Are video games art?

[Valka D'Ur]

I'm also an art elitist, and I agree with him in the sense that art that is made for money is at best compromised art. Hence, I think only non-professional art is secure in its artistic status.

My grandmother's ghost will be relieved to know this. She was an amateur, self-taught artist, and I consider her paintings to be the equal or better of many that grace the galleries of museums (those where nature/natural history paintings are found). She gave away many of her paintings. The ones she sold went for at most $25 - because she just wanted enough money to buy more canvases, paint, and charcoal.

I think they would be worth much more monetarily, if offered for sale - certainly they're equal to or better than some of what is sold in art stores.

However, to me they are priceless - because they came from her own inner self.


As to Roger Ebert, I think he is a nose-in-the-air snob. Why is a collaborative effort any less art than an effort produced by one person?

Moderator Action: Folks, I'm moving this thread over to the Arts & Entertainment forum.

 

[aelf]

My grandmother's ghost will be relieved to know this. She was an amateur, self-taught artist, and I consider her paintings to be the equal or better of many that grace the galleries of museums (those where nature/natural history paintings are found). She gave away many of her paintings. The ones she sold went for at most $25 - because she just wanted enough money to buy more canvases, paint, and charcoal.

I think they would be worth much more monetarily, if offered for sale - certainly they're equal to or better than some of what is sold in art stores.

However, to me they are priceless - because they came from her own inner self.

Well, I do agree with your sentiment, but what I'm talking about isn't really about sentimental value, which is what you seem to be referring to. I think subjective value is somewhat different. An artwork can certainly be valuable without sentimental attachments and thus be valuable to many different and unrelated people. But how valuable it is and why it is valuable would differ from person to person. There will certainly be universal ideas that multiple people can apprehend from a given work, but, at the same time, these ideas would speak differently to each person.

I guess the bottom line is art isn't something that people can analyse and 'solve', and thus it does not primarily have objective value. And I think the fact that they are the products of subjective expression is about the only thing different art pieces have in common with each other. Subjective expression is, therefore, the common trait in everything that we refer to as art.

As to Roger Ebert, I think he is a nose-in-the-air snob. Why is a collaborative effort any less art than an effort produced by one person?

I've tried to articulate what he might have meant, and I think it really comes down to the fact that too much external input (in the sense that it is external to individuals) is involved when it comes to video games. The best analogous illustration that I've come up with is an artist who has a marketing team and an executive team giving input for an artwork based on what they think would sell very well in the market. Moreover, to make it worse perhaps, the artwork is then mass produced. That just wouldn't strike us as a very artistic process.

I think, though, that he is barking up the wrong tree when he says that this makes video games not art. I don't believe that the above objection makes video games necessarily completely unartistic. They can certainly have artistic elements and be, on the whole, fairly artistic. But they are still going to be pretty far from being purely artistic, which is what I think distinguishes them from what we conventionally consider as artworks.

 

[lovett]

No, it isn't "clearly a judgement based on motivation". It's not the purpose (read: intentions) of the artist - which is what motivation amounts to - that is in question here, it's the purpose of the particular artwork itself (read: what the work is supposed to realise/achieve).

I only skimmed through the article, but I can certainly sympathise with Ebert's argument that the production process speaks against it being art. If an artist had a marketing team and executive team that give input for the work from the perspective of what would sell, we're likely to call him a phony, or at least we probably wouldn't appreciate his output as true works of art. And why do you think that is? I think that's because his art stops being about subjective expression but more about product design and marketing.

A few things here, how can artwork have a purpose quite different to the intentions of the artist? 'purpose' is a quality that can only be endowed by things with minds; artwork does not have a mind and of course cannot have independent purpose. We are left then with the problem of dividing the intentions of the artist in such a way (that is not uselessly expansive or immediately arbitrary) that we can say an artwork has a purpose which does not relate to all the motivations of the artist.

