "Pilgrims", the "Witches", if that's even what they are in the first place? We can guess, we can speculate... but we'll never know. The figure is saturn because people decide he's saturn, turning to old myths to try to make sense of something that was never intended for them to see. Personally, I like not knowing who the figure is, as much as I find this picture far more haunting and terrifying. I think If I ever knew for sure, if I suddenly knew what the painting was 'about'... I'd go right back to how I felt before I learned it's nameless. It wouldn't be disturbing anymore, because I'd have no reason to think on it. But as a glimpse of something that I'll never really understand, a nightmarish figure seen for an instant with no context or explanation, it will probably haunt me for the rest of my life. I'm sorry I'm nerding out about this one fact. I really, really like that bit of trivia and as soon as I saw Goya come up, I was hoping for this so badly.
love hearing your excitement about this!! as ive learned more about that painting i agree, not knowing what it was meant to be makes it really unsettling in a really interesting way
Not entirely related, but I went to see Magritte's Museum sole times ago, and one thing that stayed with me was his total disregard towards titles. While he paid a lot of attention to his painting, he went as far as letting other chose titles for him. Sometimes, the same title go to two different paintings. Sometimes, the same painting has two different titles. He already expressed everything he needed to express in his work, so titles didn't seem necessary. And I feel it's the same idea here. If that Goya painting became so famous, it's because of all it evokes, and wether Goya ever gave it a title or not, or whatever it may be, that doesn't really change its evocative power (again, we can't know what Goya thought of). Trying to mitigating it by naming it is vain. I don't know, I just find this whole subject so interesting
i feel like that's so closely intertwined with the covering up of the figure's nudity. they want to make sense of this frightening image, to give it a reason to be scary as a way to make it somehow less so, and so they compare it to Saturn- except the legend of Saturn never said he had a boner while eating his children, and that brings a whole host of new interpretations to the image that many people weren't comfortable with (or a select few decided the rest wouldn't be comfortable.) so they covered it up. i feel it's a much more humanly potent image with the new information.
That 2nd to the last paragraph, really reminds me a lot of the noodle incident video by Overly Sarcastic Productions. To summarize, Noodle Incidents are basically scenes in whatever media where a character names some past event and maybe one or two things that happened in it but never give any context or full explanations for whatever the event was, main example being the Calvin and Hobbes noodle incident after which the trope was named after, where Bill Watterson, author of Calvin and Hobbes, just decided to never explain the incident since he figured nothing was going to be funnier than whatever ridiculous thing the audiences thought up. That trope talk video also mentions horror noodle incidents, and it's really what mirrors your speech about not wanting to know what it is. Horror Noodle incidents may involve not showing the monster's full anatomy, or like you say, not explaining a thing about it, because whatever the audience tries to label or identify it with, and whatever fearful and scary expectations they may hold about said horror noodle could be scarier than if Goya had actually just spelled out what it was.
Another artist who comes to mind is Franz Kafka. He never intended to publish his books and told his only friend who knew about his writing to burn them after his death.
Virgil. Before his death, he told Augustus to burn the Aeneid, the work he considered his masterpiece. We still don't know why he wanted to burn it, just that he did. The Aeneid was never meant to be read by anyone but Virgil himself.
@@Hazzy113 this is the popular opinion about the Aeneid. However, the point about propaganda is very valid, you can never trust anything too much. I'll see if I can find some sources and add it to my comment.
As a Peruvian, I'm somewhat surprised you never addressed the damaging of the Nazca lines by the Greenpeace group over half a decade ago. The destruction caused by a group of outsiders trying to give their own meaning to a work, disrespecting its culture, and its preservation. The Nazca lines can't be visited by the average individual. To walk on them requires specific permission from the government and those preserving the work, and to see them from above requires access to a airplane, something most people in the country can't afford. The term for the kind of surface that covers most of the Peruvian desert is "Desert Pavement." A thin layer of rocks covering every each inch, cementing the landscape in the same shape it always was, and always will be. Any step you make in the deserts of Peru leaves a permanent scar that will last for thousands of years, and from above, you can see every track left by every car that's ever wandered into the sands. And in an attempt by outsiders to shame a country into changing the fuel they depend on to exist, they destroyed part of our heritage that we all agreed should be protected. There is not a single person in Peru who believes the average person should be allowed to walk along the lines, as to view them is to destroy them. Which is why Greenpeace had to flee the country. Not just out of risk of the government punishing them, but out of risk of the people punishing them. I feel a more in depth analysis on the lines would've greatly aided your thesis here, and brought some much needed attention to the damage those who don't understand art can do out of a desperation to grant it their own meaning. Like the tearing of the pages, or the slicing of the painting. Despite this though, I'm still glad to see them mentioned. Although most people associate Peru with the work of the Incans, our national logo illustrates the P of our nation with the swirl of the monkey's tail. It's a work that for us, is just as important as our cities of stone. Great work, and I look forward to your next video!
I've read some more of the topic and damn, sadly Greenpeace activists weren't the only ones doing damage. 2012 and 2013 damage was done by the Dakar Ralley and some other damage was done by a quarry. It's a tragedy that the Nazca lines can't be protected from destruction. Too big for a museum and walling them in would be too expensive.
@@yonokhanman654 It creates a paradox. Greenpeace would definitely be a group to oppose such things as that quarry, but instead, a lack of appreciation for the intersection of nature AND indigenous historical culture undermined their very morals, ruining something possibly created in honor of the natural surroundings
@@OhNoBohNo Really sheds a light on the fact that Greenpeace is an American non-profit. Indifferent to the cultures and values of the nation of Peru, they merely wanted to make a statement. Bullies, who scarred the hallowed grounds of a piece too majestic to even gaze upon, simply because they unilaterally decided their cause was grander than the works of some uncivilized, uncouth, no doubt smelly Latin Americans. As a Latin American myself, it's hard not to feel extremely bitter about just how kind the gesture was.
Y’know what I’m thinking of? When I was little, I saw this commercial about a musician who made a vinyl record out of some sort of earthy material, can’t remember what it was. It was supposed to be a statement about climate change, because he buried it underground and it wasn’t supposed to be opened for a set amount of years, it was maybe 50 or 100, I can’t remember. But with the material it was made of and its underground burial, unveiling it in a state where it could be played was reliant on the climate of the earth during its time underground. Basically, if it ever got too hot for too long, the vinyl would degrade and the music in its original state would be lost to time. I think about it a lot, y’know? What’s going on with that? It could’ve also been a weird dream. I was a very environmentally conscious child with a very overactive imagination, but I SWEAR I remember that commercial vividly.
might you be talking about Pharrell Williams? he made a song in 2017, but buried it in a clay vessel that will be destroyed if the vessel floods due to rising sea levels caused by climate change. it won’t be released until 2117
I'm admired you didn't mention Kafka. Kafka didn't published most his works. He was a minority inside a minority: A German speaking Jew inside Czechoslovakia (at that time Bohemia). He almost never finished anything, burned almost all he wrote and what he left, he left with instructions for burning all; what was not done, and because of that we have some of his books. The only famous book he published while alive was Metamorphosis (AFAIR).
Absolutely. I think some of his shorts were published, but of his novels, only Metamorphosis. But I mean, there’s nothing else quite like his work. Who are we to take the things he wanted destroyed and show them to the world and who is he to try and take that from us even after his death.
Jacob-among all your videos, none have affected me as much as this one. In 2015, I played The Beginner's Guide the day in came out in the midst of the deepest, darkest depression of my life. Somewhere in the latter quarter of the game I burst out crying with a sense of existential desperation, but try as I might I couldn't articulate why. During this video's segment on that game, I once more found myself silently sobbing, but this time with a sense of cosmic relief. I get it now. Thank you.
The fact that these videos leave me feeling in awe of the concept of art itself is truly a testament to Jacob's own artistry. What a wonderful thing to be able to witness.
The more videos I watch, the more I feel like I can appreciate "art" in abstract. I've always been someone that was just confused about those big splotches on a canvas, or a canvas entirely in one color, or anything like that - confused why it is supposed to be art. And around me people always joked something along the lines of "Even I could do that" or "That's probably expensive for money laundering purposes". And I understand why these people say that - I myself prefer intricately painted or carved art, that is immediately grasping one with it's detail or abstract representation. Something that shows the talent, hard work, and artistry of the creators is just more pleasant to me personally. But when Jacob mentioned the mostly red painting at around ~22:26 and continued talking after I suddenly realized: A lot of art is not just the piece itself, but the story attached to it. Be it the story the artist tells, or the story an observer experiences
if you haven't already, watch his video entitled, "who is afraid of art?", in which he talks much more about that very painting, why it's important, and why its desecration should be taken seriously and not dismissed because "it's just a red canvas".
you probably know the mona lisa today because of its history of having been stolen and such that made it more popular to the public, not for some extra special intrinsic reasons even though it really is fine art in itself and was not intended by da vinci. But thank you, you made me realize that there are people litterally going to see contemporary art at face value when we are bombarded by abstract art concepts all the time
In a way im pretty sure ive made art made for no one but its maker. From cringey but unique designs i made as a 15 year that I still keep under my bed, little messed upand delusional writings of my past terrible mental state from 5 years ago, to a recent couple of sketches I drew of my partner of 4 1/2 years. Others seeing these with their eyes would dull their meaning to them, but to me, their host, are artifacts of specific memories and emotions I hope to never lose.
recently, i bought a copy of autumn de wilde's book, "elliott smith" titled after and dedicated to her late friend. it is mostly photos that she took of him, with two sections of interviews with smith's friends separating the book into sections. the first section of the book sees smith posed in different locations, in front of a mural, outside a shop, by the side of the road. in the last section of the book, we get photos of these same places, now without smith. it's a real gut punch, something i had never experienced with photography before. it was such a great illustration of loss.
Watching this video I can't help but be reminded of my best friend. A few months back, she finished a draft of a novel. She intends to keep working on it and she has several other WIPS she's working on. She spent years writing it in her free time, and she intends to never publish it. In fact no one but her has read it, though those of us who talk to her regularly have heard plenty about it. She has little interest in the opinions or criticism of anyone else, because this is her way of getting out the stories in her head. She's agreed to one day let me read through to check spelling and grammar, and I know when that happens that it'll be a very special experience because of the trust it requires. I think in an age where everyone has access to a platform the idea of not sharing art seems ridiculous until you're the one making art you don't want to share. Goya's hidden works make sense to me because it's so clear that it was for himself. I think in a sense we only want to see hidden art or art for no one because we know it's there and we know we aren't supposed to see it. And (ignoring any specific controversy a piece in this video may have, looking at you City) we feel entitled to look because the people who made those pieces call themselves artists, and why wouldn't artists want to share their art. Why would you write a novel for any reason other than to publish it. Got a little pretentious on main there but ig guess watching a jacob geller video will do that to a girl LMAO
Idk, I'm a lifelong artist and writer and I don't like to share my work, except occasionally with a few people I know. I just hate the idea of performing for an audience and feeling like I'm playing a role, making what other people want just for validation.
I wonder if there is a meaningful difference to be found between "Art for no one", "art for an audience that we aren't (and cannot be)", and "art for the artist". To me, the Nasca lines *feel* like art for the sky, or maybe the gods, depending on how you want to religiously conceptualize it. That is, art that is meant to be appreciated, but not by the people who made it, and not even really by any human. Coda's games in the Beginner's Guide, on the other hand, feel more like art for the artist - the meaning is there, but obscure. Again, we're not the target audience, it's not *for* us, but the art is for someone, and that someone is human, which can make the art even harder to grasp, in some ways, because for all the space that separates us from the gods, we know about as much about the gods as the people in Nasca. Same with Goya's works. Given the context, they seem more like works for the artist. Meant to be seen and appreciated, to express certain feelings, just... not to the public. But the City really does sound like art for no one. Hearing you talk about it, at least, it feels like art that even the artist would rather not see. Something that should exist for the sake of existing, but not be seen or experienced by anyone. Or at least not understood by anyone. I get the feeling that the challenge of the art is to ask us to not see it as art. Here's a thing that exists, it proclaims. But don't try to explain why. Just accept that it does and move on. Wanting to see it, to experience it, runs directly counter to that. It's very existence runs counter to our entire sense of being human. We see something that is artificial, and we feel the need to understand it. In that sense, the use of Prince's work seems somehow... obscene, maybe? Because, until he died, I don't know that I would call those songs "art". Or at least not "finished art". It's not that they were only meant for the artist, or god, or even for no one. They were... proto-art. Failed art, maybe. Akin to scenes in a movie that were storyboarded, or even shot, but ultimately didn't make the cut. Or the rough sketch of a famous painter that they decided wasn't conveying what they wanted. It's something in the process of becoming art. But, I guess that begs the question of - what *is* art? is the first draft of the first chapter of a novel that get trashed so that the author can start over art, in and of itself? Or is it only once the novel is completed and the author says "Done" that the collection of words is transformed into art? If that first draft is art, does that mean that every paint stroke after the first is, in some way, destroying existing art in order to create new art? I obviously don't know. As usual, your videos are fascinating, and leave me with more questions than I had when I started. But that's utimately the point, right? Not to come to a conclusion, necessarily, but to just... find new questions to ask.
I feel like I would like City more if its very existence didn't require such an obscene price tag. I obviously can't tell the artist how to spend his money or his health, but I can at least say that between an art installation that is truly meant for no one and idk spending money on charity work I would much prefer City to not exist. It doesn't really benefit anyone, but it doesn't harm anyone. It feels like the artist really wanted to make it, but it's also a huge vanity project.
i feel like your first paragraph also applies to Gellers statement about nature, because a lot of things in nature ARE meant to be seen, to communicate some meaning, just not to us. there are flowers evolved to resemble specific insects to encourage pollination, Birds of Paradise have intricate mating rituals and striking plumage and many animals communicate lethality by the the use of bright colors. However, the comparison of nature to art also brings up the contrast of intelligent design to evolution, and peoples beliefs can drastically affect peoples views on that. so maybe we cant really even compare art and nature, just attempt to imitate or contrast it against our own creations.
I don't understand what you mean by not meant to be seen. If it exists, it's meant to be seen, to try to understand it, to at least feel it. The mere existence of the video and all of our comments means it's not for no one. Sometimes the art escapes the creator and their own ego makes them think and proclaim something that's simply not true. I don't like a lot of modern art, I think it's bullshit, but that doesn't mean it's for no one. If something exists, it's for us humans to appreciate.
I think art for the artist is more accurate. If it was truly for no one, I'm not sure I would call it art. I kinda think art has to be experienced in order to exist, even if it's just the creator. Maybe that doesn't make any sense, I'm a little tired.
The irony is that the "experiences" you bring up in this and many of your videos are so esoteric I would never have come across them if not for the video, yet your analysis and dissection of them robs me from ever truly experiencing them for myself. Your greatest work yet, thank you. I really liked Sun Figures.
In some previous videos, I've stopped partway through as soon as a short story was mentioned to go read it myself. I read "To Build a Fire" and "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" on Jacob's (implicit) recommendation, before I heard what he had to say about them. I feel the same way you do--the act of hearing an opinion fundamentally changes your own, and you can never get a first impression back.
