Having forbidden themselves discussing and evaluating their "art games" in terms of pleasure, they therefore need another criterion in order to be able to discuss them at all. It is vitally important to avoid judging these "art games" according to the criterion of pleasure, since this would immediately expose their complete and utter worthlessness: after all, five minutes of OutRun 2 or Crysis are more fun than all their shitty games put together — and they know it. They must therefore find another criterion according to which some of their "art games" can be considered more "artful" than others. And this is where the meanings (and especially the hidden, all-too-hidden meanings...) and the messages come in. It's already an old and tired story (not that the artfags, being uneducated, would be in any way aware of it...): what occurred previously in painting with the gradual shift toward Abstraction, in poetry with the abandonment of rhythmic structure, in the plastic arts with the introduction of the ready-mades, and so on and so forth in every single artform — the same exact process is currently unfolding itself in the world of videogames before our very eyes. To begin with what occurred in painting, the turning point comes with the appearance of Impressionism. This style, though clearly vastly inferior to previous schools of painting (a fact of course which art critics of the time did not fail to point out, deriding Impressionist works as sloppy, lazy, unfinished sketches), was at least still focused on giving the viewer pleasure. So while Impressionism, on the one hand, clearly represented a vulgarization of painting, a relaxing of the bow of the artform (— every highly evolved artform is a tensed bow), an enormouslowering of the barriers to entry for new painters, to a level far lower than what was required to paint, e.g., in the Romantic, Neoclassic, Rococo, or Baroque styles, and indeed in any previously existing style barring perhaps some very primitive ones such as the Merovingian, Carolingian, Romanesque, etc. — i.e. pre-Renaissance painting — nevertheless, an aspiring Impressionist still had to know how to wield the brush. The barriers to entry might have been lowered, but certainly not so much that any bungler could come in and be on an equal footing with the masters. And, at the same time, this development was directly reflected in the amount of aesthetic enjoyment these new paintings produced in those who viewed them: so that, while a Monet or a Renoir could ultimately never give as much pleasure as a Rubensor a Rembrandt, at least they weren't exactly bad to look at. Nevertheless the decisive step, the step back — to a previous, much lower, standard of complexity — had been taken, but since it wasn't exactly a step back, i.e. not exactly back to a previously existing style, but back and sideways, as it were, diagonally back, i.e. to a style which, though less complex than contemporary standards, at least came in a different, altogether new form — it appeared to the ignorant and the feebleminded as if Impressionism had suddenly opened up a new path forward. The path was indeed new, but it was leading backward not forward — more clearly downward. Now, if the fate of this new style had been up to the art critics and art lovers among the nobility whose patronage had sustained painting (and hence painters) throughout the many centuries it had taken to reach the heights of Baroque and Rococo, things would have certainly turned out differently — but unfortunately it wasn't. For the appearance and spread of Impressionism coincided with (indeed was made possible by) the rise in France and other Western European nations of a burgeoning middle class, from whose ranks painting would henceforth increasingly draw, not only its artists, but also its critics and viewers. For painting previously, i.e. before the French Revolution, was, like the rest of the arts, the exclusive province of the nobility; no one else had the time or the money to concern himself with them. Given, then, such a highly restricted, and therefore highlydiscerning and demanding public, expectations and standards remained extremely high throughout centuries, ensuring that only the most competent artists were selected and promoted. The result was a vertiginous rise of the art of painting, to such heights indeed from which the masterpieces of the Renaissance finally came to seem like stilted, awkward sketches next to what artists were achieving three centuries later. — All this suddenlydisappears once the masses have been unleashed on the art of painting, and any bungler can make a name for himself by playing the virtuoso in front of uneducated half-peasants who were born yesterday and don't know any better. Impressionism therefore was not, as is often said, the cause of the decline of painting but its consequence — the cause was the opening up of the artform to the masses. The decisive moment, therefore, was not, strictly speaking, the appearance of Impressionism, as I said earlier, but the French Revolutionwhich hastened the rise of the middle class and would eventually lead to its dominance — the temporal disparity between the two events being merely the time it took for the ripples of the political catastrophe to arrive and make themselves felt in the domain of painting (as they would eventually be felt in every one of the various areas of culture). — What followed after Impressionism is, of course, history, and indeed such abysmally wretched history that I cannot even be bothered to seriously study it, much less relate it in any detail. Briefly then, with the appearance of the ludicrous, childish, and even grotesque visual abortions, first of the Expressionists and then of the Cubists (the former of which were merely further degenerate Impressionistic works, i.e. made by artists who were not even competent enough