To consider again the Sistine Chapel, we could easily frame the purpose of the ceiling to be to shelter Michelangelo from papal displeasure. We do not on intuitive grounds; this is not how we instinctively see it. But there is no hierarchy to say this latter interpretation is superior to the former. Similarly we could note that Michelangelo was hardly free in his productive process; from the outset he was restricted to old testament themes with of course certain standards of 'good taste'. He was not given free reign. There is evidence that suggests the entire productive process was overseen be the theological 'advice' of one Aegidius of Viterbo, the validity of this is not decided either way. And yet, our estimation of the Sistine Chapel ceiling does not depend on whether Michelangelo was told what to paint be a theologian; if that were so we would hold of on declaring said ceiling 'art' because we would need to decide the issue one way or another beforehand. We simply don't know the truth of the matter, and for many works of art we never know the truth of such a matter. Indeed the question of 'purpose' need not enter our heads. I'll expand on this later...

Why, yes. Otherwise anything can be art. But we don't find that true, do we?

I'm struggling to think how all this answers the question. By 'art' (as distinct from 'craft') we certainly understand something fairly specific. Unless you mean to say that the term is meaningless anyway, what's wrong with trying to narrow down what exactly we mean by it, which does follow a certain pattern if not a certain set of rules?

Okay, so what do you think they have in common?

Here's the crux; Don't think, but look! Don't say a priori "Art must have some quality in common otherwise we could not call it art, anything could be art", look to see whether there is indeed anything in common to all.

In art we see not one essential quality that is shared by them all, we see a rich network of interrelation and similarity, such that one piece of art can be related to another piece of art by a number of quite different characteristics, including its relation to a third piece of art. There is a family resemblance in common rather than an essential quality.

We can see when considering art we do not immediately ask 'Does this have the essential quality that makes all art art' and indeed this question may never trouble us at all; in the case of subjective expression certainly we cannot tell rather a piece is the product of an artists subjectivity rather than a producers avarice; such would require an extensive knowledge of the history of the piece. This we do not need before seeing something as art and when the word 'art' is used in language we do not require this essential quality to be made explicit; the narrative required for such a quality to be meaningful (of arts 'purpose' being in the mind when judging art) is simply not in accord with reality.

And this lack of explication does not make the word 'art' meaningless because we use it perfectly well; indeed such a lack has never bothered us before. We cannot draw a fixed boundary to define the concept of 'art' which includes both cave drawings and The Seventh Seal whilst excluding anything 'non-art', and nor do we need to! It does not require a fixed boundary to make the concept of 'art' usable anymore then it requires a definition of the like 'One Metre equals one hundred centimeters' to make the concept of a metre usable. Before definition we may not have an exact measurement but this matters little; Very well, we have an inexact measurement and we can still point out the inexactness in our definition of a metre.

The need to supply a common and essential quality to a concept before this concept is meaningful is illusory, and our perception that such a concept must have such a quality is not based on how words are used in language.

To further illustrate with the example of 'game' (bare-facedly stolen) we would be left answerless if we asked what definition of game includes Chess, Rugby, Solitaire and catch? If we take card games as one group, with all their many points of congruence, and compare them to board games we can see many correlations between the two, but certain common features drop out whilst others appear. And then we might move to ball games and again certain features are retained but much is lost, including much of what was in common between the first two. Do all require skill, are all for amusement or do all involve competition? Certainly solitaire involves no competition and the types of skill involved in chess and cricket seem quite different...

Look then at a game like 'spin the bottle' or 'chinese whispers', here we see the element of amusement come again but many other characteristic features have dropped out...What links Simon Says to professional football? We can go through many different groups of game and see these similarities drop out and re-appear, such that the result of our study is that we see a complex network of crisscrossing similarities, such that one thing can be a game whilst sharing no essential quality with all other forms of game, but rather being similar to other games, but in no set way. There is family resemblance in the family of games, such that there is no essential quality by which we would on sight identify a family , yet we can see that certain members of a family share the same eyes, others the same gait or manner of speech, yet others the same height or hair; these resemblances criss-cross in the same way and by such we can identify a family much like we can identify a game.

And yet it is not so that game is defined by a logical sum of these resemblances, for although I can use 'game' in such a rigidly defined way I can also use it in an expansive way, unbounded by a frontier. Indeed this is how one uses game for the concept is not bounded. Where would we put such a boundary? The usage of the word is not everywhere bounded by rules anymore than in cricket there are rules over how high one can hit the ball, or what to do if a player starts to shoot his opposition. Yet we can still play cricket and cricket still has rules, just like we can still use the term game; again it has never troubled us before that the word 'game' should have no boundary, or if so we know not what that boundary is. As with art new boundaries add nothing to our understanding of the term and there is no need for an essential quality to make either term meaningful, we need family resemblance and naught else. We do not need one common trait in everything to which we refer to as art, and indeed in the case of many concepts such a common trait will be completely absent...

 

[aelf]

A few things here, how can artwork have a purpose quite different to the intentions of the artist? 'purpose' is a quality that can only be endowed by things with minds; artwork does not have a mind and of course cannot have independent purpose. We are left then with the problem of dividing the intentions of the artist in such a way (that is not uselessly expansive or immediately arbitrary) that we can say an artwork has a purpose which does not relate to all the motivations of the artist.

Objects don't have intrinsic intentionality, yes. I think that's pretty obvious.

But I guess I was not being clear. I never actually said that the purpose of the object has nothing to do whatsoever with the intentions of the artist. Sure it does. The artist can have many intentions at the same time, not all of which are directly relevant to the process of artistic creation. The question is which is manifested by the object - that is what I meant by what the object is supposed to realise. If what is imparted to the object is not chiefly the artist's intention to engage in the subjective expression of something, it's not likely to be considered a great work of art.

I think an example from performance art would work best here. Think of the Pagliacci story. A performer has many intentions at the same time - he may be performing to feed his family, or to get this performance over and done with so he could go home, etc. But these purposes are not relevant to his art, and if he betrays them his performance would be a bad one. The only purpose that is relevant to the artistic process, and hence that we appreciate, is the purpose that he conveys in his performance such that it is meaningful and valuable in the context of the piece. In theatre, that is the subjective expression of the role he is playing. We appreciate the actor's performance as his expression of the role that he plays and nothing else.

Hence, we can stop talking about all the intentions that the artist has, which we will never really be certain about. Instead, we look at what purpose the object ends up conveying. And I'd argue that there might well be something about the purpose of the object that is contradictory to what art is when it's made to be sold on the market. I'm open to the possibility, though, that an artwork may be subjective expression and yet is completed to be sold. I just think it's harder to fulfill that condition when you're anxious to sell something that people might want. Usually the problem is called 'pandering'.

To consider again the Sistine Chapel, we could easily frame the purpose of the ceiling to be to shelter Michelangelo from papal displeasure. We do not on intuitive grounds; this is not how we instinctively see it. But there is no hierarchy to say this latter interpretation is superior to the former. Similarly we could note that Michelangelo was hardly free in his productive process; from the outset he was restricted to old testament themes with of course certain standards of 'good taste'. He was not given free reign. There is evidence that suggests the entire productive process was overseen be the theological 'advice' of one Aegidius of Viterbo, the validity of this is not decided either way. And yet, our estimation of the Sistine Chapel ceiling does not depend on whether Michelangelo was told what to paint be a theologian; if that were so we would hold of on declaring said ceiling 'art' because we would need to decide the issue one way or another beforehand. We simply don't know the truth of the matter, and for many works of art we never know the truth of such a matter. Indeed the question of 'purpose' need not enter our heads. I'll expand on this later...

I've been working on the assumption that the purpose of a piece of work is as we perceive it. We may indeed be wrong. Perhaps there actually is little by way of subjective expression in a work of art that we consider great. There's no foolproof way of knowing, nor is it necessary for us to know the truth.

Yet I think it's important to our perception of something as a work of art that we believe it to be a product of subjective expression. Certainly, a good way to make an object appear that way to us is if the object is indeed the product of subjective expression, right?

Here's the crux; Don't think, but look! Don't say a priori "Art must have some quality in common otherwise we could not call it art, anything could be art", look to see whether there is indeed anything in common to all.

In art we see not one essential quality that is shared by them all, we see a rich network of interrelation and similarity, such that one piece of art can be related to another piece of art by a number of quite different characteristics, including its relation to a third piece of art. There is a family resemblance in common rather than an essential quality.

We can see when considering art we do not immediately ask 'Does this have the essential quality that makes all art art' and indeed this question may never trouble us at all; in the case of subjective expression certainly we cannot tell rather a piece is the product of an artists subjectivity rather than a producers avarice; such would require an extensive knowledge of the history of the piece. This we do not need before seeing something as art and when the word 'art' is used in language we do not require this essential quality to be made explicit; the narrative required for such a quality to be meaningful (of arts 'purpose' being in the mind when judging art) is simply not in accord with reality.

I think I've just dealt with the point about having to know the history of the piece.

And this lack of explication does not make the word 'art' meaningless because we use it perfectly well; indeed such a lack has never bothered us before. We cannot draw a fixed boundary to define the concept of 'art' which includes both cave drawings and The Seventh Seal whilst excluding anything 'non-art', and nor do we need to! It does not require a fixed boundary to make the concept of 'art' usable anymore then it requires a definition of the like 'One Metre equals one hundred centimeters' to make the concept of a metre usable. Before definition we may not have an exact measurement but this matters little; Very well, we have an inexact measurement and we can still point out the inexactness in our definition of a metre.

The need to supply a common and essential quality to a concept before this concept is meaningful is illusory, and our perception that such a concept must have such a quality is not based on how words are used in language.

To further illustrate with the example of 'game' (bare-facedly stolen) we would be left answerless if we asked what definition of game includes Chess, Rugby, Solitaire and catch? If we take card games as one group, with all their many points of congruence, and compare them to board games we can see many correlations between the two, but certain common features drop out whilst others appear. And then we might move to ball games and again certain features are retained but much is lost, including much of what was in common between the first two. Do all require skill, are all for amusement or do all involve competition? Certainly solitaire involves no competition and the types of skill involved in chess and cricket seem quite different...

Look then at a game like 'spin the bottle' or 'chinese whispers', here we see the element of amusement come again but many other characteristic features have dropped out...What links Simon Says to professional football? We can go through many different groups of game and see these similarities drop out and re-appear, such that the result of our study is that we see a complex network of crisscrossing similarities, such that one thing can be a game whilst sharing no essential quality with all other forms of game, but rather being similar to other games, but in no set way. There is family resemblance in the family of games, such that there is no essential quality by which we would on sight identify a family , yet we can see that certain members of a family share the same eyes, others the same gait or manner of speech, yet others the same height or hair; these resemblances criss-cross in the same way and by such we can identify a family much like we can identify a game.

And yet it is not so that game is defined by a logical sum of these resemblances, for although I can use 'game' in such a rigidly defined way I can also use it in an expansive way, unbounded by a frontier. Indeed this is how one uses game for the concept is not bounded. Where would we put such a boundary? The usage of the word is not everywhere bounded by rules anymore than in cricket there are rules over how high one can hit the ball, or what to do if a player starts to shoot his opposition. Yet we can still play cricket and cricket still has rules, just like we can still use the term game; again it has never troubled us before that the word 'game' should have no boundary, or if so we know not what that boundary is. As with art new boundaries add nothing to our understanding of the term and there is no need for an essential quality to make either term meaningful, we need family resemblance and naught else. We do not need one common trait in everything to which we refer to as art, and indeed in the case of many concepts such a common trait will be completely absent...

Sigh. This is why it's no fun to talk to analytical philosophy zealots. Why can't we separate the metaphysics from semantics?

It defies my understanding how we can mean something specific enough by 'art' as to render the term meaningful and yet have no distinguishing criterion, no matter how loose (and I object to your labeling of my view on art as "rigid" - what can possibly be much less rigid than 'subjective expression'?), for what we would consider as art.

All this fuzzy logic kind of argument is very interesting, and there are many parts of it that I can agree with. But to maintain the absoluteness of this absolutely expansive view on what art means can only result in meaninglessness. Once we've built up a big enough "network of crisscrossing similarities", anything can be art. And, funnily enough, when that has happened, we are very likely to invent a new term to replace what we had meant by 'art'. The metaphysics moves on while the semantic word games continue to talk about whether we ever really mean something remotely specific by the term.

 

[Benefactor]

http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-ebert-is-wrong-in-defense-of-games-as-art/

An 'amusing' article on the topic.

