Create

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:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 8:55 am and is filed under Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.