Cat and Girl (or, at least, Girl) contends that “High Art is by definition what’s on gallery and museum walls.”
She makes an important point, that the context of the creation is just as important as the creation itself. Thus, a sink in someone’s bathroom is just a sink, a utilitarian object. A sink in a museum, with a label, is art. And a sink in a museum bathroom, with an added label, is… guerrilla art?
And one man’s trash is another man’s highly regarded, uh… pile of garbage.
In the hopes of keeping this blog from atrophying, I will put the Great White Whale of political diatribe on hold, and continue on to a topic that is more interesting to me (perhaps we will revisit it later).
One of the big questions in game development is “Can games be considered art?”, from which inevitably follows a number of corollary questions, “Are games all art?”, “How do we make games that are art?”, etc. Of course, to answer this question, we must first know what we are talking about. So the more important question becomes, “What is Art?”
Similar to what bell hooks once said of feminism*, there are as many definitions of “art” as there are artists. Actually… there are probably more than that, since art critics, museum-goers, and “the rest” have their own opinions about what makes art… art.
*She later argued against that mentality, but that is neither here nor there. (or is it…?)
In an effort to consider as many different viewpoints as possible, and suss from them some distillation or amalgamation of criteria for something to be considered “art”, I will post as many different accounts as I come across.
The first one is an intervention piece called “Excuse me, is this art?” (courtesy of Wooster Collective), which involves a group that creates fake attribution tags (title cards? I don’t know the specific phrase for them) and posts them next to ordinary objects in a museum, such as drinking fountains and mirrors, then records people’s responses to them. Enough words, check it out for yourself:
