Well I guess it comes down to the eternal question of "what is art". Given that there are people with art grants who do crud with their bodily fluids for a living, it becomes a touchy subject. I mean some guy who takes a whizz in a bucket with a picture of the American flag painted on the bottom and then tosses a Cruicifix in it can be called a performance artist (as opposed to simply an obscene attention mongering jackoff), where do we draw the standards.
Truthfully though, despite my opinion that a lot of things that are considered artwork should NOT be considered art, I think video games are quite obviously art.
Think of it this way, producing pictures and composing music are both art. So is writing stories. Any medium that combines those things skillfully can also be considered an art form, without strecthing the definition as far as a lot of things acknowledged to be artistic like performance art do.
Now, honestly there is also a conflict even among artists about "real" art and "pop" art. The idea being that someone like Boris Vallejho or Frank Frazetta are/were artists, but their subject matter (fantasy) lacked the weight of true art. The idea basically being that if your work is obvious to a common observer and can be understood by just anyone it's simply "pop art".
That said to many video games might be "pop art" but they are still an art made up of the combination of a lot of seperate art forms nowadays. Writers, Graphic Artists, and Musicians all have to collaberate nowadays to create a single game.
Even if you don't like the idea of video games being art, how can you complain when guys can do stuff like throw a bunch of random garbage around a yard in piles, snap a picture of it, and then display it in a gallery show and be taken seriously?
"oh yeah doood, it's the chaos of the thing you see. That's what I'm trying to say with this picture".
I guess artwork is subjective, and while I understand a little about so called "real art", I'm pretty low brow because I'd much rather take a look at a half naked Amazon babe with a sword than half a dozen colored lines some dude marked on a piece of paper to demonstrate the contrast of color.
>>>----Therumancer--->