Really surprised to not see any comments in here about Vivian Maier! She was a nanny working predominantly in Chicago and New York who, incidentally, is by far my favorite street photographer. It's incredible. Her work stretches from celebrities dipping out of theatres at premieres to wage labourers reclining on landfill sofas, each picture packed with perfect lighting and composition. She died less than a before her work blew up the internet, and the only reason her work fell into the hands of the man who posted it was because she couldn't keep up with the payments on a storage locker. John Maloof, the man who's responsible for championing her work after her death (and the same one who posted it online) currently runs a website dedicated to her photography. Art for no one, and documentary for no one -- shoulder high piles of negatives, home movies, recordings of conversations with strangers, all destined to be buried under the dust, and "saved" by the happenstance of a delinquent payment. edited for spelling
it rains a lot where I live but we have this huge retaining wall I love to draw on with chalk, when it washes away there's melancholy but there's solace in knowing it was there, and made me happy while it was
The Beginners Guide was... kind of a turning point for me. In some ways, it's when I began to think of myself as an aspiring game designer. When we get to that note in the game... Well, I was thinking that Coda had died, but I also knew that that felt a bit too obvious. What I still haven't really been able to fully figure out is... Yes, I gasped when I found out that Coda was alive, and had asked the narrator to stop speaking with him. I looked at that first note for a full minute before moving on. It recontextualize everything before it. But, it was finding out that the narrator added the lampposts to each game that made me cry. I stared at that for... I'm not sure. It could have been five minutes or an hour. Something about that just... twisted a knife in me. I guess it was just simply that the narrator had led me to believe that there was some significance to these lampposts, some deep wisdom being shared through their constant inclusion. But it turns out that their significance was only in the absolute betrayal they represented. And somehow that hurt so much more than when I thought Coda had died before finishing any of these interesting game concepts. But it hurt in this deeply personal way. That's what I haven't been able to figure out... Why does it hurt like he betrayed me? I guess simply that I have empathy, and that game is an extremely well-made piece of art. EDIT: Super weird bit of synchronicity; right after I watched this video, I went to facebook to check my memories. Literally the first one is my post I made after completing The Beginners Guide exactly 1 year ago.
That episode of 'Malcolm in the Middle' where the dad spends ages painting a masterpiece with dozens of layers, and then the paint falls on the family. The audience is never shown the painting. I love and hate that episode.
One of my favorite things to do has always been to sit on a piano and play an improvised piece that lasts only that moment. I dont record it, i dont remmeber any of what i played, and the only “audience” is made up of whoever happens to be there. The music just happens as quick as it is gone. What i play is most likely not very good, but to me these moments are some of the only times were i feel proud of the art i have made. It feels the most pure, without the corruption of expectations. Purely itself.
same, same, so felt. this is how i feel with both singing- often harmonizing/countermelodying a song i'm listening to, but when i was a child i would hum constantly while reading, completely made-up tunes on the spot- my best friend got to hear it sometimes when we sat and read fantasy novels together waiting for our moms to get out of work. she thought it was beautiful, told me so. probably the first time i've ever felt really proud of something i've created from nothing. and in adolescence i fell in love with dance, took lessons enough to learn some skills but find the most joy in improvisation for myself in my kitchen, my bedroom, earbuds in, just sunk into the motion of my body. feels like i'm gathering or funneling something through my movements and giving it back to the universe. reminds me of some quote from brennan lee mulligan about being the mechanism through which the universe loves.
As someone with a rather unhealthy and obsessive archiving habit, there is something that frustrates me about reading that. I recognize that it's a pointless and unbelievably futile effort to try and "save" and preserve every piece of art ever created, partial or not, to try and make every moment and utterance permanent for looking back on in the future. But I still, immaturely, can't help but feel like the music that you played is now lost. That it can't be enjoyed anymore, that it's gone. It sounds lovely to be able to just let go and play to your heart, though. The freedom of not having to worry about its permanence, not having to worry about it ever being critiqued, its doomedness to being forgotten being what makes it so enjoyable. I should learn from that...
this kind of reminds me of my childhood self, making art in my own room, and then upon telling my mom to tell me what she thinks, realising she isnt looking at it at all, and knowing i made that art for no one but myself. nowadays im really happy to show my art to anyone who will look at it, but sometimes only i need to see what i created. sometimes the meaning and the feeling is only there for me, and not even the ones who inspired it
One of my best friends is a writer. One of the best I have ever seen. I am not one who will typically read a book without any sort of visuals to go off of, but I always find myself hopelessly enthralled by his work. And yet, the only people who have seen the majority of his work are him and myself. I've always told others how great of a writer he is, how I wish they could see it... But I can never bring myself to actually *show* them. It feels, wrong. Like overstepping a boundary that is indescribably intimate to his entire self. He's never kept every work entirely private, some short stories have been shown to a couple other friends, or to his creative writing teacher in college. But even I have not seen what is likely over half of his work. I relate to Davey in The Beginner's Guide quite a lot. It feels like there is a special kind of complacency for artists who can create and comfortably never show anyone, and it's difficult to not feel frustration that I don't have the same kind of resolve. It's something I have thought about a lot. It's something I wish I had and want to pursue. The conclusion I have eventually come to is that it could demonstrate a strong self confidence. That you don't need other people to tell you your art is good in order to be happy with it. It could also simply be that the art is an outlet for things you simply can't get out of your head any other way, like a sort of self-therapy. But not necessarily as a way to treat anything, but rather simply because the emotional attachment to the ideas presented in the art are that strong. I decided to finally just, ask him. After so long of speculating, I just asked why. He said "I create for you and my friends stupid :P " I have since taken up writing.
Calling city a skate park no one can ride in actually summed it up pretty well I think i only saw the nyt pics but that’s really accurate to how it looks there
@@senaruryuin2773 Gonna go bug Tony Hawk and a team of game devs to go to City, sketch and memorize it all, and then make it a level in the next Tony Hawk game (hopefully one that doesn't suck, so let's not let activision, ubisoft or EA touch it and enshittify it)
A professor of mine actually works primarily in the Central Andes and she explained to us that it is precisely because of the fact that people could not see the Nazca Lines in their entirety that they were built that way. The lines were actually ritual pathways for prayer (walking/travel is often associated with prayer in the Andes) so to SEE the entire monkey would defeat the purpose of the path, you had to EXPERIENCE it. Such a great video as always though Jacob, can't wait for your book to come out :)
for almost my entire waking life, I've been writing poems, majority of which I've been clutching in secrecy. the pressure to share them in hopes of "changing" the world or "providing" and just contributing anything is always there. but maybe art can also be just art, even if it was public or private. it doesn't diminish nor exaggerate its value, it's just art. something telling of something that came from someone. no matter how close I clutched them to my chest, there will always be the certainty that glimpses of my poetry can flutter in my everyday; in the actions, in the words, and in the connections we make with people. so, who is no one?
i refuse to release my writing because of a deathly fear it will be interpreted and reinterpreted to the point it is used to do more harm than good, to propel ideas that i fundamentally would abhor. the sheer idea that some folks may take away something horrific and act on it is why i've stopped writing in public spaces online long ago and mostly write on paper-with the intent to burn it before i commit to my end. it's not poetry mind, it's interpretations of nonfiction research, philosophy and so on. i do enjoy interpreting and learning how the world works, how many ways to see the world. but the idea of ever releasing my notes of interpretation is terrifying. it isn't art in this sense but i also plan to burn my drawings and paintings. my writings are clear descriptors of a worldview tho, and the harm that could come of that isn't worth it to me.
The Begginers Guide is the game that made choose a game dev career instead of going to a math college back in 2016 Never doubted that decision since then. Thank you for throw back, Jacob!
The thing about TBG (which is the only piece here I have the education to speak on) is that when the twist happens, it's nauseating. That betrayal, the forced complicity, the way Davey makes you almost an accessory to this enormous trespass-- the entire thing is fictional, but it's also not, obviously. The concept of a malicious curator makes sense to me, but what I took from TBG and what I try to impart on as many people as possible is *you do not know this artist by their work.* You cannot use someone's work to psychoanalyze them. It's, to me, vitally important to always remember that, for my protection and for others. It also killed a lot of the allure of parasocial relationships. No matter how much I enjoy someone's work, I always always always remember that I should never assume that I know them as a person. I honestly think of TBG as an important prerequisite to life in the modern era.
"Meaning is meaningless to me." - Zdzisław Beksiński, fed up with people wanting to interpret his rad paintings no matter how many times he asks them to stop.
It means so much to me for you to feature and talk about one of my favorite pieces of art! The Beginner's Guide has always made me feel that the potential for stories in video games has barely even begun to be expressed, and nobody ever talks about it enough. Thank you!
This guy is among the very top of creators on this platform I have come to love. Jacob, your integrity and refusal to compromise are of utmost importance to making these videos feel like a very personal take on your topics. Your enthusiasm and energy is contagious and inspiring and I hope to watch your work for years to come. As with so many other creators your content is timeless and your older videos have aged incredibly well. I could watch these years from now, not knowing if I watched something recently created or something we've already had years to enjoy and appreciate.
City feels like an inverse of the path carved by Dashrath Manjhi. City is hard to find, nearly inaccessible, and if Heizer had his wish, never to be used; whereas the path cut between Atri and Wazirganj was meant to be visible and used often, giving access to his village to the hospital over the mountain. It's interesting how the same act of moving around rock can MEAN opposite things
Yeah. A rich man from the privileged highest class in the world does pointless thing for no one. And A poor man from the poorest most unfortunate lowest class in the world does something for everyone.
I had not heard about this man and his work before reading this comment, and I'm glad you shared it because it makes me feel less alone - the way he worked is how I want to work. His summary on Wikipedia is "Indian laborer" - not politician, not artist, not lawyer. Not "visible." And yet he made life measurably better for all the people around him, by doing unauthorized public works, for years, for personal motivations, THAT ALSO benefitted everyone. And that's how I want to be.
Also re: Prince's death... As someone who works with harm reduction orgs, I have such enormous feelings towards it. He died from a pressed Norco (brand of hydrocodone) pill that had a fent hotspot. To think that even Prince... Prince! Wasn't getting real pharmaceutical pills. Apologies, as this is entirely unrelated from your video, but that's the direct result of the DEA cracking down on prescription opiates and doctors/pharmacies dispensing them. Prince would be alive if not for the war on drugs, and sometimes I feel kinda insane that no one acknowledges that.
My country is finally being hit by the US's war on drugs. As the quality and availability of illegal drugs has went down. The type and quality of those drugs has become a huge issue. We're currently dealing with a massive heroin addiction epidemic. Heroin was basically unheard of 10 years ago here.
Immediately what I thought of upon seeing the videos title, and that thought only strengthened throughout the video. Truant (or at least I believe it’s Truant’s quote from the typeface used) is right. The Navidson Record isn’t for us. Nor was it for him. Only Zámpano knows who it was for, and he’s dead. (Real talk, though, that book was so good at making me feel just like Truant, navigating this purposefully confusing and difficult book with him. Love House of Leaves will my whole heart
I avoided watching this for a few days because I knew it would hurt. My grandmother once told me that the only things worth living for are art and love which is why there are so many love songs. As an aspiring artist gearing up to release my first album here in the next few months, a project I’ve spent the better part of the last three years working on, I often worry that I will release it and no one will listen. I worry that the very thing I have dedicated my life towards pursuing lacks the merit of being. To create art is to destroy one’s sense of self and replace it with a constructed framework of meaning. To dissect and autopsy your deepest fears and desires and then put them on display. It is inherently vulnerable and narcissistic to believe that you have something within yourself worth sharing. The idea of putting myself in that position only to be greeted by silence is horrifying. The idea of doing it all over again on the next project only more so. Yet I must create. I am not naive enough to believe that my art stands alongside the greats but it’s the best I can do and I will keep doing it until it kills me. I don’t think any piece of art is truly for no one at all. Because all art is for the artist. It’s a self portrait spread across a hundred canvases. To creat art is to write one’s autobiography little by little in riddles and metaphors. It’s scary and painful and often times feels like it will eat you alive. But it’s the only thing worth living for.
I think what people forget is that art is just art. It doesn't need a rhyme or reason to exist. If I could, I'd draw giant animals just cause it's cool to see what you can do. Sometimes stories and structures are meant to be used in those time periods, but at the same time, some things are made cause those people thought they could and they did. I understand why the owner of "City" didn't want to make it for others to come and look at. I know I've made plenty of drawings that were just fun to make, and it was a good time. I've never liked classes where we have to deep dive into a creators art because at times its never thag deep. Sometimes, we think too much. This isnt to say that I dislike these conversations, it's one of the reasons why I love watching these videos. I just also like basking in the original intent of the creator.
City sounds so soulless. I hope that with time, the desert takes it back. That someday the cracks are filled with desert flowers, and that sagebrush grows tall and healthy in its streets.
I wish it, not because I hate it, but because I think it would elevate it. If it's made to look like a ruin, becoming a true, organic ruin seems like the perfect conclusion. But maybe it's just because I am fascinated by ruins.
See, to me, City sounds the opposite of "soulless" - it's a pure expression of human creativity. It's a monument for the sake of having built the monument. Humans inevitably alter our environments through the act of creating our own meanings.
@@blakksheep736 Haha i JUST finished it. It was a good one. And the pop corn was good aswell. I think the conclusion is great. Who is no one. The artist certainly is someone. I think we all chase a big tail throughout our lives. To create is to live fully. We need contemplation & production everyday.
Every annoying internet phrase that people use, started out with people saying it "ironically" until they forgot the ironically part. Remember this next time you start a sentence with "I'm not the person who says Annoying Internet Phrase but."
Very glad to hear you talk about the Beginner's Guide. I began to feel nauseous as Wreden's narration turned from what sounded like analysis based on conversation and friendship with Coda, to pure psychoanalysis based just on the game files themselves and Coda's further distancing from Wreden. When the twist happened, I felt like I could vomit- despite knowing it was clearly a fiction, that this hadn't happened, the game succeeded in tearing down my defenses and suspending my disbelief to an incredible degree (hampered only by one small moment where Wreden says he has to step away to do something and the game is without narration for a bit, which makes no sense since even in the context of the universe, he is recording files to edit into the game, not live narrating each playthrough). The lamppost thing in particular turned it from one-sided psychoanalysis fueled by hubris and the selfish need for access to another's art, to deception in its purest form, a lie Wreden tells the player so brazenly and indefensibly that it makes me question everything else he said all the more.
i'm so emotional right now because the beginner's guide is my FAVORITE game of all time. i was first introduced to it in 2017ish and i think about it constantly. i love its eeriness and the unsettling feeling i get when i play it. i will always always recommend this game to anyone who loves conversations about what constitutes art, what art should be seen, respecting artistic integrity, etc. i've scoured the web looking for conversations/analyses about it. LOVE the beginner's guide music you snuck in at the end too.
While I respect any artist and their wishes for their art, I feel that being obsessed with the inaccessibility of your art is equal and opposite to the desperation for approval. I dont doubt that City is a masterpiece, but the intentional separation of it dulls it to me in concept. The indifference, though. Thats tasty as hell
I think a part of the reason why City feels so dull, or maybe even "arrogant" is due to its cost and scale. This land art sculpture is estimated to cost well over $40 million. This would make it one of the most expensive art installations in human history. On an emotional level, spending that much money on something that exists without an audience feels insulting. The short story that someone made and locked away in their computer's hard drive costs only a few hundred dollars all together - the computer, the software, the keyboard. Plexus likely cost a decent amount of money to produce and publish, but it was made to be shared, and exists to communicate a sensation. City mimics the styles of a civilisation that was wiped out in the name of securing the land that the art piece was built upon, and cost enough money that it could've probably saved hundreds, if not thousands of lives. All for the sake of not being shared with the world, or perhaps more cynically, for the sake of insisting that to share it with the world would be to reduce it's meaning. According to Wikipedia (though the link to the citation seems to be dead), there was a proposed nuclear waste site that would going to be made within Yucca Mountain. It would've included a new railroad line that would come within the sightline of City, and Heizer reportedly considered burying City if that line was built. Imagine wanting to burying 40 million dollars worth of art because someone might see it.
Yeah, it's hard not to see the inaccessibility as a hype gimmick, an artificial mystique. If he didn't want anybody to see his art, he wouldn't have built a giant monument in the desert. Just make weird pointless constructions in Minecraft like the rest of us, man.
