Limitations in Art

I swear I won't transition this blog to be about the philosophy of artistic creation. I promise. However, understanding what art is and how people create art is foundational to my perspective on board game design. Today's post is a continuation of my series about art. In those posts, I outlined the ideas that design is art, art and craft are inextricably entwined, and that making art does not have to be a solo creative event. 

This post is about limitations. All art is created within constraints. I'm tired of seeing posts in design fora about how "designers shouldn't be limited in what they can design." This concept is nonsensical. Design in particular is more about constraints than other artistic fields, because design places a higher emphasis on usability. So let's take a look at some possible constraints and how they interact with various forms of art. 

Let's start with physics. Gravity is possibly the biggest limitation in the art world. I know this sounds like a joke, but it's not. Making sure performance spaces are structurally sound and safe is a huge part of technical theatre. I have been party to many conversations between designers or directors and technical directors that revolved around what was designed on paper versus what is physically possible. And since gravity is responsible for weight, it is also the cause of transportation costs and restrictions. Gravity, safety, durability— physics dictates a lot in the art world. Good designers design with physics in mind. 

Art is also limited by human physiology. A singer has to breathe. There are only so many tones audible to the human ear. An architect must design stairs and doors to human scale, both for usability and safety.  Board games have to be easily manipulated by the average human user. Human physiology dictates usability. 

Usability is about how function dictates form. The artistic medium also dictates form. Structurally sound materials will always behave and look a certain way. A block of marble contains different limitations than a canvas. Oil paints and acrylic paints produce very different paintings. Chip board tokens have different design constraints than poker chips. The materials we use when making art are themselves a limitation. 

Cost may be the second biggest limiting factor after gravity. (Although, as discussed, a lot of cost exists because of gravity.) Not every movie has Avatar's budget. A concert hall built with perfect acoustics costs more than installing a sound system. Manufacturing in China is more affordable than building the printers needed to manufacture board games in the US. The art we make is limited by what we can afford.  

Cost also affects audience. Mass produced art may cost more in total, but the per unit cost is much lower than handmade art. Movies will always be more widely available and accessible than plays. Video games will likely always have a greater market share than board games. (In terms of games, we have to factor not just per unit cost, but also the cost per hour of average playtime to understand consumer motivations for purchasing.) The higher the per unit cost, the smaller the audience. 

Cost to consumers is just one aspect of marketability. How marketable a piece of art is will limit it's audience size and it's longevity. And marketing is just one aspect of cultural mores. What and how something is marketed reflects what we value as a culture or society.  I had a theatre history professor tell my class about how avant garde theatre in the 1970s experimented with performers having sex on stage. Not as a part of a larger show, either. Perhaps you could argue these performances were pushing boundaries within the art world. But it turns out that real sex on stage is awkward and somewhat boring for an audience. These types of performances quickly died out. Today, our cultural values dictate that simulated sex scenes have intimacy choreographers and other safety measures in place to prevent abuse of or by performers. Culture limits what art succeeds and what fails.

Cultural values inform the types of stories we tell— which stories are in good taste and which are in poor taste. These values do shift overtime. Baywatch would have been banned in the early 20th century. However, no individual artist has the power to shift cultural values very far one way or the other by creating something that falls outside of what is currently acceptable. Art gets greater mileage by instead critiquing the existing cultural values. This requires that artists be engaged in a conversation about cultural values thru their art. Whether a piece of art is celebrating the current cultural values or critiquing them, art is always a reflection of the culture. 

And since creating art is one side of a conversation, artists also have to be prepared for criticism. Criticism doesn't limit art so much as it explores how a piece of art intersects with cultural mores. Critics are an informed proxy for the audience. (You can win a Pulitzer Prize in criticism.) All mature art fields have critical analysis in the form of journalists, academics, and popular trend setters. Criticism is an inevitable by-product of making art. 

All art has limitations. You could go so far as to say that art is the creative decisions we make within our limitations.