Are Videogames Art?
Is Anything?
Perhaps film critic Roger Ebert intended to stir up controversy with his comment, or perhaps he didn’t realize how much furor his words would create. It was a simple off-handed line: “Video games can never be art.” But it was seized upon by scores of commentators, especially on the Internet, and sparked a lively debate: can video games be art? In the end, the conflict fizzled out as so many Internet arguments do, with Ebert moving on with his life and the anonymous commentators of the web finding other things to complain about. But the question lingers on.
However, it is a question that is fraught with peril in the answering because it straddles the blurry line between empirical fact and personal taste and preference. It hints at a much bigger, underlying uncertainty about the nature of art itself. The real question, the one that negated the possibility of a useful outcome to the Ebert debate, is not “can a video game be art?” but “How can we tell if a video game is art?” And for that matter, how can we tell anything is art? How can we accurately define and differentiate art, that sacrosanct product of human ingenuity that sets our race apart from all other life on Earth?
It was not a question that Ebert had in mind when he excluded video games from the category of art, nor was it much discussed by his detractors who insisted that video games could belong in the galleries and discussions of the art world. Because neither Ebert nor his critics could produce a feasible definition of art, a way to categorically define art and thus accept or reject video games as part of that canon, neither side of the debate could claim to deliver a convincing verdict. It was a muddled battlefield with no conditions for victory.
Consider what might be the clearest-cut case of art imaginable: a man looks at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre gallery. This simple example contains three elements which are to be found in all cases of art or alleged art, no matter how complex. These three elements are expressed in this example by the man, the Mona, and the Louvre. There is a viewer, the audience. There is the artwork. And there is the place where the art lives. These correspond to the three most important agents responsible for determining what receives the status of art: the viewer, the creator, and the art world. These three agents help construct something – a set of guidelines, if not a strict definition – to help explain why some things are art, and some are not. The bottom line is this: Video games are not currently recognized as art, but there is nothing inherent in video games to disqualify them from becoming such. It is a matter of public and private opinion and cultural legitimacy.
Because his remarks were off the cuff and not part of a greater reasoned argument, Ebert elaborated on them in a response to his critics, which was published in the Chicago Sun-Times. In it, he hints at the way that trying to find a definition for art is like stumbling into a minefield: “…we could play all day with definitions, and find exceptions to every one” (Ebert, 2). Even so, without going so far as to offer his own formal definition, he gives a few useful guidelines to begin the search. First, he asserts that being a game prevents something from also being art. “One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome” (Ebert, 2). Art cannot have these things, Ebert says, because art must not have ulterior motives. There cannot be a way to “win” at art, nor a definite right or wrong way to “play” with art, nor a way of evaluating one’s performance in interacting with art. Take away these things, and a video game is no longer a game, and therefore a video game cannot be art without sacrificing its fundamental game-ness. Likewise, Ebert argues that other games like chess and mah-jongg can be made aesthetically pleasing, but cannot themselves be fundamentally called art.
This qualifier touches on a very important aspect of the process of defining art: the motivations and circumstances of the individual audience. A game cannot be art because the audience enters into the experience with certain goals and expectations incompatible with the artistic experience. A player of a game expects there to be an objective. A viewer of a work of art expects the art to have no objective, or else it is easily dismissed as propaganda or as something shallow and one-dimensional. The player of a game expects to find rules, but the only rules in place when viewing art are those enforced by the art gallery, not by the artist or by the artwork itself.
In fact, the motivation of the individual plays a huge role in establishing whether something is art. Simply put, it helps if the viewer considers him or herself to be viewing art. Because almost nobody goes to a video game the same way that they would approach a painting or sculpture in a gallery, any chance of artistic legitimacy is thwarted. However, this only means that most of the time for most people, video games don’t get the chance to be art.
