New "Fine Art" Article on RPGnet

[Jonathan Walton]

They posted last Friday's article today, since they had a hole they needed to fill and already had another article ready for Friday.  This one's about the theories of Joseph Margolis, a relativist who proposes that artworks are physical entities embodied in cultural entities.  Somehow, it ended up turning into a discussion of the need for common guidelines for talking about roleplaying and actual play.  Not entirely sure how that happened.  But there's other interesting stuff going on there too.

http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/fineart08mar04.html

Feel free to post comments here or in the forum for the column.

[Sean]

Dear Jonathan,

Your citations do not mention the editor of the text you are citing and hence make it difficult to track down your source. I would recommend:

Margolis, Joseph [2000]: "The Deviant Ontology of Artworks." In Theories of Art Today, Noel Carroll, ed., 2000, pp. 109-129. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

This might seem like a quibble, but it would spare your interested readers the trouble of wading through several pages of Amazon entries concerning Professor Margolis' other works in hopes of finding a text which only comes up when sought for using a different methodology.

Best,

Sean

[Jonathan Walton]

You have a fair point, Sean.  Because RPGnet generally doesn't have a very academic tone (there's the understatement for the day), I'm not in the habit of using a very strict citation standard in my articles.  If I was writing articles for the Forge, I'd probably be much more careful.  It just never occured to me that people would read my articles and then go try to find the source texts.  I've underestimated you, in other words.

I'll see what I can do about citing things in a more useful fashion.  Still, I worry that dense citations might seem intimidating (I mean, many people are already intimidated by the format and style of the articles).  I suppose I could resort to footnotes.  That might be a way for me to provide detailed information outside the main body of the work.  In any case, it's definitely something I'll consider when writing the next piece, which will also be based on an essay in the Theories of Art Today book (which I highly recommend).

Thanks for your comments.

[Sean]

That's cool. Actually, the footnote is the way to go. Then you could actually shorten the in-text citation length (lower intimidation factor) and still give full bibliographic detail.

I'd like to get you some more substantial comments on the article, but, well, I'm incredibly busy, that's why I haven't been around here so often. Still, I teach philosophy of art among other things, and I'd be very interested in reading an article on the aesthetics and/or ontology of role-playing games. I actually think that Kendall Walton's book Mimesis and Make-Believe and recent work by philosophers all over the spectrum on fictional worlds actually has some bearing on the issue of 'realism' in rpgs and what it means, but that's for another lifetime to develop.

Or another person. If you decide to keep writing serious essays on the philosophy of art and role-playing, please send them my way (or at least keep letting us know when you post them) - I'll be happy to read them and offer feedback.

Best,

Sean

[Jonathan Walton]

Still, I teach philosophy of art among other things, and I'd be very interested in reading an article on the aesthetics and/or ontology of role-playing games. I actually think that Kendall Walton's book Mimesis and Make-Believe and recent work by philosophers all over the spectrum on fictional worlds actually has some bearing on the issue of 'realism' in rpgs and what it means, but that's for another lifetime to develop.

Great.  I'm definitely hoping that, by the time I get finished with this column, I'll be able to write something substantial about the aesthetics of roleplaying, something that'll probably end up in the articles section of the Forge.  I'm definitely planning to keep posting annoucements in the Theory forum as the articles get posted.

Thanks too for the recommendation of Walton's book.  He's actually mentioned a bunch in the piece by James C. Anderson that I'm analyzing for the next article, and I was interested in his work (partially because we Waltons have to stick together :).

After Anderson's piece on aesthetic appreciation, I'm planning to tackle a new book by (the unfortunately named) David Davies, called "Art as Performance," and then maybe a piece on improvization or jazz theory.  Maybe Walton would be a good place to look next.