Art for No One

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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

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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

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'

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

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.

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.

Art is a form of communication. Sometimes you only want to talk to yourself.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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.