I took the message that all that culture is now available in an even slimmer form factor. This is the problem with art. Unambiguous messaging is impossible as one casts a wider net of interpretation
I think the mark of a good ad is that you can turn the music off and most people will get the message. The imagery of destroying the things is the problem, if you turn the music off you really don’t know how you are supposed to feel about this. Apple conveyed similar messages before with animations that did not destroy the underlying album arts, just shrunk them into an iPod. It would hit very different if they crushed a bunch of music paraphernalia people got a lot of enjoyment out of.
Very true- I wonder if the prevailing interpretation would be different if this was 20 years ago. The destruction of all those tools would probably have a much more "punk rock" interpretation from people if Apple weren't the megacorp they are today.
There's nothing anti-establishment on the commercial. They need some minimal amount of punk if they want a "punk rock" aesthetic.
All that is there is a megacorp stealing a previously popular (comical) format, to show people's culture being (quite forcefully) transformed into establishment. The commercial is repulsively anti-punk.
20 years ago there were healthier vestiges of traditional arts and culture across society - it's easy not to appreciate or miss things until they're gone.
I found it super ironic how they blathered on about all of the recycling going on in their products, then blatently show all those items being destroyed when they could clearly be recycled.
I do think that the 'rendered' idea was the best - almost thinking differently, or something...:S
It's an animation of items being destroyed. It's very fake and Apple used an exaggerated cartoon style animation so it couldn't get mistaken for reality.
It's like getting mad at road runner for dropping a piano on Wile E Coyote.
It's not about the actual instruments that probably weren't actually destroyed to make the ad. No one is mad about that. The visual of instruments being pointlessly destroyed can be viscerally upsetting. Just because you have no emotional attachment to such objects doesn't mean other people do not.
I wouldn't think most (if any of it) was real. At the most I'd expect they were destructive props in the same way the table with the legs sawn to break in the just the right way for a movie stunt is a "real" table, but not a "real table".
As the other comment says, the cans would never crush flat before the piano starts to deform at all. Then when the front of the piano comes open, a pile of all the dampers just falls out, despite that area not being touched yet. It's all done to look exciting but not realistic.
Yes. Why in the world would a director use practical effects for something like this?
The CG isn't even that good. It looks like something out of DALL-E.
It calls to mind yet another way in which the ad could have been crafted to communicate without controversy or offense -- the instruments could have been more obviously cartoons.
The ad clearly didn't communicate that message to a huge portion of its audience. There's plenty of us who can see the intent but still don't like the ad. There are so many other ways to communicate that message in a more effective way.
I think everybody agrees that that was the _intended_ message. But it's a forced transition. At the end of the ad there is _just_ an iPad. It's not as if the user has any choice now. And that makes the ad very weak. Why is Apple even going into the destruction business? They are supposed to be a creative (creating?) company, if it were an Lockheed Martin ad it would have fit ;)
By whose definition? Art is creative expression and there's no qualifiers in standard definitions to exclude work that is used to promote something else.
I'd say flyers for shows are art. or movie posters. or book covers, for that matter. Or trailer music? corporate jingles? They're all art.
By academic definition in the Science of Culture school of thought that I align with.
Art is roughly self-expression or interpretation of reality performed with symbolic means.
It's a debatable definition of course, as aesthetics are nebulous, but most others are far too broad and therefore lose their meaning and usability, at least in the academic context.
> I'd say flyers for shows are art. or movie posters. or book covers, for that matter. Or trailer music? corporate jingles? They're all art.
They are not if we're talking in generals, though there can be conditions where a specific piece can be viewed as such, of course. All the things you mentioned are products of craft most of the time. Crafts belong to the wider sphere of aesthetic culture of course, but it's not art. Of course, I know some artist/illustrators closely collaborating with authors/musicians for their posters and covers, but it's more of an exception to the rule.
Roughly speaking, the need to tailor a creation to align with the desired brand image or marketing strategy inevitably conflicts with honest self-expression.
