Early Access: Ceci n'est pas une tomate

Also can I take this opportunity to just praise The Treachery of Images? Its somewhat simplistic but in my experience its an excellent work use to introduce people for the first time to the arc of "oh that's really clever" "oh no wait that's trite and obvious" "oh no wait that's actually really insightful and has wide reaching implications". As an educational tool to ease people into thinking a bit more on a more...interconnected and critical level, I just love it

I think I would disagree with the idea that math is a realm of natural things with natural meanings, but I'm also not sure how much it actually matters to the point you're making. The mathematical systems we use every day are technically based on a set of arbitrary axioms that we use because they correlate extremely extremely well to the observed universe and fall into a similar category of "based on evidence and consensus we say this because its just useful", but alternate mathematical systems do exist and have their uses and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem hinges on the separation between systems that can and can't demonstrate certain properties of prime numbers (not that primes are special, they were just the easiest way to demonstrate "this is a problem for systems that need to do anything remotely useful"). But like I said, I'm not sure how important this very technical point is

Title Thoughts: I would at least go with English if you're appealing to a primarily english audience. I'm one of those people who knows 0 French so I couldn't even tell what the title was even tho it's a fairly simple sentence featuring a picture of a tomato. But I'm also AWFUL at titles so I will leave it there. Other thoughts: I like these videos where you contextualize and explain problems of the human condition that I am aware of and navigate readily but have never taken the time to sit out and organize and reach some kind definitive response to. My feelings on the 'are video games art' conversation has, for years, been 'this is a stupid conversation that I find incredibly uninteresting'. And that is where it remains. (And I'm NGL at first I was kind of disappointed to see you throwing your hat into the ring because I am also sick of videos about people defending or decrying the notion that video games are art, but surprise! This is actually exactly the perspective on that whole nonsense fight that I enjoy.) But with a video like this I can do a bit of a better of explaining WHY I don't care, and why I don't think it is relevant, and why I don't think the prig trying to tell me video games aren't art doesn't even actually care about art to begin with. I also think this has a lot of uses beyond this conversation as well, though. I deal with similar issues a LOT in SJW circles. I.E. as a white person raised in a middle class white society where I only SAW people who were not white on a limited basis, I was raised on what is to me the 'standard' definition that racism is, that basically thinking or acting poorly toward a person on the basis of their skin color, regardless of what that color is, is racism. Easy to understand, easy to convince myself such issues were largely a relic of the past, certainly what I took away from my 2nd grade education and never questioned because it would be like 15 years before anyone challenged that idea. Now the common conversation, in circles I now frequent, is that racism is about structural and systematic power imbalance, that while you can be bigoted against white people on the basis of their skin color, it isn't racism in a country where white people have and have ALWAYS had the dominant power. And I don't even struggle to believe this but for a long time I dug my heels in against the idea that you could just change the meaning of a word like that and expect me to know about it, until I realized that, you know, this isn't actually some new Tumblr thing. This conversation has been happening for a long time and I've never been hearing it or taught it from that perspective due to growing up in a society with an invested interest in making sure I don't think or care about the fact that in my world white people have always had the power and want to keep it and would prefer to not critically examine that. Anyway, so what I'm saying is, and I'm sure you've seen this, a LOT breath wasted over the definition of and use of the word racism by people who have histories and invested interest in maintaining a specific definition. A lot of derailing tactics, perhaps not even intentionally utilized, to avoid conversation of behaviors and their effects because it's preferable to just say "I'm not a racist, because racism means X" repeatedly, argue over definitions of words, get frustrated and offended, refuse to engage deeper. This can all be cross applied to pretty much all social justice issues. Homophobia, transphobia, I saw this conversation happening over the word 'islamaphobia' once. It's a very frustrating facet of navigating conversation, and perhaps endemic of the way we approach education as a matter of memorizing facts. If you memorized the definition of a word over 20 years ago and have been operating under that general understanding your entire life, it IS kind of dicks when a movement comes along and to tell you you're wrong. ANYWAY delightful video, and happy new years (=

Quick misspelling of "label" in "indie label," in case you care about that (or it wasn't intentional). This is a wonderful essay. I'm so happy to see a new video from you!

Awesome piece, as usual! So does this count as a December or January release in your books?

Fantastic piece!

Yeah this is great! Maybe do like a subtitle, such as "how we talk about art" or something. To create less confusion. I get that the french title makes sense, but you speak english during the video and there might be people from France who click on the video and don't understand vice versa.

First off, AMAZING WORK. Gave more clarity to this debate in 10 minutes than an entire philosophy class on Aesthetics that I took in college. Good on you for finishing it in December too. Title feedback: The title might jump out at people more if were in English? Obviously I understand why you put it in French, but personally I didn't figure out what it said before watching it, which leads me to believe that perhaps other people might not be drawn to check it out based on the title. Also, you don't actually talk about Treachery of Images in the video - which is fine, but for people not familiar with the work... it might cause significantly less confusion if you let an English title essentially translate the french in the thumbnail. Also, Re: 3:14 <a href="https://s29.postimg.org/qxv2f69if/Screen_Shot_2016_12_31_at_5_58_40_PM.png" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://s29.postimg.org/qxv2f69if/Screen_Shot_2016_12_31_at_5_58_40_PM.png</a>

Love it! There was some flickering on some photos though, it's quite subtle, but you might want to fix it before you send this out into the wild