[chrisrhoden]

> In our generation you can find tons of people doing performance art with code and custom hardware. The music scene is positively bursting at the seams, as is the gaming community.

This is specifically addressed in the top post. You're attacking a strawman. Nobody is saying that this stuff isn't valuable, it's just fundamentally different from what this post is talking about.

I won't go so far as to say that you're wrong, but you're really being an asshole right now.

[KirinDave]

> You're attacking a strawman.

No, I'm attacking a false dichotomy. Anyone who cares to talk to Daft Punk about how they do what they do will see they are technicians as well as musicians.

And if you're saying performance art ABOUT software with software as the subject should be held distinct in some arbitrary and rarefied sense, then I provided an example for that too.

[chrisrhoden]

Are you referring to your Jim Wierich anecdote? I'm pretty sure he would agree with the distinction being made here, and I am certain that art historians would.

Jim was the absolute best speaker I have seen when he gave a presentation about git at the Ruby Hoedown. His motivations for making the talk interesting were very different from the perceived motivations for the nature of the poignant guide - Jim sought to increase understanding. _why seems not to have given too many shits about that pursuit.

[KirinDave]

> Jim sought to increase understanding. _why seems not to have given too many shits about that pursuit.

You're right, Jim is better at didactic work than _why is. This doesn't mean the thing he did at rubyconf back in those early days when less than 50 people were there was any less performance art.

Jim didn't have postmodernist fox banter, and he's probably too humble to call what he does "an art." But that's okay, we can and should do it for him.

[chrisrhoden]

Unfortunately, that's simply not the modern understanding of what art is and how it works.

Text books, no matter how relevant they may be to your experience, are different from novels. And it's precisely because Jim wouldn't call it art that it isn't.

[yew]

I'd call that a postmodern understanding of art, and one originating from just one particular sect of postmodernism at that. There's a lot of postmodernists who would say that the artist's intentions in creating the work are secondary, or even irrelevant. (A lot of others who would say it too.)

The world of art is filled with warring philosophies just like everywhere else and you can't pretending that your preferred definition of 'art' is 'the one, the true, the only'. (Well, you can. Just anyone who adheres to a different philosophy of aesthetics won't take you too seriously.)

[KirinDave]

> Text books, no matter how relevant they may be to your experience, are different from novels. And it's precisely because Jim wouldn't call it art that it isn't.

I firmly assert this is wrong. You firmly assert contrary. Let's leave it at that. Further discussion is useless.

[unalone]

You assert that text books are no different from novels? That's absurd.

(If your assertion is that text books are, in fact, art, then I agree with you. But they're a very different sort of art from the sort that _why was creating – starting from the fact that the Poignant Guide is a work of fiction, and most textbooks are not.)

[reeses]

I must assert that this is not the case. Many textbooks, especially in b-school (ok, ok) are fictional narratives of a heroic quest to solve a problem. Through that narrative, lessons are expressed.

The Goal, by Goldratt, is an example of such a textbook novel.

Since it does not have a conventional novel form, I refrain from claiming the same status for Everyone Poops.