clipka wrote:
> Shay schrieb:
> 
>> ====> Technical Merit:
>> Several years ago, the Chex cereal people figured out that their 
>> cereal tastes pretty good mixed with pretzels and nuts. It does, but 
>> the fact that anyone can make it in ten minutes is why Chex Mix isn't 
>> often served at weddings. Find a recipe that takes ten /hours/ and you 
>> can bet your guests will remember it.
> 
> This is a pretty poor example: Wedding guests don't remember a dinner 
> based on how much /effort/ it took - they remember it based on how 
> /extraordinary/ it was (which I'd file as "concept").

Yes, a thing can be extraordinary because it is creative, and there is a 
voting category for that. If an artist can find some extraordinarily 
creative way to make a scene out of nothing more than a grass macro and 
the Stanford bunny, then more power to him. In fact, this is IMO the 
most difficult and laudable way to achieve "extraordinaryness."

Concept alone, however, is so easily reproduced that it quickly becomes 
banal. Even Chex mix was extraordinary for a minute.

> So to me, one (though not the only) guiding question for technical merit 
> is, "does the scene look as /convincing/ as it is possible these days?"

Escher made only a few "convincing" works.

> It doesn't matter to the wedding guests how long it took the catering 
> team to produce the dinner: It matters to them how it /looks/ and how it 
> /tastes/.

Not entirely true. Most would agree that a bowl of grapes looks good and 
tastes great, but a bowl of grapes is not extraordinary because there is 
no significant difficulty or expense in its execution.

  -Shay

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