@@thevoidlord1796 Yeah, I had that thought too. Waste of money and labor, not even built on his own land. I kind of like that wild animals are coming in and pooping on it. That's a better critique than I could ever give.
In this day and age where so much of life is controlled by the human race and everything can be fully consumed by basically anybody who wants to, I see an artistry in not only a physical isolation from the rest of humanity but an emotional one as well. When people are told they can't do something, they instinctively want to do it and when every single person who's ever known about "City" is dead and the people who knew about them are too, it will still be there.
@@awesomtown234I definitely feel like that's how the creator saw it. Enticing, mysterious, exclusive, a part of the world that will last longer than they do. They seem insufferable, full of themselves. Like a child who hits something away from you because "you can't see it, it's special"
The Beginners Guide is one of the most impactful game experiences to me. My best friend is, now, a digital artist. He had been drawing a lot since he was a kid, and he had mentioned wanting to eventually show off his art. So the Beginners Guide served as a guide, for me, to slowly help him show off his art, in a way that fit his style. I never wanted to overstep those bounds, just give support that works toward his own goals.
For me I truly believe that art doesn’t have to be shared or understood. It can be just for the artist. But, I also truly believe that art not shared with the world is the saddest thing. So much life and emotion just hidden away. There’s something haunted about that in and of itself.
As someone who actively makes art and rarely shows pieces to only close friends and family...I don't think it's sad at all. I think an artist chooses an audience like any other aspect of the piece. Imagine all the great, raw pieces of human experience that might have been rooted out and destroyed without the discretion of the author.
Art you made only for yourself can be very beautiful. The problem is when assholes like this one occupy public land for their own selfish desires. You can make are no one is allowed to see. But this is very different and this installation should be torn down.
@@capnbarky2682 It’s fine for you to do that, but I can’t bring myself to agree with you. I don’t think I can fully articulate why I will never be able to agree with you either. All I know is that there is a large part of me that yearns and cries and despairs whenever I realise that I can never know every person that exists right now. I can’t be their friend. I can’t love them. I can’t live alongside them. I can never laugh with them or hold them when they cry but I still mourn their loss. The part of me that wants to reach out, to connect, to share is the same part of me that cannot bear to see art locked away. Art is one of the fundamental ways we share ourselves with the world. Our thoughts, our feelings, our beliefs. Who we are as people. It’s a way to reach for each other in common understanding. It makes me sad that I cannot know you up close through conversation, or from a distance through your art. I will never be able to know any part of you at all. Like you didn’t exist. That’s terrible to me. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear or just rambling at this point, but I hope you understand.
I mean, isn’t the exclusivity kinda part of the experience? If it was freely available, and a popular tourist destination, wouldn’t it feel more… hollow? I mean, it would to me, at least.
I had an art history lecture that covered Goya, and while I remember it being mentioned that Saturday Devouring His Son was painted on the artist’s dining room wall, I do not recall if they mentioned how private a work it was. I certainly don’t remember the lecturer mentioned _it wasn’t given that name til after Goya’s death._ I swear when I learned this and grokked the implications of it, I felt a chill go up my spine. The dude’s whole legacy just has such this haunted feeling to it.
I think you put it well at the end. Art for no one is a misnomer. Art exists purely in the mind. It is the human experience that creates the art. Without human eyes, it's merely shapes and colors. Or really, nothing at all. As it is the human mind which creates those shapes and colors. Art lives to be experienced. Whether by the masses, a select group, or simply the artist. Art is always for someone.
during the whole video i couldn't help but think about a passage from adrian tchaikovsky's "children of ruin"; the flawed digested ancient copy of Erma Lante, a terraformer turned exobiologist who died millennia ago, her memory reanimated by an alien bacterial colony incapable of understanding what it ate, but desperate to find more, and maybe understand one day. and this shambling homunculus, this broken parody of a shadow of a long-dead woman, trudges around the landscape of Nod, digging up the native soil to build endless facades of a city from her memories. a dead city built from alien dirt, trying to rebuild with only contextless copies of broken memories, hoping it will make it understand. the landscape is strewn with the same grid of the same identical streets and facades, no interiors, no life, no purpose, repeated across continents on an alien world full of life that has no need for cities, on which only a handful humans ever set foot, in the distant past but the empty streets are still there
That reminds me of "The City" or "Library" in Nier Automata, where machines soulessly copy the work of humans, imitating all the aesthetic signs that places like that should have, but no colors or interiors (in the case of the city), those places are mostly uninhabited. The're just an empty spaces built by beings replicating works of some other civilization they could never see and therefore, understand.
Love this video. "If a city rises in the desert and no one is there to capture it, what does it matter if its a masterpiece",, Made me think about how like 7-10 years ago, American news orgs were *obsessed* about taking photos of China's "ghost cities" and "metro stations to nowhere". Now said cities are filled with thousands, if not millions, of citizens living somewhere that was deliberately planned for them. Obviously these are urban planning projects, not art pieces, but it made me think of how we conceptualize what we think of as these "empty spaces". Of course the City is located in the desert, the type of environment that receives the least ecological consideration by far.
Reminds me of something i learnt in geography, the difference between space and place. Space being whats between two places, but a space could also be a place for someone(and vice versa), like a field , to some its just a space to others its where they play football friday night.
@@XalantorOr are populated by small fractions of the intended population. A city designed for 2 million but inhabited by 1 million is still half empty.
Hi, Jacob. I paused at the time where you revealed the "twist" of the Beginners Guide, and went and finally played it. I think it broke me. I cried at the end, with that betrayal, with that... rotten center that crumbles the whole exhibit, cried at seeing myself in Davey the narrator. Came back, finished your video, cried again. But then again. I'm glad it exists. I'm glad City exists, even in its betrayal by the times, to a lesser extent by you. I'm glad YOU exist, and have helped me to develop my own meaning in seeing the art of games, and art in the world around me. I'm sad. But, I guess, that's the whole point. Because the meaning of art is the meaning we put into it. The experiences we bring to the table mold and shape how we view art. It's not objective. Sorry if this is rambling. I'm just... trying to find my own meaning, I guess. And I hope, some day, I do.
About The Beginner’s Guide version of Davey being fictionalized, it’s at least partially based on the real him. The letter Coda writes to him at the end, the last part of that is something a friend said to him in real life, that he felt physically ill being around him. I actually made a short video essay about the game some years ago and found the clip of Davey saying so while doing research
hearing jacob geller briefly summarize the ending of the beginners guide was equally as gut punching as going through the whole thing again. that “game” is so goddamn good
as an artist, this honestly makes me tempted to give a sketchbook to someone in a manner that only they could see it. being able to have such an impact on someone, for me, has always been the point. not for many people to see it
I kind of want to do something like that, but leave it as something for the kids I hope to have in the future. There's something weirdly beautiful and comforting about having something super personal that you pass down to your children and noone else will ever get to see it.
@@thecoolestfaisal that sounds amazing, and i think the only reason i didn't have that exact same plan is because i don't want kids. for me it would just be a really close friend or family member
Hi Jacob, I know it's highly unlikely you'll read this, but ever since I first played The Beginner's Guide back in 2015 I've been thinking about it's connection to conceptual art, unplayable games and un-experienceable art. Ten years later, you put into words something I've been trying to make sense of for ages. This video is truly a masterpiece. Thank you.
This reminds me of the secret NES game which is hidden within the Nintendo Switch's operating system. After hackers discovered how to activate it it was promptly removed. It is speculated that it was put there for Satoru Iwata who programmed the game and later became CEO of Nintendo before he died around the time that the Switch entered production.
It was a sort of memorial talisman, meant to be kept for a period of mourning and never opened. The patch that removed the game "Golf" when the traditional time for mourning was over, nearly a month after how to open the talisman had been revealed.
25:11 within the context of trauma, I think you can interpret this deconstruction in a more positive way. Trauma is strangely defined both by the things we struggle to remember (or in the case of generational trauma, things we were never told) as well as the things we cannot forget. In healing, you must confront both. Therapy is, in a sense, a form of deconstruction. You must face those memories, slice open the pages. Sometimes you find stories and history you weren’t aware of, sometimes you find painful memories your mind tried to bury, and occasionally you find something not so bad buried under there (like the kitchen being used). That sense of forgetting what was concealed and what wasn’t is part of healing too. That trauma doesn’t go away but it can be processed and filed away with the rest of your memories, no longer standing out or hiding. Just being. You are different now, more of your pages laid bare. But different isn’t bad. It just is. My mom has been unpacking some generational trauma recently. I know it’s hurt, but I think the pain is, if not lessened, easier to bear. Consolidating her memories with her siblings’ has been a part of the process and I’m reminded of that when looking at the cut open pages. There’s a quote from the band Crywolf that has always resonated with me. The gist of it is, opening up feels a lot like giving someone a knife and it concludes with the author saying, here I am. Here’s the knife. Please be gentle. Cutting open the pages of the book gave me a similar feeling. Art is personal, sharing it is, well, a lot like giving someone a knife.
On the subject of Plexis, I think it appeals to a certain approach to the divulge of context that many people do with anything made, from media to objects. I am someone who will dig into the backstage interactions to the writing to the cinematography of movies to being inextricably focused on the inside of a game console or a slot machine. Something that inherently bears the mark of a reader who permanently, visibly, and *physically* communicates that they're willing to vivisect art in order to understand it fascinates me. When any art leaves the hands of its creator, when it affirms its existence to the world even slightly, it submits to the death of its intimate conception. And yet in it's eventual perception, it lives forever. How fascinating. (Seeing this released the day after I opened up to someone about having issues making art for myself (let alone at all) felt like some sort of divine intervention, frankly. Your videos always get me in a more creative mood but this has to be one of- if not- your best videos yet. Thank you.)
I'll admit, my primary reaction to City's existence is pure contrarianism. "A place in the desert that I can't go? That I can't take pictures of? Says who? Can they stop me?" Just a gut reaction of opposition, before even any consideration of art- An artist can create art, can present that art to the world, but to tell the world how they can and cannot engage with that art? I don't really think that's up to them. ...That is a sort of entitlement, obviously. But we are entitled to some things, it's not always a word synonymous with 'unreasonable', and I feel like my own biases aside, there is still a line to be found there, somewhere. What are the limits of privacy? Coda, in the Beginner's Guide, certainly seems like their privacy was violated. Prince's feels more hard to judge. And City? The idea of a thing so large it ceases to be a thing and becomes a place- CAN that even be considered private in the first place? Does anyone have that right? Heck if I know.
Considering he didn't built it on private land and that the labor definitely involved other people, I think his demands for privacy are on pretty shaky ground. But I'm a contrarian myself, and my immediate thought was 'I hope someone flies a camera drone in there and really pisses him off', so this take is very much colored by who I am as a person.
I don't have an opinion on "privacy", but a comment on "limits": Please imagine we don't have all of today's tech. It's a few hundred years ago, before the invention of National Parks and the concept of "public land". Imagine that the person you trust most in this world tells you that they happened upon City. They tell you where it is and what it's like and how incalculably lucky they are to have found their way home. But they can only be so precise. The desert is vast. You want to search for City. But each time you set off into the Nevada mountains and wastes, you can only explore so far. You have to return to civilization for water. And you can't afford to do this forever! (In this economy?!) You can't *really* find City. City, a mile and a half wide, is simply too small. The monkey carved into the South American landscape went unseen for a thousand years. I think the question of "Who's gonna stop me?" might be conceptually more interesting if the answer is: the physical restraints of your flesh.
Do we really "own" anything to begin with? Or do we just possess it because we've declared "I own this thing". Hell even your own body, sure you control it, but does it not also control you? Choosing then you must eat or sleep. And what about not keeping it after passing? Can you own something truly if everything is temporary?
This is actually a really big thing that weighs on my mind whenever I get back into watching this channel or a new upload. The Beginner's Guide is one of my favorite games. I care a great deal about art and the profound, obviously, since I'm here. But the lesson that comes with TBG hits so hard, someone like me, an amateur writer who lives with and is best friends with a very talented artist. Our art compliments each other, and the realization that the game turns on me at its end is a terrifyingly poignant revelation that I am not only fallable in my artistic understanding, but so easily lulled into melding someone else into what I think about art, like this channel, like many other channels on this site I frequent so much for what profundity I may not know about or see. It leaves me with a gentle dread, knowing that I can so easily abandon myself in what I see, what I read, and what I watch and adopt meaning and perspective from those around me that I trust to various degrees to feed it to me, That's all to say nothing about the idea of becoming dependant on it, too. Having to leech meaning from art and those who create it or interpret it in order to fuel my own broken creative engine. It leaves me wondering who I truly am, whether I've let the burden of other people's thoughts change and shape me so that I can't know who I'd be without it, or whether that's even a bad thing to begin with. I love profundity, I love deep meaning and philosophy, and I love finding it in the art, writing, games, and music that I partake in, as well as amateurishly create. I love these videos that always seem to refuel that love, but it's pieces like TBG that make me see the lampposts, and make me strive to improve myself, so I can illuminate things for myself.
I will not view City. In time, I will forget that City exists. The memory of this video will decay in my mind and the idea of art for no one will vanish from my awareness. Perhaps that's the point.
beginner's guide... i always would get goosebumps seeing that screenshot in your twitter account's header. good to see you finally found the right video to talk about it more. beginner's guide is so precious.
As you describe city, I find myself suddenly mindful in an almost violent way. Aware of the shape and texture of my face, every breath I draw, the sensation of my fingers hitting the keys as I type this. I don't know if it's the result of what you are describing, or the sheer nature of your description, but your ability with words to draw me into this state so suddenly and effortlessly is a gift. I hope more great inspirations, and further genius finds you, for you have made yourself a worthy vessel, and your ability to express experience lets you share the exclusive beauty of things in a way that multiplies their affect and potency, a power you wield responsibly. Thank you for your existence, and for what you have done with it
My book, "How a Game Lives," is available for pre-order now. The deluxe edition- which includes prints and a vinyl album- will only be available until May 10! www.lostincult.co.uk/howagamelives
I can not wait to get my paycheck and order it soon 🙏
How do you freeze the views? On the video?
JACOB GELLER BOOK!!
LETSGOOO!!
Already pre-ordered 👍👍
Please tell me there'll be an audio version for blind people! Though, unless it's narrated by you, hearing your thoughts in anyone else's voice will be a trip.
I'm going to preoder one as soon as I know where I'm gonna be living this year. Love your work Jacob.
In college, there was an art exhibition on campus focused on the impermanence of art. One of the exhibits was a bowl of ashes titled "this painting was destroyed before the exhibition." Next to it was an oil painting titled "this painting will be destroyed if it is not taken by the end of the exhibition." I visited the exhibition every day, and nobody took the painting. On the last day, the painting was still there. I couldn't bear to see such craftsmanship destroyed, so I took it. Now it hangs in my bedroom, where only I can see it. Lately, I find myself looking at it and thinking "I'm the only one who ever sees this painting. Is this any different than if it were actually destroyed?"
Edited to actually close my quotation marks
Wow that’s very profound
Thank you for sharing. That’s beautiful
You can still break the spell that keeps it hidden from our sight. Had it burned, no magic known to humanity could have done that
Personally, I think it matters a lot. You preserved something that would otherwise have been lost, and perhaps it's loss would have been fine too... But it wasn't, and now it lives on for those that happen to glimpse it in your home and more importantly: for you. I can't put to words what that feels like to read, but it seems important somehow.
I had a lot of talks with artists of the pros and cons of both physical and digital art.
And one thing I’ll say is digital art will always exist for the people, nothing can truly destroy it if you know what you’re doing and it will continue to be there for 1-2-100-1 million people that may want to see it and have a piece of it. No one can take it and hide it away from others in some private collection.
