Dead Art Forms

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Which art forms - high or folk - have died?

― Tom, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

needlepoint to the degree with which it was inovated and practiced , quitling , any homecraft .

― anthonyeaston, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

whittling, y'all

― katie, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Wrong, Anthony, it is very much alive. Quilting, lacemaking and needlework. In fact we know some amazing needle workers.

― helen fordsdale, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Well very few (any?) art forms are completely dead - you'll always get someone keeping the heritage flame alight. I dare say there are even a few cave painters about. But yeah - needlework's not what it was. Maybe you can only pomo needlework is now possible..

Skiffle? Yodling? That thing with pretty big letters at the start of books?

― Nick, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

True, Nick, maybe we should call it living dead artforms? Zombie-art?

― helen fordsdale, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Text adventures.

― Tom, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Fractal graphics?

― Nick, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Quilting *is* very much alive. We get books here from time to time with new takes on the quilt. I mean, you can do a hell of a lot with just fabric squares, stitch patterns, and batting.

― Kerry, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Tom -- you did that just to rile me, didn't you. grrr. (and other rile-type sounds)

rec.arts.int-fiction is alive and well thank you very much. Graham Nelson, the saviour of text adventures, will smite you.

― Alan Trewartha, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Yes, text-based adventures are perhaps the greatest lost art form of them all. It's always been a great disappointment to me that I never got to play any of the Infogrames releases - is there anywhere where these would still be available?

― Trevor, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

sort of. they are still on sale and the copyright is still being upheld. you'll get SHOUTED at if you stumble into rec.games.int- fiction and ask for copies of the INFOCOM games. everyone asks for that. Oh, you can get some Zork Games for free now.

There is however a LARGE community of text games developers, and they produce lots of FREE games, some of which are of an excellent quality -- better than the 70s/80s commercial stuff. Start at the if-archive. My recommendations are the games: Curses, Spider and Fly, and Christminster.

― Alan Trewartha, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Do they still depend on you stumbling on the right vocabulary to win? ("Oh, you've got to EMBARK THE CANOE not BOARD it. Why didn't I think of that before?")

― Nick, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

the vocabulary is way larger than the old games that had to fit in 60K. "hunt the verb" as it's known is universally seen as a failing.

Another link to my shed of a website where you can play some games in a java applet.

― Alan Trewartha, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Board games, card games, frozen yogurt, and NEW BEAT!

"Darling, come here, and..."

― Brian MacDonald, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

keeping the heritage flame alight = effectively dead, for me, pretty much dead. mostly dead. like when the human body hasn't had any new food, it starts eating itself, starting with the retinas.

part of the difficulty in answering this question is that i think as we lose our arts we must efface their absence with a welter of propaganda and other, seemingly new forms which will make us forget those other loves; there are always other fish in the sea etc. and i think this kind of historical airbrushing is especially effective with "low art" traditions that may never have had institutions to sustain them. liiiike.... the building and maintenance of kites.

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

i am shamed . i want to quilt
i would have suggested folkdancing but we sqaure dance so thats out , what about Hair Art

― anthony, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Text adventures? What the hell?

― Ally, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Anthony, you and David square dance?

― Samantha, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Text adventures? What the hell?

Are we talking about Infocom games of the early 80s here? Or the Make Your Own Adventure action novels for kids where you could make decisions which would alter what page you'd read next?

Anyway, Ally, before the wonderful advent of actual computer graphics, many computer games were simply long-form adventure puzzles which were texted based. You had to type in a command to do what you needed to do... like "go north", "talk to the robot", "fight monster", etc.

― Brian MacDonald, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

It hasnt died but good journalism has been going down the pan for years, like it or not. I had a good english teacher back when I was 14 or so and when I told him I wanted to be a journalist he made me read George Orwells essay, "Politics and the English language". Apparently it's the 50th anniversary of when Orwell wrote that essay and when you read phrases like "payload" and "collateral damage" written by people who call themselves journalists it just makes the text all the better.

Also started reading a book by Neil Postman "Amusing Ourselves to Death". It's about the declining standards in journalism due to television.

― Ronan, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

rock.

― duane, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Music Hall?

― Norman Phay, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

text adventures = zork?

dead art forms:

- radio drama

- greek tragedies (repelete with chorus)

- comics (hah! deny it!)

- calligraphy (in countries with non-idiogram based writing systems)

- vaudeville

- burlesque

- rock music (wait, all the same thing! haw haw.)

― jess, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I wish we were talking about Choose Your Own Adventure, those things were the bomb. Though a bit disturbing that children's books featured "turns" that could lead you to your own death.

― Ally, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

i still have all my choose-your-own-adventures.

war with the evil powermaster, represent!

― jess, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Those books were a serious excercise in intensive bookmarking.

― Kim, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Roller Derby

― Kris, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

starving artists

― hamish, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

feeding Christians to lions

― hamish, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

yes david and i square dance.

― anthony, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

and the lusty lady, jumbos clown room , annie sprinke- they all do burlesque . I would say Kabaret as opposed to Cabaret

― anthony, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I wish big stage spectacle Irish Dancing a la Michael flatley would die. I'm always told conversation is a lost art. Must have been something I said

― Menelaus Darcy, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Do people still hold tobacco spitting competitions?

― Menelaus Darcy, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Zork ruled. "Choose your own adventure" books were kinda neat how they introduced kids to metafiction. I'd inevitably check on all the endings and go backwards from the one I thought the coolest.

― bnw, Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

All I can think of that is dying out is languages. Do many people speak Scots or Gaelic or Welsh or Manx anymore? I remember reading that some of those languages are nearly extinct.

I like playing Mah Jong and Canasta. I can't find many people under sixty who enjoy these games. I wish I could. Is anyone else on ILE in Melbourne? If so, do you want to get together and play Mah Jong or Canasta?

― toraneko, Wednesday, 31 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

i'm in sydney, but hey, hop on a plane and we'll do coffee and shit. me htinks Art (capital A) is dead. Me is glad.

― Geoff, Wednesday, 31 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I worked on a video game title based on Mah Jongg and Shanghai. Yes, the main demographic of Mah Jongg players are indeed women in their 60s+... but hell, I still love Mah Jongg and all it's complexities. I'm the proud owner of a Shanghai/Mah Jongg tile set

KONG!

― Brian MacDonald, Wednesday, 31 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

the book I learned mah jongg from had a v.sniffy back page which said "actually the chinese play a much simpler faster game than this, suitable for gambling and w/o all the poxy rococo folderol of you decadent imperialist running dogs so HAH!!" That was the gist, anyway.

― mark s, Wednesday, 31 October 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

there are speakers of Irish and Scots Gaelic and Welsh. i think they are all relatively healthy, compared to say, ten years ago. the last native speaker of the Manx variety of Gaelic died circa 1974, i believe, but as he made it into the era of the tape-recorder, an idea of how it was pronounced has survived, and, like Cornish, it has been revived.

― cameron, Friday, 2 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Weren't Choose Your Own Adventure just Fighting Fantasy for the bottom set kids?

I think opera is dead. The only opera that sells now is actually pop.

― chris, Friday, 2 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

hmmm Nixon in China anyone

― anthony, Friday, 2 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

"Nixon in China" is one of the few operas I own on CD... I played the entirely of this on KUCI almost 7 years ago... that John Adams.

― Brian MacDonald, Friday, 2 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

String Quartet is dieing. A good knife maker is hard to find and some days I miss Mousier Felix and Mr Norton cookies like no tomorrow.

― Mr Noodles, Friday, 2 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

its impossible to find good servants these days

― Menelaus Darcy, Friday, 2 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

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