I think commercialism compromises artistic value, because I’m of the “It’s art if you intend for it to be art” camp and if their primary intention is to make money… well, there you go.
Why are making money and making art mutually exclusive intentions?
So David isn’t art now? Most good art is created in substantial part to make money. In contrast, there are incredible amounts of dreck created where the sole intention is to create art. I don’t see how money is relevant at all, and I’m sure that most American Idol contestants really do care about being artistic, even if they are mostly lacking in artistic talent (relative to truly good musicians - they’re far more talented than the average schmo).
Most art through history has been made for pay. The “real art is unsullied by commercialism” meme is a 19th century invention. At the time it was a response to rising industrialism that suddenly made it possible for the lower classes to buy mass-produced decoration. It was part of a general effort by the middle class to align itself with “aristocratic” tastes to distinguish themselves from the great unwashed. As such it seems a particularly unuseful critical stance for interpreting art in general, and contemporary art in particular.
If you’re going to argue that video games should be excluded, you’re going to have to come up with a criteria that makes it clearly different from other art forms. So far, your only criteria has been the commercial nature of video games, which is a terrible argument, because you’ve just argued all art of any nature out of exsistence.
Who cares how it’s made? It’s how its consumed that is important. And while I’ll agree that most video games don’t have a lot of artistic merit, Half Life, and Half Life 2 moreso, is one of the few games I would highlight as the ideal argument for video games as art.
No, we all it art today because it is art today. Again, art is not a value term, its simply a definition. Art can be good, or bad, and most video games are bad art, at best. But some video games are excellent art, and I think deserve to be recognized as such. I think video games have the potential for enormous growth in this direction, and the more people recognize this now, the sooner that growth will occur.
You suggested that people were disagreeing with you because they have small dicks. How is that not hostile?
People want to censor everything. Our laws have clearly protected the right to free expresion since the beginning of our country, but every time a new medium is introduced, there’s another fight to establish that the first ammendment applies to it, as well. Video games are that new medium, and the fight is already on. Hillary fucking Clinton is one of the leading proponents of government censorship of videogames, and she’s getting quite a lot of distance out of it because of the public perception of video games as meaningless fluff, as less important, and there for less deserving of protection, as books, or movies, or music. This is exactly the same attitude that crippled the growth of comic books as a legitimate art form back in the '50s. It’s Seduction of the Innocent all over again, and I think it’ll be a crying shame if the censors win this one, too.
Alright, but you still haven’t given a sustainable criteria for putting video games on the not-art side of the spectrum.
If it has artistic value, then by definition, it has to be art.
Let me be clear: I don’t think that everything is art. A bulldozer is definitely not art. A urinal hung on the wall of an art gallery probably isn’t art. And I won’t even claim that all video games are art. For that matter, not all drawings are art, and neither are all movies, nor all sculptures. All I’m claiming is that some video games are art.
Not only is “being built with a purpose in mind” consistent with something being art, it’s necessary. Something built with no purpose in mind isn’t art, it’s just a mess, or an accident. If Leonardo had painted The Last Supper with no purpose in mind, it’d be an awfully big coincidence that it ended up looking like a bunch of folks sitting at a table eating.
Now now, we’ve already established that it’s not art if it’s produced for commercial purposes, and Leonardo painted The Last Supper because Duke Lodovico Sforza paid him to do it. So it was produced with a purpose in mind, and for commercial gain, and hence it’s doubly not art!
I still fail to see what Half-Life or any other video game has to do with a nuclear reactor. When they design reactors, aesthetics are absolutely not a concern. Have you ever seen one? They’re ugly, industrial complexes, and nobody expects any different. Everything about a reactor is designed to generate electrical power in the most efficient way possible, and that’s it.
Video games are pretty much the exact opposite - everything about them is aesthetics. Game designers use a certain graphical style, certain kinds of sounds, set a certain mood, use a certain setting, all in the effort to make a cool game that people want to play. If a game is cool enough, people will play it. How is the pursuit of cool anything but art?
The Sistine Chapel was painted for money. You wanna argue that it’s not art?
How is this even an argument? Video games definitely require all kinds of creativity. Level design, character design, artwork, story writing, even developing the physics of the game engine all requires creative thought. One might say that the more complex modern games of today are more artistic than the simple games of the past like Pacman, but even those primitive games required some creative input.
In my mind, art is anything that requires creativity to create. Of course, how do we define creativity? I suppose one could define art as a work of creativity that doesn’t have any purpose other than entertainment. If someone invents a new kind of toaster, that’s not art, but if someone builds a sculpture of a toaster that doesn’t actually make toast, then it’s art. Now if Michelangelo’s David made toast, would it be art? That’s kind of a gray area there…
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