Though you did the right thing. And you enjoying it is more valuable than it being gone imo.
from the creator of such masterpieces as 'Fear of Depths' and 'Fear of Cold' may I present the esteemed Jacob Geller's latest perfection - 'Fear of Concrete'
Fear of Missing Out
Fear of Graffiti
Fear of Worthlessness
Fear of being perceived maybe? The horror of something as vulnerable as your soul poured into your art being absorbed by others.
Fear of being interpreted
Cannot describe how excited I am for the book. You've got me thinking a lot on the preservation of media and I'm thankful to be able to keep a part of yours now no matter what happens to this site
RT enjoyer of beautiful content
hello fellow Irishman
hello rtgame player of games
damn, you really have a good taste RT, love you and your art dude :D
Well well well, if it ain't the drift king himself enjoying the impermanence of art
After Syd Barrett left Pink Floyd, he returned to his birth name Roger Barrett and spent the rest of his life in reclusion painting. The vast majority of his work was never seen by anyone but him and maybe his close family, because he destroyed most of his paintings upon finishing them. It's an incredible contrast to the exuberant displays and mainstream visibility that Pink Floyd went on to do those same years.
I feel like this answers to me what makes City feel so wrong to me. The arrogance that you can lock away a part of the earth even after you die, or lock away pieces of music in a vault, or whatever, falls away if the person actually commits to that and destroys it themselves before they die.
I suppose there's a discussion to be had about the boundaries of art and privacy. You could write a sequel to this essay about the disclosure of historical letters between figures, to the ethics of leaking online DMs, to the joke about asking your friend to clear your browser history if you die. That last one speaks about how we are remembered, and how much say we ought to have in our legacy. The ancient Greeks thought part of living an excellent life had at least something to do with your legacy and memory, so there's a real cultural throughline from then all the way to now.
i don't know much about pink floyd but i know a little bit about syd, as he is one of my boyfriend's biggest inspirations. they're both neurodivergent and share a lot of similarities. this comment made me feel quite emotional (or maybe i'm just high LOL)
@@iluvxtc0 becoming debilitatingly obsessed with Sid Barrett was instrumental in me learning I am neurodivergent lol so it's quite an emotional topic for me too
I appreciate you talking about Syd without mentioning the usual nonsense about how he “went mad”
There's a similar notion I've been mulling over for some time now. When I read a book, I create a movie in my mind. All the characters and locales take on a specific shape that my brain forms from the writer's words. My own unique, non-transferable version of the universe and the people in it. However, once a film or TV show is created, those people and places become fixed. Daenerys Targaryen now looks like Emilia Clarke. Aragorn will forever be Vigo Mortensen. Every film adaptation invades a little bit of my mental real estate.
This, man. So much this. I think it's why I'm always a little bit afraid of popular adaptations, no matter how good, lol.
This is the exact reason I avoided watching the Harry Potter movies for so long. Rarely do the characters and scenery depicted in movie adaptations match up to the ones envisioned in my own brain-scape. In a very real way, this disparity ruins beloved stories for me. It's like being told you're wrong about purely subjective material.
@@taylorthecurator Exactly!
film adaptations of everything is definitely a factor in my visual aphantasia. it's corrosive to the imagination in the extreme to so often be given the visions of others.
I'm stubborn af and my mental image of characters and scenes from books are often unchanged even once a TV series/Movie is created. But I am always so disappointed when characters, places, stuff are finally depicted but aren't as cool as I imagined them.
Sorry Jacob, but true art for noone is my 50 word docs and 4 premiere pro projects that I refuse to release because it isn't perfect yet, but refuse to work on it because I can't make it perfect yet
I've SO been there 😂❤ I try to get over it by doing new things I am terrible at just for fun and the sheer joy of making something new
It's art for you, though. You made it. You're not no one.
They will never be perfect. 'Finished' is a chimera. So the question is really, when will they be good enough? Is them being wrong really worse than their non-existance?
If you never work on it them because they're not perfect yet and you're not good enough to make them perfect, then you'll never get good enough.
Much better if you work on it then later throw away what you don't like
A perfect thing is a thing thoroughly finished, and what of humanity's is ever truly complete?
Art is a form of communication. Sometimes you only want to talk to yourself.
Bars
All art is in conversation with other art and with the world. In an abstract way, I don't think it's possible for an artist to direct all their energy inward
@@biancahertzman6539 I define art as only something humans can give and derive meaning to and from. You could sing a song to the sea, but no one besides you would derive meaning from it. Also, if the artist dies with a piece undiscovered, it can’t enter the zeitgeist and is inconsequential. I kind of get what you mean, but if you endow the existence of a solitary piece with an “energy” that resonates with the universe. That’s something that hasn’t been quantified and will not take seriously.
this made me weirdly emotional thank u
THATS SUCH A GOOD PERSPECTIVE OMG
This is a great essay, but I also want you to know that I was housing a giant burrito in my face for dinner when Saturn Devouring His Son popped up and I felt weirdly called out.
lol seeing that depiction of Saturn look at you while you look back exactly like he is…is that how it went down?
@@ivandejesusalvarez9313 Pretty much, yeah. Like having your soul looked into. 😂
Bro lmfao i cant stop laughing at this
Was it a cabeza or a sesos burrito? I hope so, for the sake of the synchronicity.
@@almishti No, it was chicken unfortunately 😂
I get the feeling that the real ‘City’ was occurring while they were creating the piece. Planning, construction coordination, calling in favors for machinery, those sounds are all so common in a city. The constant development and upkeep of all the infrastructure is a major aspect. During the construction, it probably felt like a whole city working to make this art
Makes me think of Walt Disney World.
11 years have gone by, and yet, the concept of "Art for No One" still brings me back to 2013, when the creator one of Yume Nikki's most popular fangames at the time, LcdDem, simply vanished and told everyone not to talk about the game publicly, not to contact them, basically, to forget it existed. Same thing happens with all of their music - they deleted it off the face of the internet.
One part of me still wishes I could've told them how much LcdDem inspired me to create my own work - in fact, I might not have made my own games at all if it wasn't for LcdDem. Countless posts posing as this person have surfaced, under a veil of anonymity, indirectly claiming to be them, but it's never final. Of course, everyone has the right to anonymity. The only thing that stings is, having to feel guilty just for sharing an amazing piece of art, for mentioning it, talking about it. 11 years, and there was never any closure.
I tell myself I let go, and I wouldn't say it's a lie, but it's not completely true either. But it inevitably comes up in conversation - the way it handles colors, the atmosphere, the music, the way almost no inch of game space is wasted (except maybe the orange maze). It's at the root of why I picked RPG Maker at all, it's the first Japanese fangame I've ever played. It's the core of why I made my own fangame at all - how can I forget such beauty?
I'm not to the end of the video yet, but the idea of "art for no one" evokes, for me, the reality of everyone's singleplayer Minecraft worlds. An idea implied in "for no one" is "(except the creator.)" There are probably millions of beautiful, intricate, or personally meaningful things people have created in singleplayer game files, only to never touch that world again, to lose it on a broken hard drive, or at least, never made accessible to the public. I'm not fully comfortable equating Minecraft with art, but it feels analogous.
In this example, I think Minecraft is more of a tool used to make art (wether the game is art itself is another question). Kinda like Paint, I guess. Or Flipnote.
A very interesting point you made. About 5 years ago, my girlfriend's bird died and my friend and myself built a massive aviary in our Minecraft world, just for her. That aviary meant a lot to her and still means a lot to me. It's on my harddrive, somewhere. But only the three of us ever got to appreciate it.
Yep, had the exact same thought! I will say, though, that it does bring me joy to tour around my old minecraft maps and show it to people. It's a way to express myself I guess.
Well if MC isn't art in itself then it's a brush, tools don't need to be artistic to be used for art
This reminds me of a story I heard on the internet, I can't remember where or how long ago. A young man made a friend on a minecraft server one day. After playing together for a while, his new friend revealed that she was dying of cancer. He continued to play with her until the end, and ever after, in each new minecraft world he made, the very first thing he would do is mine a diamond, use a name tag to put her name on it, and put it in an item frame in his base. In every world.
There are probably thousands of little rituals like this in minecraft alone that would be completely inscrutable to anyone who is not the "author" of the ritual. Really drives home the point for me about the Beginner's Guide, and how much of a betrayal is really is to rip that kind of private work out of context and put it on display for the world.
One of my friends made a painting that his art teacher called the best piece he’s ever seen. My friend painted over it completely and now hangs the completely black canvas over his door. I have still never seen the original. Only my friend and the teacher have. And no one else will. I think about this more than I should.
My friend never took a picture. And has said he forgot what the original looked like.
I read pretty recently that, to build confidence in your art, you should make something good and then destroy it.
@@killkillz makes sense honestly. You have to be confident enough to destroy something great knowing you can make something better.
That goes hard as fuck
@@killkillzHonestly hell nah. I understand the sentiment but my art has so, so much love put into it and is a direct depiction of my mental health at the time. I can tell when and why I made each piece even if I find an old paper and do not remember actually drawing it
@bnsz8704
@killkillz
when i was in middle school art, we were making small paintings on small canvas panel boards - about index card size. so, i made my piece of art like i was told. my classmate beside me, a fun and sassy girl, gawked at it and complimented me for my skill. i said thank you, and for fun, decided to smear my still wet painting, seeing all the colors muddle together like some sort of memory fading away. i had fun, but apparently she did not. she did not yell at me, but she definitely seemed a little angry or annoyed with my actions. i didn't know why, and i still don't know why. maybe she thought i was being rude to her. i still "ruin" my paintings nowadays. usually i think to myself that, "man, this sucks," or, "i could do way better." one thing that changed is that i now use oil paints instead of acrylics. painting with acrylics just feels awful to me, and with the combined quick drying time, i get frustrated easily.
i dont know why im putting a piece of my life into a random comment section of a random video (or perhaps it's not random). i think i just wanted to share my experience with "[making] something good and then [destroying] it."
About the Rat King image from Plexus, I wonder if it's intended to display the violence of the action of revealing it.
It is not simply splayed along the edges. No, it was complete in the pages. The reader splays it, in an effort to reveal what is inside you splay and cut through the plexus of the art created by the artist.
i love this community, you gave context and meaning to the passing 'wouldn't those rat edges have been connected' i had thought!
I KNOW I loved seeing that... and it could also be read as the inverse too! Rat kings are almost never alive, because 1. the substance tying the rats together is usually rotten organic matter and 2. being tied together makes mobility and food searching impossible. So in the context of familial trauma: does cutting through the Rat King allow the members freedom? When we cut ourselves off from people who hurt us- especially our blood relations- are we snipping off parts of ourselves, because now we are divorced from our context?
Should've made a cut near the inner edge instead. Just one among many false dichotomies the world has to offer!
@@Scypek turn it into a centerfold hell yeah
@@Scypek I love the idea of this, it still irreversibly alters the book, but it's done with the effort of at least keeping some semblance of the original
16:04 The Nazca lines can be seen from the mountains that surround them! They’re not as mysterious as public discourse makes them out to be.
i've always found it interesting that the word we use for making art public is "releasing"
like a bird from it's cage, like a prisoner from their confinement we set our art free so it no longer belongs to us
I want to scoff but I actually think this is really apt. The notion of ownership was on my mind throughout the video; how we may possess art by controlling knowledge and access, but just as our bodies are a stream of borrowed elements only briefly intersecting with our identities, so too do our creations belong to the universe once death forever relaxes our grip.
I think you would really enjoy the Regina Spektor song Bon Idee. It deals with that same sort of feeling, even if the genre isn't for you.
@@tortis6342 I love Regina! That song was new to me, what a cool premise.
In Spanish we say lanzar (launch). Como un beisbolista con su pelota, un cohete de su plataforma, o vomito de la boca.
i agree. i’m a huge believer in the “death of the author” concept so every time i see something make a post about a headcanon they have or fanart they made, and someone else comes along saying “ermmm that isn’t canon the author said so ☝️🤓” i have to laugh
Another fun thing about plexus/book publishing: pre 1900’s books used to be sold much like plexus is, with connected or uncut pages loosely bound in paper or fabric. This was so the (wealthy) purchaser of the book could arrange to have it bound properly in leather of their choosing later (likely to match their library’s collection). If one was to read a book unbound like this, they’d have to slice open each page individually with a knife.
When hearkening back to family trauma Helfrecht also may have been thinking about how her ancestors would have received and read a book like hers, down to the paper and the cutting. As someone who has cut pages that are like this, It feels solemn to do; not often to books require you to take a decisive step every single page you turn. But it also is made yours by the way you decide to shape each slice, if you trim the edges or not. You shape it, not just for yourself but for everyone who reads it after you.
I was thinking about that, too! It’s something I remember thinking about as a very evocative act, but just recently I read about it again when reading an article about the artist Julia Morison. She makes abstract works, but they’re often based on Kabbalistic structures, more out of the desire for an interesting formal constraint than as a practitioner. The article describes how she was researching something else in a university library, and found an uncut volume of Hermetic writings. The writer compares her act of cutting the book to her artistic practice: “the handheld intimacy of the object; the promise of overlooked and undervalued knowledge; and the need to make repeated cuts in a fragile surface before gaining access to that knowledge.” The footage of Jacob cutting into Plexus brought those ideas very vividly to mind.
The Nazca lines are completely viewable from nearby hills. The concept that they are only visible from the air is one made up by ancient alien conspiracies - although the effort to make them properly proportioned to a perfectly down-ward view may imply that the goal is to be viewable by the heavens/stars/gods
ooo interesting implication there, never thought of that
also, humans are smart enough to design things to be viewed from the sky without reaching the sky ourselves. the "aliens" conspiracies undercut the power of human ingenuity.
@@toricon8070 Yes it discredits the humans that made it, similar thing with the pyramids. As if the humans of that area couldn't possibly be intelligent enough to make something like that.
Thank you for clarifying.
@@aersla1731 Deep down those "ancient aliens" people are just racists. Do you ever notice how they always talk about African or Native American buildings? No alien help was needed to build the Parthenon or the Colosseum of course, but the Pyramids and the Nazca lines? There's no way humans built those...
im very fascinated by your comments on the anxiety of not "getting it" when going to city, the anxiety of coming back without a "worthwhile" experience, something to write to home about, etc. the topic of "getting" art is something that pops up in your videos fairly often but i wonder if you'd ever make a video solely about it. it would be phenomenal coming from you of all people
I'm so interested in this concept. I'm a creative writing teacher and one of the fundimental things I have to tell students to bear in mind when approaching texts is that 'getting it' is not necessary. Some works are not open to us all, or cannot be fully understood - and that's fine. And then we can talk about what it means for our own efforts and choices in creating fictional works. I'd be thrilled to see how Geller would explore this idea in his own essays (and in anything else he chose to touch upon)
His Hotline Miami 2 video touched on this, even down to the title "I Do Not Understand Hotline Miami 2". Although the discussion there is pretty heavily in the context of that specific game rather than the plight of attempting to understand art as a whole, from what I recall.
ig on some level that’s part of the job. If I were in his position, it would be a dream job, but I’m not sure the underlying stress of needing to have an idea to make a video abt would ever go away.
@@helenmcclory5676A professor I have a class with rn specializes in shakespeare (and teaches creative writing) and she has expressed many times about how students are put off from her classes or reluctant to participate for fear of "not getting it" or having not "gotten it" prior. Your comment has me thinking about the role of the author in making things 'gettable' and how that conflicts with subtlety and style. This is all a bit rambly but its on my mind for some writing i need to do myself
City has no scale without the person. City has no meaning without the person. City has no soul without the person. A city is a nature we made for us.