 

[azzaman333]

A video game cannot be art if it is fun.

 

[GenMarshall]

One word, Machenima. That is all

 

[Lillefix]

Has anyone brought up the gamedeveloper legend Ron Gilbert's(Monkey Island anyone) response to this? Well here it is. And Ebert even replied to him btw.

Roger Ebert is at it again, claiming that not only are games not art, but that they can never be art.

Roger, Roger, Roger.

Over the past year I have gained an immense amount of respect and admiration for Roger Ebert. I read his blog everyday and it's damn good, some of the best and most insightful writing on the web (or anywhere). He's gone through some very terrible and personal issues with cancer and hasn't let any of it stop him. I remember watching Siskel and Ebert back when it was on PBS and credit it as one of the reasons I became so interested in movies and storytelling and almost sending me to film school rather than down the path of making games.

But I didn't go to film school, I decide to make games instead. Why? Because games gave me a creative and artistic outlet. They allowed me to express myself and my ideas and my characters and my stories.

The games I was playing and wanted to make were adventure games and I didn't see much difference in how they told a story from how a movie told a story except they were interactive. I saw them as an extension of the linar narrative of film. I saw them as not only a way to tell a story with real characters, real emotions and real ideas, but one where the viewer got to participate in the story. They got to touch it and twist it and become part of it and make it their own.

I can't imagine anything more artistic than connecting with your audience in that way. It's unique to the way games tell stories and we've only begun to understand it's artistic potential and power. Movies will never go away, but neither will games that tell important, interesting and deep stories and we're just getting started.

The problem is Roger has not played the right games, or any games. Roger is a master at understanding movies and there is no person I respect more than him when it comes to understanding film and it's importance.

But games? Not so much.

Here is my challenge to Roger: Why is Monkey Island not art, yet, the Pirates of the Caribbean movie is art?

I will hold the story and characters of Monkey Island up to the Pirates of the Caribbean movie any day. The story in Monkey Island 1 and 2 is as deep and complex and interesting as that of Pirates of the Caribbean. The characters are as living and real and developed as you'll find in any film, I'd even argue more so since you can have conversations with them and explore the nooks and crannies of their stories in a way a movie or book cannot.

So, Roger, play Monkey Island. Really play it. Don't have someone that has played it tell you about it. Don't get someone to play it for you. Don't read about it on Wikipedia. Play it and let it swallow you and then tell me it's not art.

Update:

Roger replied that he did not think Pirates of the Caribbean was art.

If that is indeed what he thinks, then his argument does make a little more sense to me. He's not saying that film is art, but that some film is art. Ok, I can believe, under his standards, that no game has reached the level of art, but to say they never will be art is naive and history will prove as such.

Although, he did say "no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form", so I guess that is his escape from the hammer of the future, but it can not excuse the fact that he's never played or tried to understand games at the same level that he does film. If he wants to continually bring this issue up, then he should at least become a quais-expert in it first or at lease try to understand it.

And no, watching YouTube videos of games doesn't count because it's not experiencing the one thing that makes a game unique and that is how you interact with it. This would be like critiquing film by only ever reading scripts and never watching the movie. There is an entire layer that is missing.

Roger also mentions in his essay "Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?" I would ask: why are you so concerned that they are not? You're the one that keeps bring this up, not us.

http://grumpygamer.com/

 

[Kyriakos]

I consider some old adventure games to be art (new ones might have been regarded as such too, but i haven't played any) since they have a plot, deep characters and a complicated world. Moreover lets not forget that an adventure places you in a position that a book or a movie cannot: in it you are the one acting (although not entirely freely, for example the dialogues are scripted).
It is a different form of art from the other ones, but that doesnt mean it shouldnt be seen as art.

 

[ParadigmShifter]

Has anyone brought up the gamedeveloper legend Ron Gilbert's(Monkey Island anyone) response to this? Well here it is. And Ebert even replied to him btw.



http://grumpygamer.com/

I would have just emailed him with "You fight like a cow!"

 

[Lillefix]

I would have just emailed him with "You fight like a cow!"

You know, that line owes it's existence Orson Scott Card. And even Ebert must admit he's an artist.