Arthur Berleant, in his article “A Note on the Problem of Defining Art,” says that the judgment of the audience plays a huge role in establishing something as art. “The touchstone of all art,” he says, “is…seen to be the aesthetic experience and not a definition” (Berleant, 240). By experiencing something as art, by conscientiously and rigorously appreciating and evaluating it as art, the viewer helps establish the object as art whether it appears to be or not. “If an object succeeds in evoking an aesthetic experience, it, then, in that instance, becomes an aesthetic object” (Berleant, 240). The key point from this quotation is “in that instance.” The status of art is not everlasting, nor is it independent from the context of its time and place and audience. Therefore, any designation of “art” comes with a disclaimer: your results may vary. Berleant asks…whether a definition must be a prerequisite for evaluation or whether evaluation follows from the experience of art and then becomes formulated in a justificatory definition. The latter, if it were the case, would not necessarily mean subjectivism in evaluating art. It does insist, however, that art is never art by definition. A rule, in this case a definition, never made a painting or a piece of music beautiful. It is the intellectual, who strives for cognitive apprehension of what he has undergone in an art gallery or concert hall, who seeks to understand, to codify, to systematize and regularize, who may inadvertently discover himself upholding the contrary (Berleant, 241).
Other authors have pointed to the power of the individual viewer to bestow artistic legitimacy on something that might otherwise be dismissed as non-artistic. George Dickie, in “Defining Art,” says that a work of art is something “upon which some society or some sub-group of a society has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation” (Dickie, 254). He then notes the importance of the word “candidate:” it implies impermanence and uncertainty. “Nothing is said about actual appreciation and this leaves open the possibility of works of art which, for whatever reason, are not appreciated” (Dickie, 255). Thus by this argument, the mere fact that Ebert (and by extension, everyone who read his article and thought about the questions it raised) considered video games as “candidates” for appreciation makes it possible for them to be art, even though Ebert emphatically rejected their artistic status. More importantly, it places the onus of deciding art status at least somewhat upon the viewer: “The status [of candidate for appreciation]…must be conferrable by a single person’s treating an artifact as a candidate for appreciation, usually the artist himself, although not always, because someone might create an artifact without ever considering it a candidate for appreciation and the status be conferred by some other person or persons.”
This quote raises an interesting point, and introduces the second agent responsible for determining the status of a work of art. One might reasonably wonder, if classifying an artifact as a work of art is a difficult and subjective endeavor, why not simply ask the object’s creator? In fact, the background of an artwork, its creator and his or her intentions, play an important part in establishing (or corroborating) a verdict of “artwork.”
The philosopher and aesthetician Paul Ziff refers to the creator’s authority on art in his article “The Task of Defining a Work of Art.” He says that what the creator intended for his or her work is important, whether or not his or her intentions are honored. Ziff’s example is Nicolas Poussin’s painting “The Rape of the Sabine Women.” He says that “it was made, and what is more, made deliberately and self-consciously with obvious skill and care” (50) to be appreciated as art. An art gallery is not necessary to confirm Poussin’s intent to create art, and indeed Ziff supposes that the painting would have been created to hang in a chateau or some other dwelling of a private individual. The painting did eventually find its way into an art gallery, and…in this respect the painting is not treated in the way intended by the painter. But there is good reason to believe that the painter did intend the painting to be displayed in an appropriate manner, to be treated with care, and to be preserved for as long as possible. And there is good reason to believe that Poussin did intend the painting to be contemplated, studied, observed, admired, criticized, and discussed by some people, if not by just any people (Ziff, 60).
In other words, Poussin intended it to be treated as a work of art. Even if its original purpose (to decorate the home of a rich patron) has been long-since abandoned, its unstated, implicit purpose, to be regarded as artwork, has been honored.
On the other hand, it is possible to have an artifact that might have been art, or could be art, but was not created or intended to be such. A perfect example is an ancient piece of pottery, perhaps an urn from ancient Greece. These relics are often beautifully decorated, and are frequently found in art museums, but it would be inaccurate to say that they were intended to be art, in the way that Poussin’s paintings were. Pottery was made to serve a specific utilitarian function – to hold wine, or grain, or to be eaten off of. Artfully-rendered decoration, where present, was simply added to beautify the object and make it more pleasing to look at, and not to usurp its primary function of holding liquid or what have you. The potter did not envision his pot in a modern art gallery, or even an ancient one contemporary to his time. Even though such antiques are often seen in the same building as “bespoke” pieces of art made specifically to be art and nothing else, there is a clear sense that they are of a different breed than paintings or sculptures. Beautiful as they may be, they belong more to the category of historical artifact than timeless work of art, and therefore are most often confined to their own separate section, among other ancient artifacts belonging to their time period. The fact that these ancient vessels are not being used according to their creators’ intent should not be surprising, since history has no obligation to honor the intent of the creator, to the chagrin of many artists and other creators.
