paper
active
2020
paper:2021-07-08-andrew-ngutao-8-pdf-f24e01

Culture and the Arts: From Art Worlds to Arts-in-Action

ByC. Thi Nguyen
DOI 10.1177/0002716208318634
Christopher Alexander & generative design theoryChristopher Alexander's design theoryAttentive Focus"Beauty radiates from the emotions inside the dancers, not from external displays of skill.""Cooking at its most primal is not consciously instructed labor but a flowing, attentive reverie."DesignerEnactorThe aesthetics of our own actions are already a natural part of the rich experience of our lives.Turkish BreakfastVideogame Aesthetics (Theoretical Discussion)

TL;DR

C. Thi Nguyen's central claim in this 2020 *Philosophers' Imprint* piece (vol. 20, no. 14) is that there exists a coherent, theoretically neglected category of art — the process arts — in which artifacts are designed not to bear aesthetic properties themselves but to call forth first-personal aesthetic experiences of the enactor's own activity. Rock climbing routes, the puzzle game *Portal*, social tango, Turkish breakfast spreads, and the city of Istanbul are all cited as exemplars of a schema that differs structurally from object art: the designer's work and the attentive focus come apart, with aesthetic properties emerging in the enactor's engagement rather than in any stable artifact. Nguyen introduces the conceptual distinction between *designer's work* and *attentive focus*, along with the taxonomy of designer process arts (e.g., *Portal*), enactor process arts (e.g., social tango), and hybrid process arts, and deploys an expanded version of Nick Zangwill's account of the artist to show that game designers and route-setters qualify as artists by imbuing works with the *power to bring about* aesthetic properties rather than with the properties themselves. Dominant theoretical treatments of games by Bogost, Tavinor, and Lopes are shown to systematically elide process aesthetics by assimilating games to the object-art paradigm. The paper argues that this theoretical omission is not a peripheral error but reflects a deep cultural bias: because process arts distribute aesthetic value across the artifact and the enactor's activity, they resist object-art frameworks, and correcting that bias requires recognizing aesthetic dependence — the way an enactor's activity can owe its precise aesthetic character uniquely to the process artwork that enabled it.

What to take away

  1. 1. Nguyen distinguishes two schemas for the arts: in object art the aesthetic properties adhere to the artifact itself (paintings, novels, the album *Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)*), while in process art the designer's work and the attentive focus come apart, with aesthetic properties adhering to the enactor's own activity.
  2. 2. The paper proposes a three-part taxonomy — designer process arts, enactor process arts, and hybrid process arts — illustrated respectively by *Portal*, social tango, and tabletop role-playing games.
  3. 3. Nguyen introduces the concept of *aesthetic dependence*, defined as the condition in which the precise aesthetic character of an enactor's activity depends on its being evoked by that particular process artwork, using the basketball actions 'making a basket' and 'performing an assist' as cases where the aesthetic quality is constituted by the game rules themselves.
  4. 4. The puzzle game *Portal*, whose wormhole gun mechanic creates counterintuitive physics puzzles, is the paper's central designer-process-art example: the aesthetic insight — that specific virtual physics will produce an experience of 'one's mind finally unlocking' — is held by the designer, not the player.
  5. 5. Bogost's procedural-rhetoric account, Tavinor's fiction-based account (*The Art of Videogames*, 2009), and Lopes' interactive-algorithm account (*A Philosophy of Computer Art*, 2010) are all shown to defend game art-status by attributing value solely to stable object-properties, thereby systematically excluding process aesthetics.
  6. 6. Nguyen invokes Saito's everyday-aesthetics argument (*Everyday Aesthetics*, 2007, pp. 18–26) — that process aesthetics is too variable for intersubjective art-practice — only to refute it by showing that prescriptive attentional frames (as in game rules, food-service conventions, and tango practice) can stabilize process-aesthetic experiences to a degree sufficient for critical discourse.
  7. 7. The paper extends Zangwill's account of the artist (from *Aesthetic Creation*, 2007, pp. 36–58) by adding the clause 'or the power to bring about those aesthetic properties', allowing climbing-route setters and game designers, who imbue works with capacities rather than finalized properties, to count as artists.
  8. 8. Nguyen hypothesizes that Chopin's piano works, unlike Beethoven's sonatas, constitute a partial process art because the physical movements each piece requires have expressive resonance accessible only to the performing pianist, suggesting that many canonical object-art works have underappreciated process dimensions.
  9. 9. A methodological choice another researcher could replicate is using the contrast between two games of starkly different design — *Dragon's Lair* (near-fixed action sequences) versus open-choice games like *Go* — to operationalize a sliding scale of how rigidly a process artwork constrains enactor activity and thereby approximates shareability of aesthetic experience.
  10. 10. An open question the paper raises but does not resolve is whether cities qualify as unframed process artworks, since there seems to be no illegitimate way to attend to a city's aesthetic properties during navigation, which would make cities a structurally different kind of process art from games, tango, or cookbooks that carry explicit prescriptive frames.

