Been There, Played That

During my junior year in high school my class took a field trip to the Dallas Museum of Art.  While walking through the halls one painting caught my eye.  It was a very large white canvas with a big black dot in the middle.  What made it even better was the name of the painting which you most likely guessed based on the title was “Black Dot on a White Canvas”.  Standing there I honestly couldn’t believe that this was hanging in a museum of art.  Looking at this thing all I could think was that a ten year old with a stencil could have created this painting and these guys were calling it fine art.

I had never thought about video games as art till Roger Ebert made his infamous statement that “Video games can never be art.”.  I honestly don’t know how this statement can be taken seriously when you look at some of the garbage that people consider to be art.  Art is so subjective that trying to classify what is and isn’t art is a pretty futile exercise.  As we have always heard “Art is in the eye of the beholder”, so how can one medium be labeled as art while another is so easily dismissed.  Mass Effect 2 stands as one of the best experiences I have ever had playing a game and was better than any movie I watched or book I read this year.  In my opinion video games stand shoulder to shoulder with books and movies and their popularity is growing everyday.  As it stands now the video game industry is bigger than Roger Ebert’s movie industry.  Overall I feel that as video games become more popular their acceptance by main stream sources will grow as well.  At the rate things are moving I doubt it will be long before video games are accepted as a true art medium.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 1:58 am and is filed under Random Thought. 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.