Angriest Rice Cooker Director’s Cut 48–On Challenge
I’ve said before that I have very little use for any standard of artistic or literary quality that doesn’t take into account pure aesthetics. I think that the standard of artistic quality that I have the least affection for is the “virtuoso” standard: how hard is it to do? Now, I can certainly appreciate the beauty of a virtuoso performance. The feeling that comes from listening to someone play a difficult Liszt piece, for example, does come in part from the sheer physical impressiveness of the player. But that is just one kind of aesthetic pleasure that can be derived from a work and it’s absence doesn’t imply, to me anyway, that a work is any less artful. There are other Liszt pieces that demand very little in the way of technical skills, but they are still quite beautiful in a very different way.
In fairness, the rice cooker here makes his sarcastic point using a logical flaw. The “my five year old could do that so it’s not art” argument suggests that difficulty of execution is a necessary prerequisite to great art, but it doesn’t really suggest that difficulty of execution is a sufficient condition for great art. The idea that something as physically demanding as contortionism is great art doesn’t follow, even if you take that argument to the most absurd extremes.
But, hey, he’s a fuzzy logic rice cooker, not a conditional logic rice cooker.
(har har har)
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