Peer brief — for seminar discussion

C. Thi Nguyen's 'The Arts of Action,' published in *Philosophers' Imprint* vol. 20, no. 14 (May 2020), argues that the history of aesthetic theory has been organized around what he calls object art — works such as paintings, novels, the Wu-Tang Clan's *Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)*, or live performances of *King Lear*, in which aesthetic properties adhere to a stable artifact independent of any particular audience member's activity. The paper's contribution is to identify, theorize, and defend a second, structurally distinct category: process art, in which the designer creates an artifact whose function is not to bear aesthetic properties but to call forth first-personal aesthetic experiences of the enactor's own agency, movement, and deliberation. The key formal innovation is the distinction between the designer's work (the stable artifact: a game's rules, a city's layout, a Turkish breakfast spread) and the attentive focus (the enactor's own activity), which in object art are one and the same thing but in process art come apart entirely. Using this distinction, Nguyen builds a three-part taxonomy: designer process arts, where the aesthetic insight is held by the artifact-maker (the puzzle game *Portal*, climbing routes set in climbing gyms); enactor process arts, where the insight belongs to the participant (social tango as analyzed by Beatriz Dujovne); and hybrid or nested arts (tabletop role-playing games, improvisational theater). To account for who counts as an artist in such a schema, the paper expands Nick Zangwill's account of the artist — which requires imbuing a work with aesthetic properties in virtue of an aesthetic insight — by adding the phrase 'or the power to bring about those aesthetic properties,' thereby admitting game designers and route-setters as genuine artists. The load-bearing finding is that dominant philosophical treatments of games — Bogost's procedural-rhetoric account, Tavinor's fiction account, and Lopes' interactive-algorithm account in *A Philosophy of Computer Art* (2010) — all systematically elide process aesthetics by locating art-value in stable object-properties, and that this is a theoretically driven distortion, not an innocent omission. What this implies, per the paper's argument, is that the aesthetic value of process artworks is distributed: the artifact participates indispensably in the aesthetic end-product through what Nguyen calls aesthetic dependence, but cannot finalize that value without the enactor's active role. An alternative method Nguyen could have used to establish the process/object distinction would be empirical analysis of critical discourse in game reviews and climbing culture — sources he briefly cites (noting that natural game criticism focuses on experiential play while academic theory shifts to graphics and narrative) but does not pursue systematically. A critical reader would push back on the following: the paper's central cases — *Portal*, basketball, Turkish breakfast, contact improvisation — are selected precisely because they sit at the extremes of a spectrum Nguyen himself admits is continuous. The argument depends on treating these as paradigm instances to establish the category, but the taxonomy may not generalize cleanly. If most actual artworks are hybrids with both object and process dimensions (as Nguyen grants of first-person role-playing games, detective novels, and Chopin's piano works), the distinction between object art and process art risks being a difference of emphasis or prescriptive frame rather than a structural difference in kind — a worry Nguyen deflects but does not fully dissolve. The paper also raises the open prediction that analytic aesthetic theory's neglect of process art is traceable to deep cultural and institutional biases favoring object-centered high-art traditions descended from Western Europe, a sociological claim that is asserted rather than demonstrated.

Claims (4)

Questions (2)

Related work— refs + corpus + external arXiv

Cited / in-corpus / arXiv badges show which signals surfaced each row. Multi-source rows weighted higher.

+27 more

Similar preprints — Semantic Scholar

Cross-corpus bridges (1)

same_concept_as · Nomic cosine

External markdown files that talk about the same concept as this entity.

  • alexander
    T Here, I wish to draw attention to the neglected arts of action.papers/extracted/2021-07-08_Andrew_NGUTAO-8.pdf_f24e01.md0.781