Superior to tradGod’s nature. We should use up the Sun like an e-cig
Probably the most damaged of Goya’s Black Paintings by institutional interpretation is the painting “Drowning Dog”. It is the most minimalist of Goya’s paintings, but very emotive, with all matter being held in the bottom-left corner the little dog is, with its eyes held up to the majority of the painting, a swath of off-white near-emptiness. Despite this, it’s held at the prized end of the “Black Paintings” hall in the Museo del Prada, with its plaque proclaiming it to be the best work of this series and definitively a drowning dog.
I looked it up and at first I was like "what, that's it?" then I lingered on it for about ten more seconds and when I tabbed away I felt the need to take a nice deep breath. Art's pretty cool
Seeing this painting in person was definitely life-altering for me. I didn't know about it before I got into the Pinturas Negras space, and it instantly became my favorite. Seeing both this painting and "Juana La Loca" were trascendental experiences I don't often have in museums. Can't recommend Museo del Prado enough.
I'm not the creative type, but I am a biologist, and many of the things you said in this video stuck with me. Despite all the technological advances the way many of us learn anatomy is still to take a razor to a corpse like you did to that book, open that which was mean to remain closed, and take the things inside out of their intended state. The concept of *in situ* - in its natural state - is a sort of holy grail for those attempting to understand our bodies, because to observe something is to change it and to be able to see how life works is in many cases to damage it. This is especially true in the case of the brain, which is simultaneously one of the most important and most fragile parts of us. Nobody has ever truly seen a plexus, just crude imitations or dead tissue. Perhaps the divine art is also for no one.
I don’t really know how to properly put it into words but this comment is incredibly beautiful. Thank you.
I'm a zoologist myself, and... I think a lot about species that went extinct before humans got to see them. What we have left are fossils, and that's only if we're lucky. There was beautiful life out there that we will never get to see, except for in echoes left behind in stone, if even that. Who's to say how many more species were never fossilized, and will likely never be known? And yet without creatures of the past existing as, among other things, evolutionary stepping stones, we wouldn't even be here. We, and all the life around us here and now, are living proof of the fact that they were here. And even if we never get to see them or know them, we carry them with us.
I'm an aspiring biologist and I so often long to see the natural world as it exists *without me.* I want to experience nature I'm not a part of, to see what happens when all the animals are just existing without any person as a blip on their radar. But it's impossible. At least outside of limited snapshots captured by cameras that are still *there*, just unnoticed by the wildlife
To observe something is to change it... the biological equivalent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
@@ParadoxGavelIts crazy to me to even think about the life currently existing on our planet that we have yet to discover. The earth is so vast and diverse and we’ll never truly get to know every secret it holds.
Okay but "Las Vegas has more in common with the Nuclear Bombs dropped nearby than the environment it was built in" is such a hard line tho? Like wtf.
Every other line in Jacob's videos is hard as fuck, and the rest are set-up.
Well, but he's definitely not wrong. You gotta admire how commited Vegas is to its theme: Perversion. It perverts nature, it defies its own environment (who would build such a huge city in Nevada of all places?) and even its reason for existing at all is questionable. It's so over the top wrong that it wraps back around to being amazing in a twisted way.
Bright, loud and bombastic 💥❤
Mans a natural poet for sure
Seriously. I was so impressed
33:34 For a moment I thought this was going to lead into some sort of Da Vinci Code-esque crime drama type scenario where Jacob either goes looking for Goya’s skull or reveals that he was the one who had it all along
I really like the idea that if Jacob found a famous, lost historical artifact, he would reveal it 3/5 of the way into an hour-long essay as part of a transition linking painting and sculpture back to gaming, all in a video where neither the title nor the thumbnail is related to the artifact. I would be disappointed by anything less.
@@generatoralignmentdevalue What if nobody took his head and it just went walkabouts on its own?
As an artist who has been destroying my paintings over the last 20 years, this spoke to me very highly. I would take photos of them before I destroyed them, but very, very rarely would I show the photos to people. A few years ago, an ex-girlfriend would watch me paint, and she convinced me that I should stop destroying my work. Only in the two years since have I started to not burn or paint over everything. It has been an interesting shift, as now I make a bit of money selling them, but there is also an unsettling feeling that the part of my soul which I'd put into my work is still out there. The catharsis that I would get from destroying the trauma I'd put into a piece seems to linger.
When I was working on a comic project I hoped would be my masterpiece, I befriended someone who offered to assist me. At first I agreed, as any help with coloring and shading (my least favorite parts) is helpful, and everything would have been fine if he'd left it at that.
As years passed my assistant became my co writer, adding his suggestions, then characters, then rewrites, then changing the genre and the very purpose of the story. I would kneel on the floor crying and begging him to stop but he would look down at me, wait for me to catch my breath, and continue pushing changes as though I had said nothing. Eventually his name went before mine on the creative credits. He was the main name on the websites. Then he talked me into turning one of my lead characters evil so he could be replaced with his own and I snapped. I did the only thing I still had power to do- I killed the project.
Thus led to a two year mental breakdown where I couldn't draw nor write. He didn't understand anything I was going through. He still doesn't.
A while back he suggested that we play The Beginner's guide together. It was... uncomfortable. Here was a game about an artist meeting a fan who gradually takes over their life, changing the works against the creator's will, and not understanding what was wrong. I looked at my former co writer, wondering why he wanted me to play this as it MUST be a sick joke on his part, and I saw... nothing. No recognition. No flicker of recognition on how closely this game matched our own experience.
He thought the game was about bad internet critics.
I still don't know how to process this.
He sounds like a complete psychopath. I'm so sorry you had to endure this. 💔
Jesus, that sounds terrifying. Especially the part where he DOESN'T SEE that TBG is literally about what he himself did... That means that none of it was out of malice, but just emptiness. Zero emotional intelligence. I believe you, some people literally ARE that much of a blank void, and trying to ask them to change themselves is pointless. The only thing you can do is set boundaries, distance yourself, eventually leave. (I had a roommate like this, so I know.)
I hope you are able to find other friends, if you can't yet cut yourself off from this empty void of a person, at least others can support you when things go wrong. That's the number one step for anyone in an abus!ve relationship - friend or boss or family or anything - expand your social circle, tell your story to people who will listen, and lean on THEM more and more, instead of this person who gives you nothing and just takes. And of course, if you can afford it, professional therapy.
The point is to get other people to validate your experience - commenting on YT and hearing supportive strangers agreeing that what you went thru sounds awful is a really good first step! You can acknowledge that you suffered. Honestly, some people never get THAT far. You're already able to tell the story, and you don't blame yourself. You're on the right track. I think you're gonna be fine.
that's fucked up
that is terrifying what the hell
@@86fifty On the other hand, sometimes people are terrible at recognising this kind of thing, but they don't lack feeling. He isn't aware of what was going through OP's mind, just as OP isn't aware of what's going through his. It could be that, if he was made aware of what he'd done he'd be horrified. I'm reminded of the commonly believed myth that autistic people have no empathy, when that generally speaking isn't just not true, it tends towards the opposite. Hyperempathy is far more common than lack of empathy in autistic people, though both *can* happen. But they might not show it, or they might not see the signs that the other person is in distress. But when they do see it, they feel it far more strongly than the average person. Or alternatively they just don't get it. They don't feel it. Both can absolutely happen.
Its unlikely this person is an empty void, is what I'm saying. They might just not see the signs. Not realise what they'd done. To OP, it was his masterpiece slowly taken over by an assistant. The the assistant, it was just some comic that became special when it became a collaborative work. Or maybe he really was a terrible person. We can't tell.
But I'm always wary when people assign malice or soullessness to people like that when its far more likely to be both parties failing to understand one another. Nobody is a blank void.
I'm reminded of being a child and checking out an illustrated book from the library. A delightfully-drawn "mystery" wherein a bunch of anthropomorphized animals attend a birthday party only to discover that someone's eaten all of the food before the guests could make it to the dining room. The twist is that the book ends with all of the animals proclaiming their innocence with the reader left to guess at who's telling the truth and who's lying. The cliffhanger ending had one bit of salvation: a sealed envelope on the rear cover. My copy was sealed but the bigger problem is that this was a library book. Child-me agonized over whether I could cut through the paper and find the answer until my mom (thankfully) reminded me that the next kid to check this out would likely *also* want to read the answer. We opened the envelope together and found out which animal ate the feast.
And I'm glad we did! The answer was that the mouse ate the food along with a few hundred of his friends. This book went from good to great as the letter also revealed that the hundreds of other mice were visible as texture in the painted backgrounds. Sure enough, reading through the book again brought a new joy. I'm sure the author and illustrator would have been glad for my petty act of vandalism.
I think there's more of a parallel with Undertale rather than the destruction of Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue. What limits would you break to experience more of a good thing? An author-intended transgression that brings you closer to total understanding at the expense of a preconceived limit.
Graeme Base
I did think about Undertale during this video. Where at the end of the best and happiest ending, a character BEGS you not to play the game again, not to restart it all so that you can experience the choices you didn't make; leave the characters to their happy ending. But of course many players do reset, often to get the worst and most painful ending afterwards, because their curiosity and desire to experience more of the art was greater than their respect for the fictional characters that comprise the art.
I REMEMBER THIS!!! Holy shit, this brought back a real vague memory when I was like 8 yrs old.
@@Roverdrive_XReminds me of the one and only time I played through undertale six-ish years ago. I got the pacifist ending, freed the underground, and have not touched the game since to leave all the characters at peace
what was this book called??
One time, in my Minecraft world, I put down a big slab of sandstone blocks, with the explicit intention of forgetting why I did so.
It sounds like you failed.
@@-tera-3345 there's still plenty of time.
Sounds like some of my experiences in Satisfactory.
I guess what makes me not a true artist is that I don't have the audacity or money to do it in real life.
@@ixnayonthetimmay tbh I think Satisfactory art is just dependent on being able to show it off effectively.
I definitely think that some builds I've seen became... _something_ alright and what is art if not living rent-free in someone's brain like Let's Game It Out's conveyor belt tornadoes of lag testing?
The google reviews for city are pretty interesting. Lots of one star reviews "we didn't get in, we drove for hours thinking they'd let us in"
"I built a massive long Johnson in public space and charge people to view it because I want to feel like a self important cockhead"
On them, honestly. Everything about City says you need to make a reservation
@@megancress1384city is so stupid in my opinion. its on my bucket list to break in. its on public land too...
@@sphinxansame here. down with. City!! >:3
@@BadGirlTayTayNowIn the next episode of jacob geller ''Who is afraid of the City''
I don't know who said it first. Pretty sure my grandfather was quoting someone else. He always said, "There is music that's meant to be heard. But there is also music that is meant to be played."
I can't stop thinking about this video.
Last week my grandfather passed away. He had been sick for a long time and was almost completely unaware of his surroundings. Just after he was diagnosed he wrote a letter to his wife, intended for her to only read after he died. But before he died, she would be diagnosed with cancer and pass soon after. He never knew, or at least never accepted it.
Next week he will be cremated, with this letter. A letter, written by a dead man, for a dead woman, neither of whom ever knew the other died.
We made the decision that no one would read this letter, but the thought of it won't leave my mind. No one will ever know what was in the letter, I doubt my grandfather even knew.
It truly is art for no one, but only now.
“I also frequently wonder whether any of this means anything at all. Which is just the experience of making art, I think.”
- Jacob Geller, The Best Games of 2023
I haven't seen that video, but I really needed to hear this today.
in high school my art class went to an exhibition of "outsider art." the artist was henry darger. all of his work was discovered posthumously, including a 15,000+ page book. it was an uncomfortable experience for many reasons. his work primarily featured children, and violence against them. he was a devout catholic and most likely a repressed homosexual and pretty obviously struggled with sexual identity based on his depictions of the sexes. afterwards i couldnt stop thinking about how his art was probably made to process trauma and identity and all number of things, and now it was being picked apart by high schoolers to study for quiz questions.
Oh god could you imagine your vent art being picked apart by high schoolers after you die?? Yuck yuck I agree with you entirely
@@sydneygorelick7484 nah that's not too bad, you're already dead so it's not like it would affect you anyway. No imagine if your vent art was discovered and picked apart by high schoolers while you're still alive...
@@sydneygorelick7484 and the part when they said "most likely" 💀
@@DreamyAileen we like to think the dead are still alive. it’s easier to process death as someone “going away” for a little while, which is why our brain tends to show the dead sympathy.
I had never heard of this man before this comment.
I read his Wikipedia article, top to bottom. Then I googled some of his art.
I don't know how to describe what I'm feeling, but if I wasn't at work I might have a good cry.
I used to be homeless in Vegas, all of my time not spent day laboring on housing construction at the edge of town was spent crack climbing, bouldering, and soloing in Red Rocks. Your inclusion of all the different spots within the park's loop added such an extra point of subjective meaning to this video.
Thank you for the unintentional (though very welcome) identity trip.
You are a Storyteller. This is what it must mean to be a Storyteller. Man, I could listen to you talk about absolutely anything. You use words SO well. You flatter each word. Thank you.
Something cool I noticed that wasn't mentioned is at 32:28 where you state "the giant is sleeping" is that all the little circles and shapes are all people, with a big ladder climbing up on top of him. A whole lot of tiny little people exploring this sleeping giant. (The most notable person is in his left eye! A little kid peeking in.
Could you maybe form a narrative out of the three colossi shown in the video? The sleeping giant woken up by little people, destroying their city in anger, then feeling regretful over it?
When you brought up Goyas paintings and called it Saturn Devouring his Son, my first response was to out loud say "That's not what it's called!". I was *overjoyed* when you went on to explain that none of these paintings have Titles.
For me, that exacerbates the horror of that particular black painting. It's something monstrous, cannibalistic... and people looked at it and went "Clearly, that's Saturn devouring his Son!"
Because if it's not that, not a myth that can be clearly categorised... then what is it?
Ever since I learned that fact about that specific painting, I've been haunted by it.
Edit: I think one of the most interesting parts about that piece of information is that...
It's the one thing that even with the painting being revealed, Goya will take with him to the grave. Everyone has seen these paintings. No one will ever know what they are paintings of.
Who IS this monstrous figure? Who are the "Pilgrims", the "Witches", if that's even what they are in the first place? We can guess, we can speculate... but we'll never know. The figure is saturn because people decide he's saturn, turning to old myths to try to make sense of something that was never intended for them to see.
Personally, I like not knowing who the figure is, as much as I find this picture far more haunting and terrifying. I think If I ever knew for sure, if I suddenly knew what the painting was 'about'... I'd go right back to how I felt before I learned it's nameless. It wouldn't be disturbing anymore, because I'd have no reason to think on it. But as a glimpse of something that I'll never really understand, a nightmarish figure seen for an instant with no context or explanation, it will probably haunt me for the rest of my life.
I'm sorry I'm nerding out about this one fact. I really, really like that bit of trivia and as soon as I saw Goya come up, I was hoping for this so badly.
love hearing your excitement about this!! as ive learned more about that painting i agree, not knowing what it was meant to be makes it really unsettling in a really interesting way
Not entirely related, but I went to see Magritte's Museum sole times ago, and one thing that stayed with me was his total disregard towards titles. While he paid a lot of attention to his painting, he went as far as letting other chose titles for him. Sometimes, the same title go to two different paintings. Sometimes, the same painting has two different titles. He already expressed everything he needed to express in his work, so titles didn't seem necessary.
And I feel it's the same idea here. If that Goya painting became so famous, it's because of all it evokes, and wether Goya ever gave it a title or not, or whatever it may be, that doesn't really change its evocative power (again, we can't know what Goya thought of). Trying to mitigating it by naming it is vain.
I don't know, I just find this whole subject so interesting
Dude, you're in a Jacob Geller comment section. We're all nerds here, you're in good company, no need to apologize!
i feel like that's so closely intertwined with the covering up of the figure's nudity. they want to make sense of this frightening image, to give it a reason to be scary as a way to make it somehow less so, and so they compare it to Saturn- except the legend of Saturn never said he had a boner while eating his children, and that brings a whole host of new interpretations to the image that many people weren't comfortable with (or a select few decided the rest wouldn't be comfortable.) so they covered it up.
i feel it's a much more humanly potent image with the new information.