 

[Japanrocks12]

I really like Ebert, and I enjoy reading his reviews. But I have to disagree with him here. At the same time, I am of the opinion that Santiago made a poor-to-mediocre case for video games here. She touted the Waco game as art? Really? What about Ico or Shadow of the Colossus? Ikaruga?

Anyway, Ebert's argumentation does not have something to say about the fundamental nature of video games that might preclude them from being transcendent. He just has eons of familiarity with great film and other art forms, and almost none with video games. He does not speak with much authority, and would not make my top 10 list of "arbiters of art," if you will, in today's society. Therefore, one could present him with any video game that purports to be artistic in some fashion, and it would not stir him from his dogmatic slumber. Maybe, just maybe, a game which rests its putative claim to artistic-ness on account of its cinematography. Though to us in the video game crowd, those games are just movies with limited interaction.

 

[holy king]

so some old art critic refuses to label a new form of art as art?
seriously?

 

[Japanrocks12]

so some old art critic refuses to label a new form of art as art?
seriously?

yeah, a TL;DR interpretation boils down essentially to this.

 

[lovett]

Hence, we can stop talking about all the intentions that the artist has, which we will never really be certain about. Instead, we look at what purpose the object ends up conveying. And I'd argue that there might well be something about the purpose of the object that is contradictory to what art is when it's made to be sold on the market. I'm open to the possibility, though, that an artwork may be subjective expression and yet is completed to be sold. I just think it's harder to fulfill that condition when you're anxious to sell something that people might want. Usually the problem is called 'pandering'.

I've been working on the assumption that the purpose of a piece of work is as we perceive it. We may indeed be wrong. Perhaps there actually is little by way of subjective expression in a work of art that we consider great. There's no foolproof way of knowing, nor is it necessary for us to know the truth.

Yet I think it's important to our perception of something as a work of art that we believe it to be a product of subjective expression. Certainly, a good way to make an object appear that way to us is if the object is indeed the product of subjective expression, right?

So the essential quality which defines art is 'Our perception that it is subjective' rather then any actual subjectivity in its making? That's interesting. It of course implies that what counts as art is liable to change depending on people's perception; if I were to believe that the Sistine Chapel's ceiling was designed on the basis of what would please Pope Julius (and Michelangelo's theological advisers) I could not truthfully call it art.

But to go further then that, the idea that Michelangelo painted the Sistine's ceiling with the intention to pander to the pope's whims, rather then express his subjective interpretation of the Old Testament, is not instantly dismissible. It is very doubtful, but quite possible. Certainly we would agree that Michelangelo did not have complete freedom of subjective expression; He could not write 'Pope Julius II is a dick' right across the Creation Of Adam; one assumes that would have some quite dire consequences. His ability to paint his interpretation was strictly limited by a number of factors, although we don't (and won't ever) know the true extent to which he was allowed free rein. The point is, when assessing whether we should perceive the Sistine Chapel ceiling as a product of subjective expression we must take this into account (think Bayesian probability); Michelangelo's art is tainted. We cannot rationally perceive it as a pure product of subjective expression. It's artistically impure.

In contrast, as you mention the art of an amateur who paints purely for the sake of painting is vanishingly unlikely to be created to please a market (be that a single individual or a collective). We can say it is almost certainly a work of subjective expression; it's artistically pure. This leaves us in a bit a a situation; We must conclude that the work of every two-bit amateur is more artistic then what is perhaps the finest pieces of painting in the cannon of western art. A piece of work recognized, universally, as 'art'. The fact that our original assertion about the essential quality of art has lead us to a conclusion so radically out of line with how 'art' is used in everyday (and indeed critical) language very much indicated that we have gone wrong. That we are talking about does not define art. Our original assertion must be in error.

To add to this, I am also curious as to how we delimit the term 'subjective expression'. You said earlier that subjective expression does not mean 'there is no external input whatsoever. But any external input has to be internalised and expressed subjectively by the artist' yet to fulfill the demands we would like when defining art (that the definition includes everything people generally agree is 'art', and excludes everything people generally agree is 'not-art') it seems like we really need to refine this view. To whit, one could well interpret the marketer's 'pandering' as his subjective interpretation of what the market wants. That is, he takes the external input supplied by market analysis, internalizes it and comes up with an original product which is his expression of those external inputs. We could parallel with Michelangelo taken the bible as an external input, internalizing it and expressing it.

