... quite useless

[builderofxeno]

 A week ago Roger Ebert posted an article on his Sun-Times blog in response to a TED Talk by Kellee Santiago, president of thatgamecompany.  In her TED Talk Santiago made the case that the video game is, in a very substantive way, a contemporary art form.  Ebert, in contrast, titles his article "Video games can never be art," He argues, on a

Comments

[lacrimawanders]

Really not the way I was expecting you to go with this post -- but I like it. Do you think that art's become too broad of a term to express the meaningful things it used to? I wonder what it is that it used to express.

Do you think it's because 'art' has moved into too many types of mediums, or that because we have begun to see art as something else?

[builderofxeno]

I'm not sure if it's just a matter of there being too many mediums. The main problem, at least for me, is that the term seems to encompass mediums and works that are substantially different. The video game is a significantly different expressive medium than sculpture or music, and the works produced in those mediums bear out those differences. To just slap the general label of "art" onto all of these mediums seems lazy and not very conducive to our understanding and appreciation of the mediums.

[not_a_girl]

Bread is a really broad term too, applying to everything from naan, to croissants, to Russian black bread, but it's all bread. You can break it down into different types of bread, pastry breads, whole grain breads, sweet breads, but it's all bread.

I'm really bemused by why Ebert thought it necessary to slag on video games so much.

[theljparadox]

i, too, was intrigued by this argument. my immediate thought was that i have never heard someone claim that a particular thing is "not art" without being immediately attacked. the groups doing the attacking usually vary, but the type of attack being made is always very uniform - "you are a traditionalist who simply can't appreciate something outside your own comfort zone." this leads me to two conclusions:
1 - "art" is an ideal-type in the Weberian sense. it is an inherently contextual concept, neither absolutely real nor illusory, and no definition of the term can transcend its social/cultural context.
2 - although it rarely considered thus, art can be absolutely anything.

threat: i'm gonna git you, sucka.

[theljparadox]

also, i was fond of these conclusions, because they mean i no longer see any reason whatsoever to argue about a concrete definition of art. i hate having that debate, and it pleases me to no end that i don't have to have it again.

[vox_ex_nihili]

I'm going with the food argument on this one