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Roger Ebert Backs Down On Video Games As Art
Jhyrryl writes "Roger Ebert has again posted about video games. It's an apology of sorts, for having publicly said that games are not art. He wrote, 'I should not have written that entry without being more familiar with the actual experience of video games. ... My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times.'"
Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so.
Then he goes on to say that there were 4,547 comments left with ~300 supporting his view. He claims it's longer than Anna Karenina, David Copperfield and The Brothers Karamazov.
... and of his dismissal of this he says, "I was too damned bull-headed."
... permanently.
What he said is that he shouldn't have said it. That he should have been more informed of video games before making that statement. But, in the end, he's still saying that video games can never be art. Ebert is bull headed. I've seen the footage where he breaks down into a fight with Siskel. A decent argument is one thing but Ebert's harder to sway than a dead mule. So he made a statement. And what you're going to get is the definition of the word 'art.' He even admits Sony bent over backwards to give him the chance to play a beautiful non-combat oriented game
Roger Ebert is a brilliant man. However, as oft occurs with brilliance, he will not admit a mistake, a misstep or that he was flat out wrong. You've squeezed all you can squeeze out of him which is basically that he regrets saying it but he still believes it is true.
We call movies art. We call literature art. We call silence art. We call a single color art. Hell, we even call graffiti art. The crudest symbols our kind could muster gets to be called art. But, goddammit, for some strange reason the second you express yourself through a series of complexly arrange ones and zeros interacting with the viewer, you can't call it art.
Mr. Ebert, I may be far younger than you and I may be far less informed than you but I cannot understand what possesses you to reserve the word art from being applied to games. I can only take solace in knowing that future generations will see it differently
My work here is dung.
As i like to say: Those who can, do. Those who can't, criticize.
And as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit."
Arguably, his stupidity was in saying that "video games can never be art". Saying that "no video game has yet reached the level of art" is controversial; but a respectable enough empirical opinion, particularly back in the bad old days.
To say that they can "never" be art is either to make a stupid and almost certainly wrong prediction about the technological future, or to attempt to impose a definition of "art" so special-purpose that the statement "video games can never be art" is basically just a tautology masquerading as an insight.
Ebert admits he was foolish to reveal his opinion but maintains the opinion that video games can not be art. What he should have realized is developing an opinion without proper experience was the mistake. And he still won't invest a few hours to check out a video game. How many hours has he wasted on shitty movies? Ebert just doesn't want to be wrong so he's not going to allow himself to justify his own opinion. Still a jerk.
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
I have two arcade machines, and I bought both because not only did I like the game play, but also the art of the game. Both are color vector graphic machines (Tempest & Star Trek), and both have beautiful displays. IMHO, the display on Tempest still can't be outdone with an LCD or plasma system. I've also studied the schematics and there is considerable art in the way the designers pushed their extremely limited systems.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
What things constitute art has always been fiercely debated. No one has definitively defined what is art and what is not. At one time there was debate whether photographs could be art. Then it was whether something generated on a computer could be art. As these things gained greater acceptance it was more accepted that they could be considered art. Roger Ebert may be a bit outdated in his interpretation of art, but there isn't any "right" answer.
Since when did something have to be "good enough" to be art? I think that would come as a surprise to Duchamp and the whole modern art establishment he had spawned.
For whoever doesn't know the story, the whole modern art phenomenon started in 1917 with a guy called Marcel Duchamp, who signed an urinal and sent it to an art gallery under the title "Fountain."
It was not the first of Duchamp's "readymades", basically just objects he found and signed, but otherwise didn't even make or anything. The first was a found bicycle wheel he signed and displayed under the name "Bicycle Wheel" in 1913. Sometimes he at least used funny names for them, like titling a shovel "Prelude To A Broken Arm" in 1915, others were like that Bicycle Wheel. But the urinal is what became famous and redefined art.
The funny thing is that Duchamp spells it out in interviews, some even much much later, that he just wanted to destroy "art". He found the whole establishment to be little more than a circle-jerk clique (not his exact words, but the general gist of it) and obsessed with form above and beyond anything else. He wanted to destroy it all. His urinal was supposed to convey the message, basically, "your work is worth as much as this urinal to me."