Yet we would say the two are on quite different scales as per what counts as art; indeed we are wary at calling the former art at all. So if 'subjective expression' as the essential trait of art neither accords with common usage nor allows us to separate 'art' from 'non-art' shouldn't we conclude that other criteria are involved as well, that subjective expression may not be essential after all? Perhaps even a family of criteria

Sigh. This is why it's no fun to talk to analytical philosophy zealots. Why can't we separate the metaphysics from semantics?

It defies my understanding how we can mean something specific enough by 'art' as to render the term meaningful and yet have no distinguishing criterion, no matter how loose (and I object to your labeling of my view on art as "rigid" - what can possibly be much less rigid than 'subjective expression'?), for what we would consider as art.

All this fuzzy logic kind of argument is very interesting, and there are many parts of it that I can agree with. But to maintain the absoluteness of this absolutely expansive view on what art means can only result in meaninglessness. Once we've built up a big enough "network of crisscrossing similarities", anything can be art. And, funnily enough, when that has happened, we are very likely to invent a new term to replace what we had meant by 'art'. The metaphysics moves on while the semantic word games continue to talk about whether we ever really mean something remotely specific by the term.

We can't separate metaphysics from semantics because you are making quite bald metaphysical claims; that we should determine what counts as 'art' by identifying a single 'common trait' all examples of art share (post #42). I am saying that we don't need any such 'essential quality' to determine what is art, nor the firm boundaries of definition implied by such. Between examples of art exists only a loose family resemblance (I use 'rigid' to compare with this, rather then other definition of which 'subjective expression' is likely liberal) and we intuitively recognize said resemblance.

To say that we need a definite distinguishing criterion for a concept in order to render it meaningful lest our usage become meaninglessly expansive rather ignores the fact that we don't. For where is the distinguishing characteristic of games, and from where can we draw boundaries with which to define 'game'? We cannot, and yet we still mean something by the term game; our loose family resemblance seems to adequately express the concept. And indeed if this were not so we would expect words to be understood by a process of definition, rather then definition to be generated after words are understood. It does not follow that a specific (but inexact) meaning of art it outside our understanding; it follows that we understand it implicitly and are unable to explicate our understand. This does not mean we do not know what art means, anymore then we do not know how a guitar sounds because we can not explicitly state said sound.

Just because the boundaries of a concept are blurred, as inevitable if they depend on family resemblance, does not mean that that concept is meaningless anymore then a blurred photograph is not a meaningful depiction of a person.

 

[Marla_Singer]

According to wikipedia: "Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions."

If you've been moved by a video game product, then you can consider there's an artistic aspect in it. Personnally, only one video game truely moved me and that was Zelda when I was a young kid. And indeed, I would consider Zelda as having an artistic value.


But anyway, I believe wikipedia's definition is a bit limited. Art is to me essentially about expression. It's about expressing something that would touch the heart... and also make you think. Video games can clearly do so. Afterwards, one can judge each games individually, but it's foolish to declare that a form of expression, in itself, can't be Art.

 

[Marla_Singer]

A video game cannot be art if it is fun.

Any musician will tell you that it is fun to play an instrument (or sing... or even simply to listen to music). Though you won't deny music is Art.

Of course, the artistic value depends afterwards about which video game we're talking about. But that's true in any form of Art.

 

[aelf]

In contrast, as you mention the art of an amateur who paints purely for the sake of painting is vanishingly unlikely to be created to please a market (be that a single individual or a collective). We can say it is almost certainly a work of subjective expression; it's artistically pure. This leaves us in a bit a a situation; We must conclude that the work of every two-bit amateur is more artistic then what is perhaps the finest pieces of painting in the cannon of western art. A piece of work recognized, universally, as 'art'. The fact that our original assertion about the essential quality of art has lead us to a conclusion so radically out of line with how 'art' is used in everyday (and indeed critical) language very much indicated that we have gone wrong. That we are talking about does not define art. Our original assertion must be in error.

