Galleries aren’t waiting for games to be accepted as art by critics, but seem to have made the choice themselves already. For example, The Smithsonian American Art Museum is hosting The Art of Video Games. Also, the NYU Game Center is holding the second annual exhibition of games No Quarter. Unfortunately not very close to me.
I wrote about games as art before, so I should mention that Georgia Tech University has held a conference called Art History of Games. The talks are fortunately available on Youtube. Certainly worth a glance.
I acted in Juhana Petterson’s participatory art installation, Portaikko, last weekend at Imatra Human Culture art-festival. It was exciting, since I haven’t done anything like it before, but still familiar enough from previous larp-experience. The amount of participants wasn’t spectacular, but easily enough to feel like a success.
It seems that Roger Ebert has changed his opinion of games. The acclaimed movie critic admits that he cannot make the judgement that games are not art because he is not familiar enough with video games. But it seems that not everybody agrees that this is a good thing.
Recently, I touched upon the subject of games as art. This is by means unexplored territory; in fact it is so well traversed that the great movie critic Roger Ebert has commented on the subject. Unfortunately, he voices a negative opinion. He bases his view on arguments I can’t completely accept, while I do agree that not everything that is of value is art.
The short answer: of course they are! The longer answer? Possibly, see more. ...