Nonetheless, this intent is important when it comes to deciding if an artifact is a work of art. Since, as previously stated, we as individual viewers are primarily responsible for deciding for ourselves what is and is not art, it may seem as though the creator’s intentions are irrelevant, especially if the creator is far removed from our time and culture. And indeed, we can judge objects based solely on their objective existence, ignoring all other aspects of their provenance and function. But to do this would be to lose much of the nuance and subtlety behind many great works of art, and doing so might also lead us astray when it comes to certain cases where the creator’s intent matters a great deal. In general, an artifact that was created based on ulterior, non-artistic motives is usually seen has having a weaker case for artwork status than an artifact that was created solely for the release of creative energy, to beautify, or to evoke emotion independent of an established cause. This is particularly clear in the study of propaganda, and its more mercantile variant, advertisements. Art has long been the vehicle of propaganda and many works of propaganda display the same level of aesthetic beauty, carefully thought-out composition, skillful use of contrasting themes and symbols, and so on, as any of the recognized “great works of art.” But it would be misleading to fill an art gallery with pieces of propaganda, unless they are treated as a historical exhibit in the same manner as the ancient clay pots might be. Certainly no one could mistake an advertisement for a work of art, because it is obvious just from observing it that an advertisement was not made with the same intent as Poussin’s “Rape of the Sabine Women” or Michelangelo’s David. Advertisements and propaganda are conceived and executed primarily for the purpose of convincing or re-educating their viewers and converting them to a certain point of view. Any artistically-meritorious elements present in the work were put there with that purpose in mind, and not simply for their own sake, i.e. for the sake of art.
Another illuminating example of how intent can change the role of an object comes from the Dada period of the early 20th century, a time when many were discussing the role and definition of art in our society. A French artist named Marcel Duchamp brazenly submitted a porcelain urinal to an exhibit put on by the Society of Independent Artists. Of course, the exhibit refused to call the urinal art, even though Duchamp had put his signature on it and given it the name Fountain. Most, like Roger Ebert, claimed that this new form of expression was not in the same category as established art and should be disbarred. Today, Duchamp’s Fountain is hailed as the first example of “readymade” art, ordinary objects repurposed for artistic expression. Duchamp’s brilliantly subversive act set the stage for the deconstruction and reimaging of art that exploded the whole notion of artwork in the postmodern era (Tomkins, 182). And it was all about intent. The urinal that would become Fountain would have remained nothing more than a urinal, functionally useful but completely non-artistic, had Duchamp not come along and decided to sign it and lay it on its side and call it art. People objected to this perceived attack on the institution of art, and accused him of trivializing a noble concept. In fact, Duchamp was exemplifying the confusing relationship between artist and audience, and providing a sterling example of how important intent can be. Although Duchamp did not literally create the urinal from scratch by hand, he is its artistic father; it is he who gave it a new life as a work of art. As its creator in this sense, his intent was clear: he wanted the world to consider this mundane urinal as art, worthy of the same consideration as the paintings of the great masters and the sculptures of the ancient Greeks. Duchamp’s insistence that the urinal was a work of art helped us to accept it as such and recognize its significance. Without knowledge of intent the urinal would never have become art, and would never have landed in a museum.
By the same token, however, Duchamp would have little right to call his creation art if he kept it in his home and never showed it to another living soul, or indeed, if he installed it in his home and urinated in it. If he did, it would not belong to the world of art, but the functional and utilitarian world of everyday appliances from whence it originally came. Even though contemporary critics were outraged at the notion that Fountain belonged to the same world as the Mona Lisa and all the rest, and rejected it as art, their discussion made it, as Dickie would say, a candidate for appreciation. Eventually, critics and scholars accepted Fountain as a new kind, a new archetype, of artwork, and today scholars point to its value in precipitating this sort of paradigm shift. And it came about because Duchamp had the audacity to submit it to an entrenched art exhibition.