That 2nd to the last paragraph, really reminds me a lot of the noodle incident video by Overly Sarcastic Productions. To summarize, Noodle Incidents are basically scenes in whatever media where a character names some past event and maybe one or two things that happened in it but never give any context or full explanations for whatever the event was, main example being the Calvin and Hobbes noodle incident after which the trope was named after, where Bill Watterson, author of Calvin and Hobbes, just decided to never explain the incident since he figured nothing was going to be funnier than whatever ridiculous thing the audiences thought up. That trope talk video also mentions horror noodle incidents, and it's really what mirrors your speech about not wanting to know what it is. Horror Noodle incidents may involve not showing the monster's full anatomy, or like you say, not explaining a thing about it, because whatever the audience tries to label or identify it with, and whatever fearful and scary expectations they may hold about said horror noodle could be scarier than if Goya had actually just spelled out what it was.
Another artist who comes to mind is Franz Kafka. He never intended to publish his books and told his only friend who knew about his writing to burn them after his death.
Virgil. Before his death, he told Augustus to burn the Aeneid, the work he considered his masterpiece. We still don't know why he wanted to burn it, just that he did. The Aeneid was never meant to be read by anyone but Virgil himself.
@@PhantomGato-v-how reputable is our source for this? Considering the propaganda in the Aeneid this seems unlikely.
@@Hazzy113 this is the popular opinion about the Aeneid. However, the point about propaganda is very valid, you can never trust anything too much. I'll see if I can find some sources and add it to my comment.
Marcus Aurelius too
Then the short foreign soldiers from the capitol saved all of them from being destroyed
As a Peruvian, I'm somewhat surprised you never addressed the damaging of the Nazca lines by the Greenpeace group over half a decade ago. The destruction caused by a group of outsiders trying to give their own meaning to a work, disrespecting its culture, and its preservation. The Nazca lines can't be visited by the average individual. To walk on them requires specific permission from the government and those preserving the work, and to see them from above requires access to a airplane, something most people in the country can't afford. The term for the kind of surface that covers most of the Peruvian desert is "Desert Pavement." A thin layer of rocks covering every each inch, cementing the landscape in the same shape it always was, and always will be. Any step you make in the deserts of Peru leaves a permanent scar that will last for thousands of years, and from above, you can see every track left by every car that's ever wandered into the sands. And in an attempt by outsiders to shame a country into changing the fuel they depend on to exist, they destroyed part of our heritage that we all agreed should be protected. There is not a single person in Peru who believes the average person should be allowed to walk along the lines, as to view them is to destroy them. Which is why Greenpeace had to flee the country. Not just out of risk of the government punishing them, but out of risk of the people punishing them.
I feel a more in depth analysis on the lines would've greatly aided your thesis here, and brought some much needed attention to the damage those who don't understand art can do out of a desperation to grant it their own meaning. Like the tearing of the pages, or the slicing of the painting. Despite this though, I'm still glad to see them mentioned. Although most people associate Peru with the work of the Incans, our national logo illustrates the P of our nation with the swirl of the monkey's tail. It's a work that for us, is just as important as our cities of stone.
Great work, and I look forward to your next video!
Thank you for this addition! I had no idea, and I'm glad you shared
I've read some more of the topic and damn, sadly Greenpeace activists weren't the only ones doing damage. 2012 and 2013 damage was done by the Dakar Ralley and some other damage was done by a quarry. It's a tragedy that the Nazca lines can't be protected from destruction. Too big for a museum and walling them in would be too expensive.
@@yonokhanman654 It creates a paradox. Greenpeace would definitely be a group to oppose such things as that quarry, but instead, a lack of appreciation for the intersection of nature AND indigenous historical culture undermined their very morals, ruining something possibly created in honor of the natural surroundings
@@OhNoBohNo Really sheds a light on the fact that Greenpeace is an American non-profit. Indifferent to the cultures and values of the nation of Peru, they merely wanted to make a statement. Bullies, who scarred the hallowed grounds of a piece too majestic to even gaze upon, simply because they unilaterally decided their cause was grander than the works of some uncivilized, uncouth, no doubt smelly Latin Americans. As a Latin American myself, it's hard not to feel extremely bitter about just how kind the gesture was.
Thank you for sharing this.
Y’know what I’m thinking of? When I was little, I saw this commercial about a musician who made a vinyl record out of some sort of earthy material, can’t remember what it was. It was supposed to be a statement about climate change, because he buried it underground and it wasn’t supposed to be opened for a set amount of years, it was maybe 50 or 100, I can’t remember. But with the material it was made of and its underground burial, unveiling it in a state where it could be played was reliant on the climate of the earth during its time underground. Basically, if it ever got too hot for too long, the vinyl would degrade and the music in its original state would be lost to time. I think about it a lot, y’know? What’s going on with that?
It could’ve also been a weird dream. I was a very environmentally conscious child with a very overactive imagination, but I SWEAR I remember that commercial vividly.
might you be talking about Pharrell Williams? he made a song in 2017, but buried it in a clay vessel that will be destroyed if the vessel floods due to rising sea levels caused by climate change. it won’t be released until 2117
I'm admired you didn't mention Kafka. Kafka didn't published most his works. He was a minority inside a minority: A German speaking Jew inside Czechoslovakia (at that time Bohemia). He almost never finished anything, burned almost all he wrote and what he left, he left with instructions for burning all; what was not done, and because of that we have some of his books. The only famous book he published while alive was Metamorphosis (AFAIR).
Absolutely. I think some of his shorts were published, but of his novels, only Metamorphosis. But I mean, there’s nothing else quite like his work. Who are we to take the things he wanted destroyed and show them to the world and who is he to try and take that from us even after his death.
Jacob-among all your videos, none have affected me as much as this one.
In 2015, I played The Beginner's Guide the day in came out in the midst of the deepest, darkest depression of my life. Somewhere in the latter quarter of the game I burst out crying with a sense of existential desperation, but try as I might I couldn't articulate why.
During this video's segment on that game, I once more found myself silently sobbing, but this time with a sense of cosmic relief. I get it now.
Thank you.
The fact that these videos leave me feeling in awe of the concept of art itself is truly a testament to Jacob's own artistry. What a wonderful thing to be able to witness.
The more videos I watch, the more I feel like I can appreciate "art" in abstract. I've always been someone that was just confused about those big splotches on a canvas, or a canvas entirely in one color, or anything like that - confused why it is supposed to be art. And around me people always joked something along the lines of "Even I could do that" or "That's probably expensive for money laundering purposes". And I understand why these people say that - I myself prefer intricately painted or carved art, that is immediately grasping one with it's detail or abstract representation. Something that shows the talent, hard work, and artistry of the creators is just more pleasant to me personally.
But when Jacob mentioned the mostly red painting at around ~22:26 and continued talking after I suddenly realized: A lot of art is not just the piece itself, but the story attached to it. Be it the story the artist tells, or the story an observer experiences
if you haven't already, watch his video entitled, "who is afraid of art?", in which he talks much more about that very painting, why it's important, and why its desecration should be taken seriously and not dismissed because "it's just a red canvas".
you probably know the mona lisa today because of its history of having been stolen and such that made it more popular to the public, not for some extra special intrinsic reasons even though it really is fine art in itself and was not intended by da vinci. But thank you, you made me realize that there are people litterally going to see contemporary art at face value when we are bombarded by abstract art concepts all the time
In a way im pretty sure ive made art made for no one but its maker. From cringey but unique designs i made as a 15 year that I still keep under my bed, little messed upand delusional writings of my past terrible mental state from 5 years ago, to a recent couple of sketches I drew of my partner of 4 1/2 years. Others seeing these with their eyes would dull their meaning to them, but to me, their host, are artifacts of specific memories and emotions I hope to never lose.
recently, i bought a copy of autumn de wilde's book, "elliott smith" titled after and dedicated to her late friend. it is mostly photos that she took of him, with two sections of interviews with smith's friends separating the book into sections. the first section of the book sees smith posed in different locations, in front of a mural, outside a shop, by the side of the road. in the last section of the book, we get photos of these same places, now without smith. it's a real gut punch, something i had never experienced with photography before. it was such a great illustration of loss.
Watching this video I can't help but be reminded of my best friend. A few months back, she finished a draft of a novel. She intends to keep working on it and she has several other WIPS she's working on. She spent years writing it in her free time, and she intends to never publish it. In fact no one but her has read it, though those of us who talk to her regularly have heard plenty about it. She has little interest in the opinions or criticism of anyone else, because this is her way of getting out the stories in her head. She's agreed to one day let me read through to check spelling and grammar, and I know when that happens that it'll be a very special experience because of the trust it requires. I think in an age where everyone has access to a platform the idea of not sharing art seems ridiculous until you're the one making art you don't want to share. Goya's hidden works make sense to me because it's so clear that it was for himself. I think in a sense we only want to see hidden art or art for no one because we know it's there and we know we aren't supposed to see it. And (ignoring any specific controversy a piece in this video may have, looking at you City) we feel entitled to look because the people who made those pieces call themselves artists, and why wouldn't artists want to share their art. Why would you write a novel for any reason other than to publish it.
Got a little pretentious on main there but ig guess watching a jacob geller video will do that to a girl LMAO
Idk, I'm a lifelong artist and writer and I don't like to share my work, except occasionally with a few people I know. I just hate the idea of performing for an audience and feeling like I'm playing a role, making what other people want just for validation.
I wonder if there is a meaningful difference to be found between "Art for no one", "art for an audience that we aren't (and cannot be)", and "art for the artist". To me, the Nasca lines *feel* like art for the sky, or maybe the gods, depending on how you want to religiously conceptualize it. That is, art that is meant to be appreciated, but not by the people who made it, and not even really by any human. Coda's games in the Beginner's Guide, on the other hand, feel more like art for the artist - the meaning is there, but obscure. Again, we're not the target audience, it's not *for* us, but the art is for someone, and that someone is human, which can make the art even harder to grasp, in some ways, because for all the space that separates us from the gods, we know about as much about the gods as the people in Nasca. Same with Goya's works. Given the context, they seem more like works for the artist. Meant to be seen and appreciated, to express certain feelings, just... not to the public.
But the City really does sound like art for no one. Hearing you talk about it, at least, it feels like art that even the artist would rather not see. Something that should exist for the sake of existing, but not be seen or experienced by anyone. Or at least not understood by anyone. I get the feeling that the challenge of the art is to ask us to not see it as art. Here's a thing that exists, it proclaims. But don't try to explain why. Just accept that it does and move on. Wanting to see it, to experience it, runs directly counter to that. It's very existence runs counter to our entire sense of being human. We see something that is artificial, and we feel the need to understand it.
In that sense, the use of Prince's work seems somehow... obscene, maybe? Because, until he died, I don't know that I would call those songs "art". Or at least not "finished art". It's not that they were only meant for the artist, or god, or even for no one. They were... proto-art. Failed art, maybe. Akin to scenes in a movie that were storyboarded, or even shot, but ultimately didn't make the cut. Or the rough sketch of a famous painter that they decided wasn't conveying what they wanted. It's something in the process of becoming art.
But, I guess that begs the question of - what *is* art? is the first draft of the first chapter of a novel that get trashed so that the author can start over art, in and of itself? Or is it only once the novel is completed and the author says "Done" that the collection of words is transformed into art? If that first draft is art, does that mean that every paint stroke after the first is, in some way, destroying existing art in order to create new art?
I obviously don't know. As usual, your videos are fascinating, and leave me with more questions than I had when I started. But that's utimately the point, right? Not to come to a conclusion, necessarily, but to just... find new questions to ask.
I feel like I would like City more if its very existence didn't require such an obscene price tag. I obviously can't tell the artist how to spend his money or his health, but I can at least say that between an art installation that is truly meant for no one and idk spending money on charity work I would much prefer City to not exist. It doesn't really benefit anyone, but it doesn't harm anyone. It feels like the artist really wanted to make it, but it's also a huge vanity project.
i feel like your first paragraph also applies to Gellers statement about nature, because a lot of things in nature ARE meant to be seen, to communicate some meaning, just not to us. there are flowers evolved to resemble specific insects to encourage pollination, Birds of Paradise have intricate mating rituals and striking plumage and many animals communicate lethality by the the use of bright colors. However, the comparison of nature to art also brings up the contrast of intelligent design to evolution, and peoples beliefs can drastically affect peoples views on that. so maybe we cant really even compare art and nature, just attempt to imitate or contrast it against our own creations.
I don't understand what you mean by not meant to be seen. If it exists, it's meant to be seen, to try to understand it, to at least feel it. The mere existence of the video and all of our comments means it's not for no one. Sometimes the art escapes the creator and their own ego makes them think and proclaim something that's simply not true. I don't like a lot of modern art, I think it's bullshit, but that doesn't mean it's for no one. If something exists, it's for us humans to appreciate.
@@echinas0908"if it exists, it's meant to be seen" not necessarily. it doesn't have to be. i think this is what this artwork is challenging.
I think art for the artist is more accurate. If it was truly for no one, I'm not sure I would call it art. I kinda think art has to be experienced in order to exist, even if it's just the creator. Maybe that doesn't make any sense, I'm a little tired.
The irony is that the "experiences" you bring up in this and many of your videos are so esoteric I would never have come across them if not for the video, yet your analysis and dissection of them robs me from ever truly experiencing them for myself.
Your greatest work yet, thank you.
I really liked Sun Figures.
In some previous videos, I've stopped partway through as soon as a short story was mentioned to go read it myself. I read "To Build a Fire" and "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" on Jacob's (implicit) recommendation, before I heard what he had to say about them. I feel the same way you do--the act of hearing an opinion fundamentally changes your own, and you can never get a first impression back.
@@sydneygorelick7484 I did the same with "To Build a Fire"! Also, Disco Elysium
Really surprised to not see any comments in here about Vivian Maier! She was a nanny working predominantly in Chicago and New York who, incidentally, is by far my favorite street photographer. It's incredible. Her work stretches from celebrities dipping out of theatres at premieres to wage labourers reclining on landfill sofas, each picture packed with perfect lighting and composition. She died less than a before her work blew up the internet, and the only reason her work fell into the hands of the man who posted it was because she couldn't keep up with the payments on a storage locker. John Maloof, the man who's responsible for championing her work after her death (and the same one who posted it online) currently runs a website dedicated to her photography. Art for no one, and documentary for no one -- shoulder high piles of negatives, home movies, recordings of conversations with strangers, all destined to be buried under the dust, and "saved" by the happenstance of a delinquent payment.
edited for spelling
it rains a lot where I live but we have this huge retaining wall I love to draw on with chalk, when it washes away there's melancholy but there's solace in knowing it was there, and made me happy while it was
The Beginners Guide was... kind of a turning point for me. In some ways, it's when I began to think of myself as an aspiring game designer.
When we get to that note in the game... Well, I was thinking that Coda had died, but I also knew that that felt a bit too obvious. What I still haven't really been able to fully figure out is... Yes, I gasped when I found out that Coda was alive, and had asked the narrator to stop speaking with him. I looked at that first note for a full minute before moving on. It recontextualize everything before it.
But, it was finding out that the narrator added the lampposts to each game that made me cry. I stared at that for... I'm not sure. It could have been five minutes or an hour. Something about that just... twisted a knife in me. I guess it was just simply that the narrator had led me to believe that there was some significance to these lampposts, some deep wisdom being shared through their constant inclusion.
But it turns out that their significance was only in the absolute betrayal they represented. And somehow that hurt so much more than when I thought Coda had died before finishing any of these interesting game concepts. But it hurt in this deeply personal way. That's what I haven't been able to figure out... Why does it hurt like he betrayed me?