> By academic definition in the Science of Culture school of thought that I align with.
Can you give me one example of this school of thought? An actual institution or some book/paper that goes into this topic? I have not been able to find much anything except broader topics of culturology or science of culture. I've also not found anything suggesting that my examples aren't considered art by it.
> All the things you mentioned are products of craft most of the time. Crafts belong to the wider sphere of aesthetic culture of course, but it's not art.
Crafts and Art overlap frequently. Someone can be a woodworker that builds tables and they might not be an artist. They fine tune their craft and build sturdy, excellent tables, but they're not creating art. However, if they are making creative decisions about how they want to express themselves through the tables they create, yes, it is art.
> Of course, I know some artist/illustrators closely collaborating with authors/musicians for their posters and covers, but it's more of an exception to the rule.
It hardly matters if they are or aren't, you don't need a band to participate in the creation of a flyer for it to be considered art. The art part comes in from what the artist who is creating it.
> Roughly speaking, the need to tailor a creation to align with the desired brand image or marketing strategy inevitably conflicts with honest self-expression.
Constraints are a normal part of the process of creating art. If I commission someone to create an oil painting on a canvas of a specific size, that is also requiring an artist to tailor their creation to align with an external factor out of their control. That doesn't make the resulting piece not art.
I get that physical constraints aren't the same as ones that are tied into art, like what message you're communicating. I think I just fundamentally disagree that it disqualifies something from being art. If I give a writing prompt to a writer, is the resulting piece of literature disqualified from being art because I shaped what it is to be about? I don't think so. Similarly, I don't think that defining themes to use in the creation of a piece of art makes it less honest. It just means that the self-expression is conveyed through different means.
Being true to HN guideline of assuming good faith, I can say that the place is really irrelevant, as, from my experience, you can't effectively force a definition within an institution without taking away academic autonomy. Mind it, this is a definition stemming from the Social Studies/Culturology context, and not from Art Criticism/Art History, as the former fields do not concern themselves with making a value judgement.
I'm long out of the loop, so I can give only general directions. You could say that the definition in question aligns with Riegl's idea of embodiment of Kunstwollen, perhaps in some way with Collingwood's aesthetic expressivism view of art, and also integrates the semiotics approach, which helps with underlining the importance of both the form/medium and the subjectivity of perception (this is important for looking at art in historical/sociological context).
If your question was, in fact, an Ad Locus attack - well, the name for it is Genetic Fallacy, I believe.
PS: A school of thought is located in the minds of its supporters ;)
My postscript just meant to point out the fact that since you asked a question about a school as a place while answering to my comment mentioning a school of thought (that's not a place), perhaps there's some miscommunication happening.
Me mentioning a school of thought and not a specific institution implied the fact that when it comes to culture, there could be a considerable variety of positions within one such institution. For example: when it comes to universities, students can be taught by professors from different faculties but the subjects can intersect significantly, so they get to see the varying approaches to even the basic stuff and they are supposed to make their own minds. Humanities are like that, there's no formulas set in stone until disproven.
I'm not so sure about that; the emoji with the eyeballs squeezed out of their sockets didn't exactly scream "compression" to me. It felt like they were aiming for over the top cartoonish destruction - but destruction nonetheless.
I hate ads, but I'm struggling to understand how something being an ad disqualifies it from being art. Advertising is a creative human endeavor. Ads are designed to make you feel something, just like art.
The romantic ideal is that art is not about consumption, but the reality, both historically and currently, is that art objects are by and large made to be bought and sold. If you disqualify all works meant for consumption, you would have very little left that we currently recognize as art.
There are a long list of arts with adjectives in front of them. commercial art, applied art, fine art, etc...they aren't art just because you have co-opted art to mean only fine art. Also see:
Art and design exist ubiquitously in all things and all actions. It is the people without taste who pretend art or design is a separate activity from all other human endeavors. Perhaps a subset of "pure" or obvious art are works devoid of function except to be perceived.
"Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." - Cesar A. Cruz