As we have seen, consensus between the creator and the audience helps establish artistic credibility for a given piece. But this relationship is only a bilateral transaction, between two individuals. Without a third party to legitimize a piece, its artistic status exists only in the minds of its creator and its viewers, ephemeral and unconfirmed. After all, it would be easy for the creator to claim that his or her intent was to create art, and for a given viewer to agree, and for both parties to be wrong, or if not objectively “wrong” then seen as being only a tiny minority who hold the object as a work of art. Their consensus is not enough. A greater governing body must exist to help usher an artifact into the established canon of true, inarguable art. Only rarely does this happen against the will of, or without the knowledge of, some kind of institutionalized art society.
The philosopher Arthur Danto elegantly expressed this crucial idea in his essay, “The Artworld.” This is the name he gives to the “sphere” of critics, scholars, aestheticians, and others who academically judge and appreciate art. Without them, Danto asserts, we will flounder helplessly in our search for a definition of art. Art cannot be, as Plato says, a mirror held up to nature, which is to say that art is strictly representational, an act of mimesis. The abstract art of the postmodern, post-Impressionist twentieth century has exploded this view, Danto believes, and it was not that useful to begin with. He asks us to imagine a perfect counterfeit dollar bill, indistinguishable from the real thing, except that it has been stamped with the words “Not Legal Tender.” “It is not an illusory dollar bill, but then, just because it is non-illusory it does not automatically become a real dollar bill either. It rather occupies a freshly opened are between real objects and real facsimiles of real objects” (Danto, 574). This space is where art belongs, Danto says, because it is not meant to be real and neither is it meant to be an illusion, but somewhere in between.
He then invokes some other instances of artwork that seem to blur the line, such as a uniquely-shaped bed made by an artist named Oldenburg. Although the bed is unusual, it is still immediately recognizable as a bed, and indeed still is a bed. How could a hypothetical viewer tell that it was art? After all, it is a bed as well as art, and so the hypothetical viewer could not be said to be in error by calling it a bed and could be justified in lying in it to sleep. Returning to a previous example, this hypothetical philistine could also urinate into Duchamp’s Fountain without committing any sort of logical fallacy: if he, in his ignorance, did not know that this particular urinal was intended to be regarded as art, how can he be blamed for acting based on the objective reality of what he sees? Fountain remains a urinal after all these years in an art gallery, but even so, the hypothetical philistine would not get away with urinating on it even though he might do the same to a thousand other urinals without issue. If we follow this train of logic, we see that the philistine’s error comes from taking these objects at face value, for seeing them as exactly and only “what they are”: a bed, a urinal. And the same can be said for less borderline cases of art. The philistine can justifiably say, when he looks at a painting by Poussin or Rothko or Da Vinci, that all he sees is smears of paint, cloth canvas, and the wood of the frame. “And how right he is: that is all he sees or that anybody can, we aesthetes included. So, if he asks us to show him what there is further to see, to demonstrate through pointing that this is an artwork…we cannot comply, for he has overlooked nothing…” (Danto, 579).
This is to say that all art is made up of components that, individually and without further context, cannot themselves be called art. And so at a certain point, art emerges from non-art roots. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. What this philistine is missing is an ability to connect the painting (or the bed, or the urinal) to the greater realm of art.
Danto contrasts the hypothetical philistine, who claims to see nothing but paint because he is ignorant of the artistic tradition behind it, to an enlightened aesthete who also says that he sees only paint, but also that he sees art. “[T]his artist has returned to the physicality of paint through an atmosphere compounded of artistic theories and the history of recent and remote painting, elements of which he is trying to refine out of his own work; and as a consequence of this his work belongs in this atmosphere and is part of this history” (Danto, 580). Examining art without bringing to the discussion the mythos, the language, the atmosphere of art—without the proper tools—leaves us in the realm of the philistine who cannot see the painting for the paint. Danto’s simple proposition: “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot [observe]—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld” (580).
