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Colm's Blog

“Full of games, programming and overblown opinions”

November 30, 2010 Video Games as Art

What is Art? Wikipedia tells me “Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging symbolic elements in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect”. This seems to be the ‘modern’ definition of Art. However in only a few lines this statement is made “Traditionally, the term art was used to refer to any skill or mastery”.
What happened? When did art become this?

What puropose does art serve if it gives no enjoyment in both the sense of a benefit and deriving pleasure. That picture above is neither intellectually stimulating nor is it enjoyable. This can only be described as a real life instance of what is referred on the internet as trolling.

Now to my point, if that above is considered art then why is this not?

What does that pathetic piece of ‘art’ above that is so much greater than Flower could have? I believe that the idea of art has truly been forgotten in modern times and is just being used as an excuse to put forward the most insane idea that the “artist” can come up with and make a claim that they are pushing boundries. What is the purpose of a message if you have to explain it to people, if they cannot derive it from what you resent.
As Lewis Carroll once wrote “Why is a raven like a writing desk”, he never intended that it have an answer however people think it does and strive to work it out. In todays understanding of art this may be considered groundbreaking and new. People will see it as meaning something even though it was never truly a question. The only way I can classify these examples of art is as a social experiment similar to the Milgram Experiment [see the variations using puppies for my true interpretation]. This is the only purpose I see it serving.

I’m not saying that all modern art is useless, there have been some very nice examples of it where maybe a pile of junk makes a shadow model when light is cast on it at a certain angle. However for every example of this there are examples of pointless conceptual art.

This may seem a very harsh interpretation of Art but as I see it if Art cannot do what it says it does or what it sets out to do then what is the purpose of it?