I can agree with a lot of this because I can imagine there being a scientific basis behind all this. However, I still see a type of "jumping the gun" when it comes to knowing the intent by the artist. Take your skimpy female design. Is it possible anyone who draws that and shows attention to it wants to appeal to males? Definitely. Biologically, we know what each gender is attracted to (however, if you take into account sexual orientation, you're leaving out bisexual or gay women who can equally find said art appealing) . But what if someone draws it just as an artstyle or preference? I'm not the one to say "well you're only doing that because you want males to look at it". Kinu Nishimura is a
female Japanese artist who did the design for
Code of Princess but I'm not in the power to know who she designed it for or if she intended for other women to not look at it. That type of thinking itself can actually be seen as sexist.
I see your point, but you're coming into this argument from a different paradigm. You're thinking of the artists as unique entities, capable of distancing themselves from their context and that it should be their privilege to behave as such without being blamed of reinforcing cultural and artistic ideas that are ultimately harming to the audience (and by harming, i'm specifically talking about reinforcing unhealthy gender representations that harm men's and women's own relationship with what is expected of their gender role). Which is simply not the case, because humans simply don't behave that way. We grow through reaction to our environments, and as an audience, every work of art that we consume inevitably relates itself to whatever else we have consumed before. That's how criticism works as well, and how it has evolved together with art throughout the centuries. That's how we can see art movements developing over time, and pretty much all movements are reactions to the paradigm that was set by the movements that came before.
And also, videogames are largely commercial enterprises, so the developers can't merely exist within the artistic world, they also have to work towards existing in the entertainment business. Their work is inevitably strictly judged by a gigantic number of possible buyers, who themselves exist in a culture that unapologetically reinforces mass consumerism. The relationship with the audience and with the medium is very different for videogames than it is for, hum, fine art photographers for example. You'll excuse me if i constantly refer to photography, that's the one medium i'm most knowledgeable about. So, if, say,
Gregory Crewdson does a project that clearly displays archaic gender roles, should he be held accountable for reinforcing generally considered bad stereotypes? His audience is very well defined, they're art gallery goers who are likely to be familiar with his work. Let's talk about another one, then. Garry Winogrand is commonly thought to be one of the best and most influential street photographers, but part of his work is clearly about exploring female moments of public fragility (
"It's the fear of having a brief moment of physical vulnerability in a public place - a broken blouse button, a dropped handbag, a taxi exit in a dress - and watching that moment show up later, in a humiliating way, because of some jerk with a camera."). Winogrand's audience is a fair bit bigger than Crewdson's, and his influence is still felt today. And unlike Crewdson, who mostly works with fictional scenes, Winogrand's work is documentarian, reflective of the society he observed and captured. Can he be held accountable for having an artistic direction that sought to display females in an unapolagetically bad light? How does each of these artists influence their audience? Differently? And if so, to what degree can they held responsible for that influence? You see what i'm getting at? There can be no one question to save them all. You shouldn't be able to ask "but is that what they were really thinking?" when their work touches controversial subjects, because that question provides no real answer. It takes nothing about the artist's context into account, it doesn't help the artist be clearer about his message, and it doesn't put any possible discomfort to rest. It's a "bad" question. If people are having problems with what they're consuming, then that problem exists whether we want it to or not.
As an aside, i do really love the art of Code Princess. The whole king and queen theme with Solange is awesome and somehow very well mixed. But it's really iffy nonetheless, and though i still haven't played the game (and thus can't really comment on it), i understand why the design might have meant someone not buying the game.
See the above. I don't think it's wrong if the artist has full control over it.
Hum, well, see the above as well!
There really is no such thing as a good or bad artist. What makes Picasso's work better than Claude Monet? You would be hard pressed to find an answer. You can like someone else's art better but you can't discriminate someone else's when their intent can be totally different from what someone else achieves.
There
is such a thing as a bad artist. Why isn't there? There are bad photographers, there are bad writers, there are bad musicians. Why shouldn't there be bad painters? Picasso certainly wasn't as good a painter when he began his career as he was when he finished it. Same with Monet. Old Monet was probably a better painter than young Picasso. Same with Da Vinci, same with The Beatles, same with Robert Doisneau, same with every artist that sold their lives and souls for their artisanship.
What you might be thinking, and this is a perfectly understandable situation to find yourself in, is that if all these people worked in different stuff, how can they be compared to each other? And that's actually the case. Well, photographers took a lot from painters and cinematographers took a lot from photography
and painting. But neither took anything from music, or from writing, or from acting, etc, right? But the thing is that, even though they work in different mediums, they all aim for the same thing. A sad photograph aims for the same thing that a sad movie and a sad song aims for. They may use a different vocabulary, and they may work with different senses, but they all have sadness in common. And therein lies the one thing that you can measure commonly measure. An artist's skill is the relationship between what he knows, how he uses what he knows, and how effective he is at using his knowledge to his desired intent.
You also say communication, but the world of art has myriads of ways to express yourself. There is no one standard every artist has to follow when it comes to the end result.
But to express yourself is to communicate, isn't it? I don't mean to say that communication is a theme common to all art, but act of using your skills to create art and to display your art is in and of itself an acting of communication between the artist and the audience.
Holy shit, i really outdid myself with this one. In any case, i'm happy you didn't just tell me to fuck off like many would. Thanks brah.