This “artworld” takes many forms, and it does not have to be simply whatever contemporary group happens to occupy the board of directors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the halls of academia. It is all about context, which in all aspects is critical to the appreciation of art. Without the knowledge of painting—the schema, the phenomenon of painting as we know it—a painting really is just a mess of pigment on a flat plane of specially-prepared plant fibers. Fountain, if it were installed in a men’s restroom, would be a urinal. If it were left in an abandoned lot, it would be garbage. But in a museum, among the Rembrandts and Rothkos, it is art. The artworld recognizes it as such (albeit after a significant period of rejection).
Now, although it is still not really possible to produce a watertight definition of art, with all personal preference and subjectivity removed such that an unthinking machine could use an algorithm to do the job of an art scholar, it is possible to establish that the three agents, artist viewer and artworld, work together to give us an increasingly certain categorization of art. If the artworld agrees that something is art, it is certainly put on the road to being recognized as such. If the artist him or herself claims that he or she made the thing to be art, its artistic legitimacy receives an enormous boost. And at the end of all that, it falls to the individual viewer to decide for him or herself at a given place and time of viewing whether or not the thing is a work of art. If consensus is achieved among these three elements, it can be said that for that person, at that time, in that place, the object is art. It is not a hard and fast rule, but a continuum, and at best we can say that something is most probably art for the majority of people in a majority of circumstances. It is not quite a definition of art, but it is as firm a grasp as this hazy subject permits us.
So after all this, what is to be done about video games? If we cannot “demonstrate through pointing” that a video game is anything more than a collection of zeroes and ones whose interactions are visualized as pixels moving about on a screen, how can we know? We must look to the three agents for confirmation, and here we find, to the great dismay of many self-identified “gamers,” that at least for now games cannot be called art.
The creators of a video game rarely, if ever, are motivated purely by an artistic muse. They may have many good ideas, and artful ones at that, but at the end of the day their primary motivations for creating the game, and the game’s primary reasons to exist, are to allow the viewer to pass some of his or her time in an engaging, entertaining way, and to make money for the game’s creators or parent company (and not necessarily in that order of importance). It is possible, however, for an artist to create a video game motivated purely by artistic, creative inspiration and a desire to share that inspiration with others.
A gamer, likewise, can rarely be said to approach a video game in exactly the same way that he or she would approach a painting or sculpture. People play video games for many reasons—to compete, to relax, to be scared, to laugh, to cry, to waste some time in a pleasant way. People view art for a number of reasons as well, but the mindset is different. However, once more there is nothing inherently wrong with a gamer trying, consciously or not, to perceive a game as art. If a gamer goes to a game seeking not a game but a work of art, it is much more likely that he or she will find it to be so. It is not inconceivable that someone could feel the same way about a video game that he or she does about the Mona Lisa.
But even a game made to be art, played by a gamer seeking art and not a game, would flounder in the arena of popular judgment because of the disdain of the third agent: the artworld. The artworld has not, yet, accepted video games into its canon. People like Ebert form what is called conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is a powerful force. Video games, except in rare instances (a traveling exhibition called “The Art of Video Games” has made rounds in various museums including the Smithsonian, but it is presented more as a historical retrospective on gaming than as an exhibition of art, much more analogous to the Grecian urns than to painting and sculptures) do not appear in art galleries, nor in the discussions of art critics except to dismiss them.
Therefore, consensus between the three prime agents of artistic legitimacy—the artist, the viewer, and the artworld—is difficult to come by when it comes to video games. Ebert is probably correct in saying that no video game yet produced can be called a work of art, because the time has not yet come. The precipitous conflux of intentions has not yet occurred in which a game, made to be art, is played by one seeking an artistic experience, in an atmosphere that places artistic legitimacy upon the experience. All the pieces simply haven’t fallen into place.
That’s not to say that they won’t, or couldn’t. Ebert is certainly wrong in saying that video games can never be art. As Paul Ziff reminds us, the artworld itself is in constant flux: “The social consequences of something’s being considered a work of art have varied in time, and no doubt they will continue to do so” (72). After all, if a toilet can begin its career perceived as an assault on art, and then go on to be recognized not just as art but as the progenitor of an important new way of thinking about art, video games surely have a pretty good chance, somewhere down the line, to enter into the world of art.
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