Art

April 20th, 2010Blog0 comments

I just read Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton, a nonfiction about the various organizations and structures in the art world; her explorations range from a night at a big Sothebys art auction to a visit to the studio of Takashi Murakami.

Takashi Murakami – Oval Buddha

Admittedly, visual art is baffling to me. I have absolutely no idea how it works. What is the narrative? How do people make money? I lack the knowledge infrastructure to determine whether a piece of art is good or not. Sure, I know what I like, but I can’t possibly tell what any of it really means. It’s like visiting a foreign country.

Don’t get me wrong — I think it’s a fascinating country. There are some objects covered by the book that are undeniably art — Murakami’s Oval Buddha for instance. Its sheer scale and sense of creativity speaks to me. But other things like IKB and Fountain (Urinal) and such are questionable.

The entire thing seems so subjective. The tools I work with — words and language — at least have a sort of precision about them. A word like “bulbous” has different connotations to different people, but the basic meaning of the word is the same to everyone. If I have a blue cube on a canvas, it could be made to mean anything. There’s something simultaneously great and alien about that to me.

Even peoples’ bodies can be art. But as that linked article seems to imply, visual interaction is the only appropriate type of interaction. With visual art, any type of touch is a bad touch.

So this brings me to the ultimate question in this post: Can video games be art?

Your Mike Golamco’s answer: Hell fucking yes. Composing visuals = Art. Transmitting said visuals electronically = Art. Creating music and sound = Art. Voice acting = Art. Storytelling = Art. Doing all of these things together to create a video game != Art? Sorry Ebert, but no. Video games are art. They are a multidisciplinary creative endeavor and that, to me, equals art. The presence of interactivity (i.e. “touching”) does not negate the artistic merit of the medium of video games.

Is every video game a piece of art? No. Like some books, paintings, movies, etc., some video games are garbage. But then there’s Fallout 3. That thing is a piece of goddamn art.

The art world: What a wild, wooly, insane and hierarchical world that is. And I’m saying this as someone that lives in LA.