Yesterday I went to The Getty Museum with my fiancee and some friends. For those that don’t know, it’s an extremely swanky art museum located on the top of a small mountain in Los Angeles. It’s just off of the highway, but you have to take a tram that winds twistily up the side of the mountain and removes you from all the sounds of city life and traffic. It also provides a truly breathtaking view into the thick wall of smog in front of downtown LA.

It’s like being in another world entirely. It’s the first time in years that I’ve been someplace that’s really, truly quiet. It’s eerie at first, but then gets calming.

What makes it even better beyond simply art is the gardens. They have a huge area devoted to a circular floating garden surrounded by a wide variety of very attractive and unexpectedly living plants.

While I was there I got to see a Rembrandt exhibit, a room full of astonishingly beautiful marble sculptures, a photography exhibit, ancient Roman art, the gardens, and an exhibit showing off the way books used to be made… exquisitely hand-painted, every page, and lettered with loving precision. Each book could easily have taken an entire lifetime to create for all the detail in it.

Now, bizarrely enough, even though I’m a professional artist, I dislike most traditional art, and passionately hate quite a bit of it. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’ve only ever created functional \ technical art for games instead of traditional art like painting or sculpture that makes me deeply agnostic about deeper meaning in art, but so much art is absolutely intolerable for me.

For example, the photography exhibit was full of 3×5 black and white photos of random, meaningless crap. Some were of the side of a small house, others were of unremarkable people, there was even a small series of closeups of the least interesting parts of a plant. The latter were intended to represent the beautiful sanctity of nature and the photographer’s passionate hate of the evils of man by his deliberate exclusion of anything man-made, modern or industrial in any way.

People were walking through the exhibit and seeming to marvel at the depth of each photograph and find all these “hidden” meanings in it and act like they’re practically spasming in pleasure over it.

I wanted to find the artist, grab him by the shoulders and violently shake him back and forth screaming “You are not an artist, you take pictures of random, uninteresting PAP and feebly attempt to rationalize a deeper meaning out of it so people won’t notice it’s BAD and you SUCK!” and then, I don’t know, throw him down a flight of stairs, or maybe just give him paper cuts from his own photos or something.

See, I hate people like that. I hate art that makes people do that. I hate artists that hang a blank canvas and call it art. I hate artists that record over four minutes of silence and call it art. I hate artists that splatter a bunch of random crap onto a canvas and call it art. I hate artists that make terrible art and try to justify its importance by claiming it has a deeper meaning borne deep from the pit of his tortured soul that utterly transcends silly pedestrian concepts like being a competent artist.

I realize art is the realm of the subjective, but so many mediocrities use it as a safe haven to be not only terrible at what they do, but a reason for being arrogant. On the other side of the coin, so many people seem to try desperately to find the deeper meaning in art that has none simply to try to lord their superiority over others.

I suppose that all boils down to pretentiousness, which, even when found roaming in the wild, I despise. The fact that so many people in a different wing of the field I chose to enter use art as a way to BE pretentious makes me sick.

For this reason, I actually hesitate to tell people I’m an artist for fear that I’ll be identified as one of these slack-witted doddering slabs of lumpy flesh.

Granted, there is quite a lot of good art, but I rarely find it in painting. Too much room to suck. I seem to prefer sculpture because traditionally they’re all working toward one specific, easily measurable standard: reality. Michelangelo’s David is a great example of what I like. Sculpture tends toward recreating human anatomy and figure as accurately and dramatically as possible, so you can easily tell what’s good and what’s not simply on a technical level.

There’s a marble sculpture I saw yesterday that was a woman draped in cloth. The cloth was so exquisitely carved and smoothed that it looked like real cloth, as if I could reach out and touch it and it would sway gently. All this out of a giant chunk of ugly rock. What’s more, since it’s marble, you can’t afford to make even a single mistake or the entire sculpture is hideously marred.

The skill sculptors needed to have to accomplish that, both realism and dealing with a VERY unforgiving and expensive material, THAT is what impresses me. Not a pile of sliced ham on a bed that some pathetic loser is hawking as art.

It’s objective measurement and specific purpose like that that I find attractive about art for games. It’s working within a set of constraints for a specfic end goal. If I make a character that looks great but doesn’t work in the game, I’ve failed to make that character be what it was intended to be, and I’m not doing my job. Period. I don’t get points for effort, I don’t get a little yellow ribbon for being a participant, I simply fail.

The challenge of my job is to take what’s asked of me and create it as best I can within the constraints of the game’s engine. Simple, cut and dry. Subjectivity takes a backseat to function, which is how I like it. That’s how I roll. :)

On a slightly different subject, I bought a Canon Powershot A95 about a month back. It’s a fantastic little toy that’s easy to use, has a wide array of features and takes deliciously huge pictures. Even a cam-tard like me can use it to take really great pictures.

I took some pictures from my visit to the Getty… if anyone’s interested, you can see them at the link below:

Jon Jones’ visit to the Getty Museum

Updates may be sporadic over the next couple months as I’m getting ready to move to a new apartment complex… an apartment complex that wouldn’t rather let my fiancee suffer a heat stroke (which she did) and lie about air conditioning to get me to move in, then forbid me from installing my own because “air conditioners look unsightly from the outside.” Apparently, purdy lil’ apartments take precedence over human lives. Once things are set in stone and I’m out for good, I’ll talk more about it. More on that soon…