Preface During this semester, Spring 2018, I have attended a Composition course at my university. For this course, I have developed a semester-long project about video games and whether they as a medium qualify as an art form. The project is ongoing and has had many facets, the first of which being in the form of a fairly conventional academic essay. A subsequent phase of the project allowed for...
In their creative endeavors, artists often partake in a struggle, the struggle between timeliness and timelessness. Timely works speak to the present, while timeless works speak to eternity—or at least to such a long span of time that humans might perceive it as eternity. Both of these have value; both have pros and cons. Which an artist ought to pursue depends upon the project at hand and the...
I find it difficult to overstate how much Star Wars means to me. The Original Trilogy was released before my birth, but I watched rented VHS copies of them at an early age. I am of the generation that grew up with the prequel films, and I saw each of them in their original theatrical run. The Phantom Menace was possibly the first live-action blockbuster I ever saw in a movie theater—I don’t...
Many of the most popular and influential books on writing drama and fiction focus on plot structure—and rightly so, for without structure narratives could not function. Considerably less emphasis has been placed on understanding serialized narratives and how their structures differ from non-serialized narratives. Over the next few entries in this blog, I intend to articulate some of my ideas and...
Words encapsulate and transmit meaning. A word without a meaning others can understand is useless. I’ve heard some say that art is whatever you say it is; if that’s the case, then I see no reason to ever use the word. I want the word art to be useful, so I strive to give it a useful definition. However, I will concede that art is difficult to define. Art is experiential, meaning that...
In my last post, I posited my definition of art: essentially, art is the cultivation of aesthetic value for its own sake. This definition relies upon another disputable definition, that of aesthetics. What are aesthetic values? To properly answer this question, we must first answer another question: what is the purpose of art? According to my definition, all art is manmade. As such, all art...
Throughout history, many different definitions of art have been posited. Since I intend to discuss art frequently on this blog, I feel it would be prudent to clarify what I mean when I use the term. My definition implies certain presuppositions, so I shall begin by pointing some of them out and explaining why I rely upon them. Art is not beauty. Art is usually or possibly always beautiful—I...
Welcome to my blog. My name is Zack McCollum. As of writing this, I am a college student majoring in English, with an emphasis on literature. I’m also a writer of drama, fiction, and nonfiction. Here I intend to post content focusing on the literary and the artistic. Most of my content will come in the form of editorials or works of textual criticism, my guiding principles for which I shall...
Recent Comments