But funnily that's not what the art world understood. The art world suddenly found itself trying to imitate the unconventionalism and shock value of that urinal. And it's been in that rut ever since.
And funnily enough everyone seems to still don't get what Duchamp actually did there, even if you show them an interview where he says it himself. E.g., I remember an interview with Michael Craig where he explains that Duchamp actually wanted to show that even everyday objects can be beautiful and art. (No, he didn't.)
In the meantime we have a fine arts establishment where a stack of bricks is called art. A tent made of PVC tubes is art. A set of 4 folded and straightened sheets of paper is called art. (No, really, I've actually seen exactly and literally that in someone's private collection.) A glass of water on a shelf is art. Or a hack like Hirst can pay someone else to put a grid of random coloured dots on a rectangle, sign it and not only get it called art, but be acclaimed for it. (Here's one sample of his 300+ pictures made of dots: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/08/Hirst-LSD.jpg.) A rectangular box made of sheet metal can be called art. A flickering TV in an empty room can be called art. A crucifix in a jar of piss can be called art.
We're in a world where calling someone's work "pretty" is the most grievous insult you can get away with in front of a professor, in some arts colleges. But it is an insult and use it only if you want to make an enemy. Nowadays you don't want "pretty", you want "thought provoking", and "original", and such.
So Ebert is, what, telling me that it isn't art because it's completely unlike what he calls art? Has he checked with the aforementioned modern art establishment? Because it seems to me like that being different is exactly what would make it "art" there.
(And I've played plenty of games which fit the "thought provoking" criterion too. But then I'm the kind of guy easily provoked in that aspect. E.g., Chucky Egg provoked much thought about the struggle of the working class against the oppressor chickens.;))
Heck, probably the best example is another painting I've seen in someone's private collection. Essentially it looked like a screenshot of Tetris. No, literally. I'm not exaggerating. Yes, I know what "literally" means. I mean it. It looked not just sorta like Tetris, but exactly like a screenshot of Tetris. Well, except for the part that in actual Tetris two rows should have been removed because they were full, but obviously on the painting they hadn't been. I wonder if it was supposed to be symbolic of the unfairness of life or something ;)
So basically, let me get that straight: _that_ is art, or so I'm told, but Ebert tells me that if it were actually animated as a game of Tetris, it wouldn't be art any more? Why? It's the same image.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Maybe they're art, just not great art. You seem to be looking for absolutes where there should be none."
Countless works of art has been created, most of them do not measure up to Shakespeare, and a great majority of that art can't be properly compared because they are in a different medium (would you compare The David to MacBeth?). All because they can't measure up or can't be compared does not mean games are not art.
Controversy, bemusement, repudiation: the three stages of a classic troll.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The idea that it might make sense to differentiate between "interactive" things and "non-interactive" things and define this line as the line between art and non-art strikes me as odd. There is no non-interactive art. If you read a book, it is your own mind that paints the picture described by the author's word. If you watch a movie, it's your mind that creates the interpretation that gives the work meaning. Art is always interactive; you interact with a piece of art. This is what gives art its meaning. Without interaction, any piece of art would be utterly dead and meaningless.
"Those who can't teach administrate" goes a lot further towards explaining the wonderful state of our schools.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
He's saying something much more honest, insightful, and true than he's getting credit for.
He seems to be saying that he not only could be wrong, but that he really isn't qualified to comment. He's admitting that he's not willing to get the required experience (play enough games) to be able to comment and be taken seriously. Given these two things, he's bowing out.
Now, it does seem like it took a lot to get it here. It seems he's acknowledging that he was "bull-headed" and that he's mostly writing this because of the barrage of criticism he's received. But what he's actually said is right on -- he isn't qualified to comment, and if he really wants to, he'd have to both solidly define art and play some games, which he's not prepared to do.
I don't have a problem with "backpedaling". I don't like that it took him this long, and I do wish he was a bit more explicit and humble in his wording. But he's realized exactly what he should have, given his experience, and he's said so. I wouldn't expect more.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I rarely see movies; I refuse to see movies, and I bash them largely on the basis of the last movie I saw, "Dude, Where's My Car?" Based on my limited data set (which I refuse to expand), I can conclude that Ebert's profession is reviewing vapid nonsense that isn't art either.
Is this opinion useful to anyone else? Probably not.