I don't see the problem with stating that amateur art is artistically purer without saying that it's more beautiful or brilliant, any more than with stating that children are more innocent without saying that they have superior moral sense.

To add to this, I am also curious as to how we delimit the term 'subjective expression'. You said earlier that subjective expression does not mean 'there is no external input whatsoever. But any external input has to be internalised and expressed subjectively by the artist' yet to fulfill the demands we would like when defining art (that the definition includes everything people generally agree is 'art', and excludes everything people generally agree is 'not-art') it seems like we really need to refine this view. To whit, one could well interpret the marketer's 'pandering' as his subjective interpretation of what the market wants. That is, he takes the external input supplied by market analysis, internalizes it and comes up with an original product which is his expression of those external inputs. We could parallel with Michelangelo taken the bible as an external input, internalizing it and expressing it.

Yes, if it is his expression of those external inputs, it may very well pass the test, so to speak. But you can't simply say that my conforming to some external standards is tantamount to my expression of those standards. There has to be something personal about it, something that comes from the self quite irrespective of (but not necessarily dissimilar to) what I am told about the external inputs. In Michelangelo's case, there certainly is a certain personal quality to his spirituality. On the other hand, I don't know what it means to have a personal quality to the act of conforming to market demand.

We can't separate metaphysics from semantics because you are making quite bald metaphysical claims; that we should determine what counts as 'art' by identifying a single 'common trait' all examples of art share (post #42). I am saying that we don't need any such 'essential quality' to determine what is art, nor the firm boundaries of definition implied by such. Between examples of art exists only a loose family resemblance (I use 'rigid' to compare with this, rather then other definition of which 'subjective expression' is likely liberal) and we intuitively recognize said resemblance.

To say that we need a definite distinguishing criterion for a concept in order to render it meaningful lest our usage become meaninglessly expansive rather ignores the fact that we don't. For where is the distinguishing characteristic of games, and from where can we draw boundaries with which to define 'game'? We cannot, and yet we still mean something by the term game; our loose family resemblance seems to adequately express the concept. And indeed if this were not so we would expect words to be understood by a process of definition, rather then definition to be generated after words are understood. It does not follow that a specific (but inexact) meaning of art it outside our understanding; it follows that we understand it implicitly and are unable to explicate our understand. This does not mean we do not know what art means, anymore then we do not know how a guitar sounds because we can not explicitly state said sound.

Just because the boundaries of a concept are blurred, as inevitable if they depend on family resemblance, does not mean that that concept is meaningless anymore then a blurred photograph is not a meaningful depiction of a person.

I think we are essentially arriving at the same sticking point, which is your assertion that my definition is in some sense unconstructively rigid. I don't think so. In fact, I'd say that where we don't see any rigidity we simply have neglected to narrow down what we mean by something. It might seem that I am picking an arbitrary definition and running with it, but I can still claim that my definition is a good one because it's based on a property of the term that is quite apart from my personal understanding of the term. This is such that a person who is in the same mental state when referring to XYZ as I am in when referring to 'art' does not mean the same thing if XYZ does not have that essential property of 'art' that I'm observing, and such that people can test my assertion and understand where I'm coming from (since, as this thread shows, I have so far been able to defend this definition and I'm not alone in holding it).

To conclude, I'm offering what I think is a pretty good working definition for art. You can't simply cancel out my claim by saying that some others don't really have a working definition for the term. Essentially, you are saying that I'm wrong because neither Ebert nor I can be the arbiter of what art means and that people as a whole have looser understanding of it. But I think we're making more sense talking about what art means than most people here, because we bothered (at least I suspect, in Ebert's case) to ask ourselves what we really mean by art. And I think that's what makes it a philosophy of art, not a psychological description of the fact that people aren't actually sure what they're talking about.

 

[azzaman333]

Any musician will tell you that it is fun to play an instrument (or sing... or even simply to listen to music). Though you won't deny music is Art.

Music isn't necessarily art either.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Music isn't necessarily art either.

No form of expression are Art in itself. The artistic value stronly vary from each object taken individually. Read the end of the post you've truncated in quoting it.