to paint in the Impressionist style, while the latter finally regressing to the level of children's and cavemen's stick-figure doodles), the floodgates were at last thrown open, and the random paint splotches of the so-called "Abstract" style which followed shortly after (a style without any rules whatsoever, that is to say a non-style, a free-for-all pseudo-style invented specifically for the benefit of the most lazy, the most talentless, the most incorrigibly incompetent pseudo-artists), signaled the death of painting. Finally some random dude like William Burroughs could come in, with no prior training in painting whatsoever, indeed with a downright contempt and disdain for the artform, place some cans of spray paint in front of blank canvasses and blow them up with a fucking shotgun for christsake, then go on to exhibit in galleries the resulting splattered canvasses as "High Art", indeed as on a par with the glories of a Raphael or a Titian — without anyone spontaneously erupting in side-splitting laughter, then taking the idiot's "paintings" off the wall and smashing them in his face. — So much for painting then. In the realm of music the story is fundamentally the same, differing only in the details. Setting aside classical music (which, rooted in a largely ecclesiastical-liturgical tradition stretching all the way back to the ninth century, finally reached during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the highest stage of richness and complexity of music ever achieved by man), the peasant/folk traditions from which jazz, blues, country, soul, funk, etc. were descended, finally gave rise to rock and roll, and thence to heavy metal — a style of music which, though nowhere near as complex as classical music, was still a relatively demanding art, especially in its "epic" and "power" varieties. But then along came punk rock, a far simpler, far easier (both on the ears and the musicians) form of rock, in short a degenerate form — though still of course to an extent enjoyable (in short, the "Impressionism" of rock and roll music), basically the kind of music perfectly suited for the masses of "rebelling" middle-class baby-boomers who were coming of age at the time, and who, being young and ignorant and stupid, lacked the necessary adequately refined taste faculty to demand more from their musicians. Punk rock would consequently further degenerate to various even simpler subgenres (grunge, etc.), at which point any slightly-stoned unshaved dude in a flannel shirt could pass himself off as a master musician by simply strumming a couple of power chords while jumping up and down and yelling incoherently (and finally committing suicide — this being the distinguishing mark of the successful musician, the cherry on the top of his performance, as it were, the coup de grâceof the virtuoso, with music as clown- and freak-show) — all this being a process which, to make a long story short, occurred also in a similar manner (which is to say in form, not in the details) in every other genre, all these trends finally leading down to and coalescing into various forms of so-called "experimental music" which, once again, had abandoned all pretense at style, thus signaling the final dissolution of music. Once you get to smelly rastafarian dudes standing on their heads and banging pots and pans (it's called "environmental music", a style of "music" which had finally regressed to the stage of half-naked savages with chunks of bone stuck in their hair sitting on trees and banging snake-skin drums), you might as well go home because the whole farce is over. — And again with poetry. The various strict metric styles, invented and laboriously refined in the various traditions over centuries, were eventually abandoned in the first half of the twentieth century as too "restrictive" (in plain terms: too difficult to adhere to), leading to an utterly random, utterly formless and unrestrained "style" (— more accurately, then, once more, a non-style—), the so-called "free verse" (which is basically a euphemism for "prose", for poetry is exactly that style of writing which is not free for christsake, which adheres to certain metrical constraints), of which Robert Frost once remarked that it was "like playing tennis without a net". What remained then was to take the final step in this direction — finalbecause it brought the entire ludicrous process full circle — and this was achieved by the so-called "prose poetry", which is simply a contradictio in adjecto, i.e. nonsense, since prose and poetry are defined as the opposite ends of a spectrum for christsake! — And that was the fate of Homer's art: to degenerate into a contradictio in adjecto. — And finally, to wrap up this mind-bewildering litany of wretchedness and perversion, in the plastic arts there is no longer anyone who has the skill (or who can be bothered to attempt to acquire it —) to painstakingly carve out of blocks of pure marble anything even remotely resembling the statues of the Greeks, the Romans, or the masters of the Renaissance; consequently, what passes itself off as "plastic art" today are the descendants of Picasso's metal monstrosities,Duchamp's urinals and Manzoni's crocks of shit — meaning whatever piece of junk modern "artists" might care to randomly slap together. — In short, while older artists throughout entire millennia created, elevated and refined the arts, giving pleasure to innumerable human beings, indeed practically inventing entire new worlds of pleasure — modern ones seem hell-bent on remaining entangled in a debased, pretentious, hypocritical pseudo-artistic process of "creation" which culminates with

"the non-exhibition of non-works in non-galleries — the apotheosis of art as a non-event. As a corollary, the consumer circulates in all this in order to experience his non-enjoyment of the works." (Baudrillard)