I guess simply that I have empathy, and that game is an extremely well-made piece of art.
EDIT: Super weird bit of synchronicity; right after I watched this video, I went to facebook to check my memories.
Literally the first one is my post I made after completing The Beginners Guide exactly 1 year ago.
I think part of the betrayal feeling could be from how the part the narrator kept emphasizing was *his own unwanted addition*.
That episode of 'Malcolm in the Middle' where the dad spends ages painting a masterpiece with dozens of layers, and then the paint falls on the family. The audience is never shown the painting. I love and hate that episode.
One of my favorite things to do has always been to sit on a piano and play an improvised piece that lasts only that moment. I dont record it, i dont remmeber any of what i played, and the only “audience” is made up of whoever happens to be there. The music just happens as quick as it is gone. What i play is most likely not very good, but to me these moments are some of the only times were i feel proud of the art i have made. It feels the most pure, without the corruption of expectations. Purely itself.
same, same, so felt. this is how i feel with both singing- often harmonizing/countermelodying a song i'm listening to, but when i was a child i would hum constantly while reading, completely made-up tunes on the spot- my best friend got to hear it sometimes when we sat and read fantasy novels together waiting for our moms to get out of work. she thought it was beautiful, told me so. probably the first time i've ever felt really proud of something i've created from nothing. and in adolescence i fell in love with dance, took lessons enough to learn some skills but find the most joy in improvisation for myself in my kitchen, my bedroom, earbuds in, just sunk into the motion of my body. feels like i'm gathering or funneling something through my movements and giving it back to the universe. reminds me of some quote from brennan lee mulligan about being the mechanism through which the universe loves.
As someone with a rather unhealthy and obsessive archiving habit, there is something that frustrates me about reading that. I recognize that it's a pointless and unbelievably futile effort to try and "save" and preserve every piece of art ever created, partial or not, to try and make every moment and utterance permanent for looking back on in the future. But I still, immaturely, can't help but feel like the music that you played is now lost. That it can't be enjoyed anymore, that it's gone.
It sounds lovely to be able to just let go and play to your heart, though. The freedom of not having to worry about its permanence, not having to worry about it ever being critiqued, its doomedness to being forgotten being what makes it so enjoyable. I should learn from that...
this kind of reminds me of my childhood self, making art in my own room, and then upon telling my mom to tell me what she thinks, realising she isnt looking at it at all, and knowing i made that art for no one but myself. nowadays im really happy to show my art to anyone who will look at it, but sometimes only i need to see what i created. sometimes the meaning and the feeling is only there for me, and not even the ones who inspired it
One of my best friends is a writer. One of the best I have ever seen. I am not one who will typically read a book without any sort of visuals to go off of, but I always find myself hopelessly enthralled by his work. And yet, the only people who have seen the majority of his work are him and myself. I've always told others how great of a writer he is, how I wish they could see it... But I can never bring myself to actually *show* them. It feels, wrong. Like overstepping a boundary that is indescribably intimate to his entire self. He's never kept every work entirely private, some short stories have been shown to a couple other friends, or to his creative writing teacher in college. But even I have not seen what is likely over half of his work. I relate to Davey in The Beginner's Guide quite a lot. It feels like there is a special kind of complacency for artists who can create and comfortably never show anyone, and it's difficult to not feel frustration that I don't have the same kind of resolve. It's something I have thought about a lot. It's something I wish I had and want to pursue.
The conclusion I have eventually come to is that it could demonstrate a strong self confidence. That you don't need other people to tell you your art is good in order to be happy with it. It could also simply be that the art is an outlet for things you simply can't get out of your head any other way, like a sort of self-therapy. But not necessarily as a way to treat anything, but rather simply because the emotional attachment to the ideas presented in the art are that strong.
I decided to finally just, ask him. After so long of speculating, I just asked why.
He said "I create for you and my friends stupid :P "
I have since taken up writing.
Calling city a skate park no one can ride in actually summed it up pretty well I think i only saw the nyt pics but that’s really accurate to how it looks there
It really does look like a sharp skating park!
@@senaruryuin2773 Gonna go bug Tony Hawk and a team of game devs to go to City, sketch and memorize it all, and then make it a level in the next Tony Hawk game (hopefully one that doesn't suck, so let's not let activision, ubisoft or EA touch it and enshittify it)
A professor of mine actually works primarily in the Central Andes and she explained to us that it is precisely because of the fact that people could not see the Nazca Lines in their entirety that they were built that way. The lines were actually ritual pathways for prayer (walking/travel is often associated with prayer in the Andes) so to SEE the entire monkey would defeat the purpose of the path, you had to EXPERIENCE it. Such a great video as always though Jacob, can't wait for your book to come out :)
Hmmm I feel like I remember hearing you could actually see them from nearby hills & mountains. Not sure the source on that though.
I was watching for like the first 38 minutes thinking “He should really talk about The Beginner’s Guide in this video,” hearing D.S AI Coda hit hard
How u comment 1 day ago? The video was uploaded an hour ago wtf?
He probably made the vid available for patreon-subscribers first.
@@Si-Al-Ti fair enough
lol same, I feel like I got hbomberguy'ed
same!
for almost my entire waking life, I've been writing poems, majority of which I've been clutching in secrecy. the pressure to share them in hopes of "changing" the world or "providing" and just contributing anything is always there. but maybe art can also be just art, even if it was public or private. it doesn't diminish nor exaggerate its value, it's just art. something telling of something that came from someone. no matter how close I clutched them to my chest, there will always be the certainty that glimpses of my poetry can flutter in my everyday; in the actions, in the words, and in the connections we make with people. so, who is no one?
i refuse to release my writing because of a deathly fear it will be interpreted and reinterpreted to the point it is used to do more harm than good, to propel ideas that i fundamentally would abhor. the sheer idea that some folks may take away something horrific and act on it is why i've stopped writing in public spaces online long ago and mostly write on paper-with the intent to burn it before i commit to my end.
it's not poetry mind, it's interpretations of nonfiction research, philosophy and so on. i do enjoy interpreting and learning how the world works, how many ways to see the world. but the idea of ever releasing my notes of interpretation is terrifying.
it isn't art in this sense but i also plan to burn my drawings and paintings. my writings are clear descriptors of a worldview tho, and the harm that could come of that isn't worth it to me.
The Begginers Guide is the game that made choose a game dev career instead of going to a math college back in 2016
Never doubted that decision since then.
Thank you for throw back, Jacob!
I LOVE that by taking a poop, that animal added meaning to the sculpture. What a genius. Pay him.
The thing about TBG (which is the only piece here I have the education to speak on) is that when the twist happens, it's nauseating. That betrayal, the forced complicity, the way Davey makes you almost an accessory to this enormous trespass-- the entire thing is fictional, but it's also not, obviously. The concept of a malicious curator makes sense to me, but what I took from TBG and what I try to impart on as many people as possible is *you do not know this artist by their work.* You cannot use someone's work to psychoanalyze them. It's, to me, vitally important to always remember that, for my protection and for others. It also killed a lot of the allure of parasocial relationships. No matter how much I enjoy someone's work, I always always always remember that I should never assume that I know them as a person.
I honestly think of TBG as an important prerequisite to life in the modern era.
"Meaning is meaningless to me." - Zdzisław Beksiński, fed up with people wanting to interpret his rad paintings no matter how many times he asks them to stop.
It means so much to me for you to feature and talk about one of my favorite pieces of art! The Beginner's Guide has always made me feel that the potential for stories in video games has barely even begun to be expressed, and nobody ever talks about it enough. Thank you!
This guy is among the very top of creators on this platform I have come to love. Jacob, your integrity and refusal to compromise are of utmost importance to making these videos feel like a very personal take on your topics. Your enthusiasm and energy is contagious and inspiring and I hope to watch your work for years to come. As with so many other creators your content is timeless and your older videos have aged incredibly well. I could watch these years from now, not knowing if I watched something recently created or something we've already had years to enjoy and appreciate.
skating on city is on my illegal bucket list now
City feels like an inverse of the path carved by Dashrath Manjhi. City is hard to find, nearly inaccessible, and if Heizer had his wish, never to be used; whereas the path cut between Atri and Wazirganj was meant to be visible and used often, giving access to his village to the hospital over the mountain. It's interesting how the same act of moving around rock can MEAN opposite things
Yeah. A rich man from the privileged highest class in the world does pointless thing for no one.
And
A poor man from the poorest most unfortunate lowest class in the world does something for everyone.
I had not heard about this man and his work before reading this comment, and I'm glad you shared it because it makes me feel less alone - the way he worked is how I want to work. His summary on Wikipedia is "Indian laborer" - not politician, not artist, not lawyer. Not "visible." And yet he made life measurably better for all the people around him, by doing unauthorized public works, for years, for personal motivations, THAT ALSO benefitted everyone. And that's how I want to be.
@@human1880 men, white, straight are the most opressed smallest minority in the world. but walt disney does not compensate for education
Also re: Prince's death... As someone who works with harm reduction orgs, I have such enormous feelings towards it. He died from a pressed Norco (brand of hydrocodone) pill that had a fent hotspot. To think that even Prince... Prince! Wasn't getting real pharmaceutical pills. Apologies, as this is entirely unrelated from your video, but that's the direct result of the DEA cracking down on prescription opiates and doctors/pharmacies dispensing them. Prince would be alive if not for the war on drugs, and sometimes I feel kinda insane that no one acknowledges that.
Just trying to lighten the mood.
Remember, Prince outlived Mike Jack. Kendrick was onto something there.
@@TURBOMIKEIFYMike jack is wild. We all know who you’re talking about but no one calls him that. You can just say MJ
@@TURBOMIKEIFYMike Jack sounds like a really weird pet name you have for him, I wouldn't use it
My country is finally being hit by the US's war on drugs. As the quality and availability of illegal drugs has went down. The type and quality of those drugs has become a huge issue.
We're currently dealing with a massive heroin addiction epidemic. Heroin was basically unheard of 10 years ago here.
Holy shit I never knew that
"This is not for you."
- _House of Leaves_
"Muss es sein?"
Immediately what I thought of upon seeing the videos title, and that thought only strengthened throughout the video.
Truant (or at least I believe it’s Truant’s quote from the typeface used) is right. The Navidson Record isn’t for us. Nor was it for him. Only Zámpano knows who it was for, and he’s dead.
(Real talk, though, that book was so good at making me feel just like Truant, navigating this purposefully confusing and difficult book with him. Love House of Leaves will my whole heart
I avoided watching this for a few days because I knew it would hurt. My grandmother once told me that the only things worth living for are art and love which is why there are so many love songs. As an aspiring artist gearing up to release my first album here in the next few months, a project I’ve spent the better part of the last three years working on, I often worry that I will release it and no one will listen. I worry that the very thing I have dedicated my life towards pursuing lacks the merit of being.
To create art is to destroy one’s sense of self and replace it with a constructed framework of meaning. To dissect and autopsy your deepest fears and desires and then put them on display. It is inherently vulnerable and narcissistic to believe that you have something within yourself worth sharing. The idea of putting myself in that position only to be greeted by silence is horrifying. The idea of doing it all over again on the next project only more so. Yet I must create. I am not naive enough to believe that my art stands alongside the greats but it’s the best I can do and I will keep doing it until it kills me.
I don’t think any piece of art is truly for no one at all. Because all art is for the artist. It’s a self portrait spread across a hundred canvases. To creat art is to write one’s autobiography little by little in riddles and metaphors. It’s scary and painful and often times feels like it will eat you alive. But it’s the only thing worth living for.
One of the best comments I've read. I don't really have much to say about it, but I just wanted to leave a note
whole heartedly agree, made me emotional reading this
I think what people forget is that art is just art. It doesn't need a rhyme or reason to exist. If I could, I'd draw giant animals just cause it's cool to see what you can do. Sometimes stories and structures are meant to be used in those time periods, but at the same time, some things are made cause those people thought they could and they did. I understand why the owner of "City" didn't want to make it for others to come and look at. I know I've made plenty of drawings that were just fun to make, and it was a good time. I've never liked classes where we have to deep dive into a creators art because at times its never thag deep. Sometimes, we think too much.
This isnt to say that I dislike these conversations, it's one of the reasons why I love watching these videos. I just also like basking in the original intent of the creator.
City sounds so soulless. I hope that with time, the desert takes it back. That someday the cracks are filled with desert flowers, and that sagebrush grows tall and healthy in its streets.
sounds good, and fitting!
That's what I'm hoping as well!
I wish it, not because I hate it, but because I think it would elevate it. If it's made to look like a ruin, becoming a true, organic ruin seems like the perfect conclusion.
But maybe it's just because I am fascinated by ruins.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.
See, to me, City sounds the opposite of "soulless" - it's a pure expression of human creativity. It's a monument for the sake of having built the monument.
Humans inevitably alter our environments through the act of creating our own meanings.
I know people joke sometimes "honey, drop everything Jacob Geller dropped a video" but not going to lie, this is literary me right now
I'm more like - "I'll watch this with a bowl pf pop corn tonight"
Be back in 3 hours approx. Hope the video was good.
@@SGustafsson well?
@@blakksheep736 Haha i JUST finished it. It was a good one. And the pop corn was good aswell.
I think the conclusion is great. Who is no one. The artist certainly is someone. I think we all chase a big tail throughout our lives. To create is to live fully. We need contemplation & production everyday.
*literally
Every annoying internet phrase that people use, started out with people saying it "ironically" until they forgot the ironically part. Remember this next time you start a sentence with "I'm not the person who says Annoying Internet Phrase but."
Very glad to hear you talk about the Beginner's Guide. I began to feel nauseous as Wreden's narration turned from what sounded like analysis based on conversation and friendship with Coda, to pure psychoanalysis based just on the game files themselves and Coda's further distancing from Wreden. When the twist happened, I felt like I could vomit- despite knowing it was clearly a fiction, that this hadn't happened, the game succeeded in tearing down my defenses and suspending my disbelief to an incredible degree (hampered only by one small moment where Wreden says he has to step away to do something and the game is without narration for a bit, which makes no sense since even in the context of the universe, he is recording files to edit into the game, not live narrating each playthrough). The lamppost thing in particular turned it from one-sided psychoanalysis fueled by hubris and the selfish need for access to another's art, to deception in its purest form, a lie Wreden tells the player so brazenly and indefensibly that it makes me question everything else he said all the more.
i'm so emotional right now because the beginner's guide is my FAVORITE game of all time. i was first introduced to it in 2017ish and i think about it constantly. i love its eeriness and the unsettling feeling i get when i play it. i will always always recommend this game to anyone who loves conversations about what constitutes art, what art should be seen, respecting artistic integrity, etc. i've scoured the web looking for conversations/analyses about it. LOVE the beginner's guide music you snuck in at the end too.
While I respect any artist and their wishes for their art, I feel that being obsessed with the inaccessibility of your art is equal and opposite to the desperation for approval. I dont doubt that City is a masterpiece, but the intentional separation of it dulls it to me in concept. The indifference, though. Thats tasty as hell
I think a part of the reason why City feels so dull, or maybe even "arrogant" is due to its cost and scale. This land art sculpture is estimated to cost well over $40 million. This would make it one of the most expensive art installations in human history. On an emotional level, spending that much money on something that exists without an audience feels insulting. The short story that someone made and locked away in their computer's hard drive costs only a few hundred dollars all together - the computer, the software, the keyboard. Plexus likely cost a decent amount of money to produce and publish, but it was made to be shared, and exists to communicate a sensation.
City mimics the styles of a civilisation that was wiped out in the name of securing the land that the art piece was built upon, and cost enough money that it could've probably saved hundreds, if not thousands of lives. All for the sake of not being shared with the world, or perhaps more cynically, for the sake of insisting that to share it with the world would be to reduce it's meaning.
