Games, Art?

I had a brief conversation with P. Adams Sitney, professor of Visual Arts at Princeton, about the history of film and photography. In particular I was intersting in how both film and photography went through a period when they were not considered art forms.

P. Adams mentioned that Chaplin popularized film to the general public and considers that film began to be discussed as art around the 1910's. This was done by scholars, philosophers, and interestingly enough, poets.

He explained that in both cases there was resistance to placing the mediums in such high regard. People thought that the camera was a toy and that film was low brow. In fact films were first shown as precursors to events, such as the circus, and were never the main event.

I pointed out to him that video games are having a similar problem, being considered toys and a low brow medium, and that perhaps they would see a similar rise in status. He was not particularly confident that that would be the case. "Radio never became an art form, even though music is universally considered an art, and TV took a long time before anyone considered it anything other than a means of transmitting films," he said.

He also posed some interesting questions about games as art: "Is pool art? What about monopoly, the boardgame? Who is the artist, the player or the developer?" He questioned whether interaction ever really played a role in art, since with most forms the artist creates something that acts upon the audience rather than the audience upon it, even with art that claims to be interative in some manner.