According to Wikipedia (though the link to the citation seems to be dead), there was a proposed nuclear waste site that would going to be made within Yucca Mountain. It would've included a new railroad line that would come within the sightline of City, and Heizer reportedly considered burying City if that line was built. Imagine wanting to burying 40 million dollars worth of art because someone might see it.
Yeah, it's hard not to see the inaccessibility as a hype gimmick, an artificial mystique. If he didn't want anybody to see his art, he wouldn't have built a giant monument in the desert. Just make weird pointless constructions in Minecraft like the rest of us, man.
@@thevoidlord1796 Yeah, I had that thought too. Waste of money and labor, not even built on his own land. I kind of like that wild animals are coming in and pooping on it. That's a better critique than I could ever give.
In this day and age where so much of life is controlled by the human race and everything can be fully consumed by basically anybody who wants to, I see an artistry in not only a physical isolation from the rest of humanity but an emotional one as well. When people are told they can't do something, they instinctively want to do it and when every single person who's ever known about "City" is dead and the people who knew about them are too, it will still be there.
@@awesomtown234I definitely feel like that's how the creator saw it. Enticing, mysterious, exclusive, a part of the world that will last longer than they do. They seem insufferable, full of themselves. Like a child who hits something away from you because "you can't see it, it's special"
The Beginners Guide is one of the most impactful game experiences to me.
My best friend is, now, a digital artist. He had been drawing a lot since he was a kid, and he had mentioned wanting to eventually show off his art.
So the Beginners Guide served as a guide, for me, to slowly help him show off his art, in a way that fit his style. I never wanted to overstep those bounds, just give support that works toward his own goals.
For me I truly believe that art doesn’t have to be shared or understood. It can be just for the artist. But, I also truly believe that art not shared with the world is the saddest thing. So much life and emotion just hidden away. There’s something haunted about that in and of itself.
As someone who actively makes art and rarely shows pieces to only close friends and family...I don't think it's sad at all. I think an artist chooses an audience like any other aspect of the piece. Imagine all the great, raw pieces of human experience that might have been rooted out and destroyed without the discretion of the author.
Art you made only for yourself can be very beautiful. The problem is when assholes like this one occupy public land for their own selfish desires. You can make are no one is allowed to see. But this is very different and this installation should be torn down.
@@capnbarky2682 It’s fine for you to do that, but I can’t bring myself to agree with you. I don’t think I can fully articulate why I will never be able to agree with you either. All I know is that there is a large part of me that yearns and cries and despairs whenever I realise that I can never know every person that exists right now. I can’t be their friend. I can’t love them. I can’t live alongside them. I can never laugh with them or hold them when they cry but I still mourn their loss. The part of me that wants to reach out, to connect, to share is the same part of me that cannot bear to see art locked away. Art is one of the fundamental ways we share ourselves with the world. Our thoughts, our feelings, our beliefs. Who we are as people. It’s a way to reach for each other in common understanding. It makes me sad that I cannot know you up close through conversation, or from a distance through your art. I will never be able to know any part of you at all. Like you didn’t exist. That’s terrible to me. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear or just rambling at this point, but I hope you understand.
I mean, isn’t the exclusivity kinda part of the experience? If it was freely available, and a popular tourist destination, wouldn’t it feel more… hollow? I mean, it would to me, at least.
@@meltingmug yeah, I imagine 6 people experiencing City at once would be quite the different experience than, let's say, 300.
The Beginners Guide shook me to my core when it came out. Somehow I knew you'd talk about it as soon as I saw this video in my feed
I had an art history lecture that covered Goya, and while I remember it being mentioned that Saturday Devouring His Son was painted on the artist’s dining room wall, I do not recall if they mentioned how private a work it was. I certainly don’t remember the lecturer mentioned _it wasn’t given that name til after Goya’s death._ I swear when I learned this and grokked the implications of it, I felt a chill go up my spine. The dude’s whole legacy just has such this haunted feeling to it.
I think you put it well at the end. Art for no one is a misnomer. Art exists purely in the mind. It is the human experience that creates the art. Without human eyes, it's merely shapes and colors. Or really, nothing at all. As it is the human mind which creates those shapes and colors.
Art lives to be experienced. Whether by the masses, a select group, or simply the artist. Art is always for someone.
during the whole video i couldn't help but think about a passage from adrian tchaikovsky's "children of ruin"; the flawed digested ancient copy of Erma Lante, a terraformer turned exobiologist who died millennia ago, her memory reanimated by an alien bacterial colony incapable of understanding what it ate, but desperate to find more, and maybe understand one day.
and this shambling homunculus, this broken parody of a shadow of a long-dead woman, trudges around the landscape of Nod, digging up the native soil to build endless facades of a city from her memories. a dead city built from alien dirt, trying to rebuild with only contextless copies of broken memories, hoping it will make it understand.
the landscape is strewn with the same grid of the same identical streets and facades, no interiors, no life, no purpose, repeated across continents on an alien world full of life that has no need for cities, on which only a handful humans ever set foot, in the distant past
but the empty streets are still there
Now that's art.
A set of bare concrete buildings (maybe?) with built in scarcity? not so much.
That reminds me of "The City" or "Library" in Nier Automata, where machines soulessly copy the work of humans, imitating all the aesthetic signs that places like that should have, but no colors or interiors (in the case of the city), those places are mostly uninhabited. The're just an empty spaces built by beings replicating works of some other civilization they could never see and therefore, understand.
Love this video. "If a city rises in the desert and no one is there to capture it, what does it matter if its a masterpiece",, Made me think about how like 7-10 years ago, American news orgs were *obsessed* about taking photos of China's "ghost cities" and "metro stations to nowhere". Now said cities are filled with thousands, if not millions, of citizens living somewhere that was deliberately planned for them. Obviously these are urban planning projects, not art pieces, but it made me think of how we conceptualize what we think of as these "empty spaces". Of course the City is located in the desert, the type of environment that receives the least ecological consideration by far.
Reminds me of something i learnt in geography, the difference between space and place. Space being whats between two places, but a space could also be a place for someone(and vice versa), like a field , to some its just a space to others its where they play football friday night.
Ghost cities still exist and many were torn down because no one went to live there.
@@XalantorOr are populated by small fractions of the intended population. A city designed for 2 million but inhabited by 1 million is still half empty.
@@Florkl Or half full
@@loggling5135For engineers though, it's twice too big.
Hi, Jacob.
I paused at the time where you revealed the "twist" of the Beginners Guide, and went and finally played it.
I think it broke me. I cried at the end, with that betrayal, with that... rotten center that crumbles the whole exhibit, cried at seeing myself in Davey the narrator. Came back, finished your video, cried again.
But then again. I'm glad it exists. I'm glad City exists, even in its betrayal by the times, to a lesser extent by you. I'm glad YOU exist, and have helped me to develop my own meaning in seeing the art of games, and art in the world around me.
I'm sad. But, I guess, that's the whole point. Because the meaning of art is the meaning we put into it. The experiences we bring to the table mold and shape how we view art. It's not objective.
Sorry if this is rambling. I'm just... trying to find my own meaning, I guess. And I hope, some day, I do.
About The Beginner’s Guide version of Davey being fictionalized, it’s at least partially based on the real him. The letter Coda writes to him at the end, the last part of that is something a friend said to him in real life, that he felt physically ill being around him. I actually made a short video essay about the game some years ago and found the clip of Davey saying so while doing research
hearing jacob geller briefly summarize the ending of the beginners guide was equally as gut punching as going through the whole thing again. that “game” is so goddamn good
as an artist, this honestly makes me tempted to give a sketchbook to someone in a manner that only they could see it. being able to have such an impact on someone, for me, has always been the point. not for many people to see it
I kind of want to do something like that, but leave it as something for the kids I hope to have in the future. There's something weirdly beautiful and comforting about having something super personal that you pass down to your children and noone else will ever get to see it.
@@thecoolestfaisal that sounds amazing, and i think the only reason i didn't have that exact same plan is because i don't want kids. for me it would just be a really close friend or family member
@thecoolestfaisal It just makes you sound like a little b.
Hi Jacob, I know it's highly unlikely you'll read this, but ever since I first played The Beginner's Guide back in 2015 I've been thinking about it's connection to conceptual art, unplayable games and un-experienceable art. Ten years later, you put into words something I've been trying to make sense of for ages. This video is truly a masterpiece. Thank you.
This reminds me of the secret NES game which is hidden within the Nintendo Switch's operating system. After hackers discovered how to activate it it was promptly removed. It is speculated that it was put there for Satoru Iwata who programmed the game and later became CEO of Nintendo before he died around the time that the Switch entered production.
It was a sort of memorial talisman, meant to be kept for a period of mourning and never opened. The patch that removed the game "Golf" when the traditional time for mourning was over, nearly a month after how to open the talisman had been revealed.
insanely specific but 7:51 sound effects being perfectly synced with the narrative gives me joy beyond measure
25:11 within the context of trauma, I think you can interpret this deconstruction in a more positive way. Trauma is strangely defined both by the things we struggle to remember (or in the case of generational trauma, things we were never told) as well as the things we cannot forget. In healing, you must confront both. Therapy is, in a sense, a form of deconstruction. You must face those memories, slice open the pages. Sometimes you find stories and history you weren’t aware of, sometimes you find painful memories your mind tried to bury, and occasionally you find something not so bad buried under there (like the kitchen being used).
That sense of forgetting what was concealed and what wasn’t is part of healing too. That trauma doesn’t go away but it can be processed and filed away with the rest of your memories, no longer standing out or hiding. Just being.
You are different now, more of your pages laid bare. But different isn’t bad. It just is.
My mom has been unpacking some generational trauma recently. I know it’s hurt, but I think the pain is, if not lessened, easier to bear. Consolidating her memories with her siblings’ has been a part of the process and I’m reminded of that when looking at the cut open pages.
There’s a quote from the band Crywolf that has always resonated with me. The gist of it is, opening up feels a lot like giving someone a knife and it concludes with the author saying, here I am. Here’s the knife. Please be gentle.
Cutting open the pages of the book gave me a similar feeling. Art is personal, sharing it is, well, a lot like giving someone a knife.
39 minutes of preamble before getting to the video game review. Absolutely astounding work. Happy this art is made to be enjoyed.
On the subject of Plexis, I think it appeals to a certain approach to the divulge of context that many people do with anything made, from media to objects. I am someone who will dig into the backstage interactions to the writing to the cinematography of movies to being inextricably focused on the inside of a game console or a slot machine. Something that inherently bears the mark of a reader who permanently, visibly, and *physically* communicates that they're willing to vivisect art in order to understand it fascinates me.
When any art leaves the hands of its creator, when it affirms its existence to the world even slightly, it submits to the death of its intimate conception. And yet in it's eventual perception, it lives forever. How fascinating.
(Seeing this released the day after I opened up to someone about having issues making art for myself (let alone at all) felt like some sort of divine intervention, frankly. Your videos always get me in a more creative mood but this has to be one of- if not- your best videos yet. Thank you.)
55 minute jacob geller video during a snow day, literally can’t get better than this
Snow days in the spring
@@The_Shimp the midwest strikes again💔
Hey it's a snow day here!!! twin cities gang rise up
@@mellow_mallow TWIN CITIES TWIN!!
snowing here too nearly everyday DURING SPRING BREAK
I'll admit, my primary reaction to City's existence is pure contrarianism. "A place in the desert that I can't go? That I can't take pictures of? Says who? Can they stop me?" Just a gut reaction of opposition, before even any consideration of art- An artist can create art, can present that art to the world, but to tell the world how they can and cannot engage with that art? I don't really think that's up to them. ...That is a sort of entitlement, obviously. But we are entitled to some things, it's not always a word synonymous with 'unreasonable', and I feel like my own biases aside, there is still a line to be found there, somewhere.
What are the limits of privacy? Coda, in the Beginner's Guide, certainly seems like their privacy was violated. Prince's feels more hard to judge. And City? The idea of a thing so large it ceases to be a thing and becomes a place- CAN that even be considered private in the first place? Does anyone have that right? Heck if I know.
Considering he didn't built it on private land and that the labor definitely involved other people, I think his demands for privacy are on pretty shaky ground. But I'm a contrarian myself, and my immediate thought was 'I hope someone flies a camera drone in there and really pisses him off', so this take is very much colored by who I am as a person.
There are literally pictures of "City" on google. And all it does is look like a big construction site
I don't have an opinion on "privacy", but a comment on "limits":
Please imagine we don't have all of today's tech. It's a few hundred years ago, before the invention of National Parks and the concept of "public land". Imagine that the person you trust most in this world tells you that they happened upon City. They tell you where it is and what it's like and how incalculably lucky they are to have found their way home. But they can only be so precise. The desert is vast. You want to search for City. But each time you set off into the Nevada mountains and wastes, you can only explore so far. You have to return to civilization for water. And you can't afford to do this forever! (In this economy?!) You can't *really* find City. City, a mile and a half wide, is simply too small.
The monkey carved into the South American landscape went unseen for a thousand years. I think the question of "Who's gonna stop me?" might be conceptually more interesting if the answer is: the physical restraints of your flesh.
I personnaly feel like we reach a limit when someone is dead.
Like did we really violate someone's wish if there is no someone anymone?
Do we really "own" anything to begin with? Or do we just possess it because we've declared "I own this thing".
Hell even your own body, sure you control it, but does it not also control you? Choosing then you must eat or sleep. And what about not keeping it after passing? Can you own something truly if everything is temporary?
This is actually a really big thing that weighs on my mind whenever I get back into watching this channel or a new upload.
The Beginner's Guide is one of my favorite games. I care a great deal about art and the profound, obviously, since I'm here. But the lesson that comes with TBG hits so hard, someone like me, an amateur writer who lives with and is best friends with a very talented artist. Our art compliments each other, and the realization that the game turns on me at its end is a terrifyingly poignant revelation that I am not only fallable in my artistic understanding, but so easily lulled into melding someone else into what I think about art, like this channel, like many other channels on this site I frequent so much for what profundity I may not know about or see. It leaves me with a gentle dread, knowing that I can so easily abandon myself in what I see, what I read, and what I watch and adopt meaning and perspective from those around me that I trust to various degrees to feed it to me,
That's all to say nothing about the idea of becoming dependant on it, too. Having to leech meaning from art and those who create it or interpret it in order to fuel my own broken creative engine. It leaves me wondering who I truly am, whether I've let the burden of other people's thoughts change and shape me so that I can't know who I'd be without it, or whether that's even a bad thing to begin with.
I love profundity, I love deep meaning and philosophy, and I love finding it in the art, writing, games, and music that I partake in, as well as amateurishly create. I love these videos that always seem to refuel that love, but it's pieces like TBG that make me see the lampposts, and make me strive to improve myself, so I can illuminate things for myself.
$5 says "The Beginner's Guide" is talked about in here
Congrats on the $5?
Here you go 💵
chaching
💵 💵 💵 💵 💵
I will not view City. In time, I will forget that City exists. The memory of this video will decay in my mind and the idea of art for no one will vanish from my awareness. Perhaps that's the point.
beginner's guide... i always would get goosebumps seeing that screenshot in your twitter account's header. good to see you finally found the right video to talk about it more. beginner's guide is so precious.
As you describe city, I find myself suddenly mindful in an almost violent way. Aware of the shape and texture of my face, every breath I draw, the sensation of my fingers hitting the keys as I type this. I don't know if it's the result of what you are describing, or the sheer nature of your description, but your ability with words to draw me into this state so suddenly and effortlessly is a gift. I hope more great inspirations, and further genius finds you, for you have made yourself a worthy vessel, and your ability to express experience lets you share the exclusive beauty of things in a way that multiplies their affect and potency, a power you wield responsibly. Thank you for your existence, and for what you have done with it