Roger Ebert: Video Games Can Never Be Art

Film critic Roger Ebert kicked in a hornet's nest in the geekosphere when he asserted that video games are not and never can be art (via Nerd Bastards).

Having once made the statement above, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to be a fool's errand, especially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the error of my ways. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.

Ebert wrote in response to a TED talk from game designer Kellee Santiago on the subject.

I would prefer to do a straight fisking of Ebert, but he wrote largely in response to Santiago, who I think provided an inadequate definition of art and thereafter proceeded in the wrong rhetorical direction.

So rather than defending Santiago's perspective and rebutting Ebert, let me argue positively that video games can be art.

We begin with the most foundational question: "What is art?" Here, I think, Santiago makes an early mistake by defining it as "the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions."

Without consulting other sources, let me offer this alternative: art is the outward expression of an inward conception of an ideal condition, such as beauty or terror. If a person thinks of something beautiful, it is not, in and of itself, art. If that person can effectively communicate it through text, performance, or a physical rendering, then he has created art.

It is necessary to note that some degree of technical skill is required. If a person is able to fully externalize his inner vision, then he has created good art. If he is hampered by a lack of technical skill, then the product represents a limited and obscured expression of the image trapped within the confines of the mind.

A person may attempt to disguise his lack of technical ability by choosing an expression that does not require great technical skill and claim that the original intent has been fulfilled. This is how we can discern the difference between Bouguereau and Pollock. Pollock chose more abstract expressions because he lacked the technical skill necessary for concrete expressions. Bouguereau, if he wished, could have created a Pollock. Pollock could never have created a Bouguereau.

So art is not fully egalitarian. A talented few, with training to hone their raw talent, will be able to outwardly express their inner vision. The rest of us will not. Or as Rudy Giuliani has been quoted "If I can do it, it's not art."

Therefore, one test of an activity as a medium of art is to ask "Can anyone, with sufficient training, do it?"


I'm inclined to think not.

Ebert suggests that the anonymity of game designers evidences their unworthiness of mention:

Yet she concedes that I was correct when I wrote, "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." To which I could have added painters, composers, and so on, but my point is clear.

Quick -- name ten composers. Now name just three game designers.

How well did you do? I'm not a musical person, but I came up with ten composers and not a single game designer. Does this mean that they are not artists? Does fame denote true art?

No -- and for a reason that Ebert of all people should understand. If game design may be compared to any medium, it is filmmaking. Both media are enormous collaborative projects that require between dozens and hundreds of specialized workers. Give Spielberg the job of creating a film entirely by himself, and he'll create something as mediocre as a game designed entirely by a solitary producer at Ubisoft. If filmmaking is an artistic medium, then so is game design. If art can be created collaboratively on film, then it can be created collaboratively in pixels.

But we can name Steven Spielberg. And Oliver Stone and the Coen Brothers and many more. But no game designers. Why? Because game production is a very rapidly changing industry, and viciously cut-throat. The technology that empowers it is growing so fast that the market rolls over any designer who can't keep up with the frenetic pace. A game made ten years ago is as crude as Georges Méliès' 1902 Le Voyage Dans la Lune. But a movie made ten years ago can be better than current releases because the medium is comparatively stagnant. Filmmakers can rest on their laurels; game designers cannot.

Both Santiago and Ebert actually mention Méliès and his film Le Voyage Dans La Lune. Ebert writes:

Now she shows stills from early silent films such as George Melies' "A Voyage to the Moon" (1902), which were "equally simplistic." Obviously, I'm hopelessly handicapped because of my love of cinema, but Melies seems to me vastly more advanced than her three modern video games. He has limited technical resources, but superior artistry and imagination.

How so? Ebert does not explain. To Santiago's most effective argument -- that video games are at an early stage of artistic development comparable to the earliest movies -- Ebert is almost silent.

But I won't argue from Santiago's perspective, which, as I've said, starts with a somewhat faulty definition of art. I define art -- and specifically good art -- as the effective outward expression of an inward conception of an ideal condition. If a person thinks of a story, and can express that story fully in text, that person is an artist and has produced art. If a person thinks of a sound and can fully express that sound in music, that person is an artist and has produced art. If a person thinks of a movement and can fully express that movement in dance, that person is an artist and has produced art. If a person thinks of an image and can fully express that image in paint, that person is an artist and has produced art.


If a person can envision a video and gather a team together that can accurately express that inner vision, that person is an artist and has produced art.


If a person can envision an interactive video and gather a team together that can accurately express that inner vision, that person is an artist and has produced art.

And that's what video games are -- interactive visual and auditory environments that express an inner vision. Not everyone is capable of producing good video games. I can't and Roger Ebert can't. The task requires people with a natural talent sharpened by formal training. They can create artificial worlds where we can experience their inner vision. Such people are artists.

And the product of an artist is art.

Now yesterday this post began as a comment at Nerd Bastards, and it grew and grew until I realized that I should write an entire post on the subject. While composing it, I encountered this excellent response from Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade (via reddit). An excerpt of its brilliance:

so there's nothing here to discuss. You can if you want to, and people certainly do, but there's no profit in it. Nobody's going to hold their blade aloft at the end of this thing and found a kingdom. It's just something to fill the hours.

Also, do we win something if we defeat him? Does he drop a good helm? Because I can't for the life of me figure out why we give a shit what that creature says. He doesn't operate under some divine shroud that lets him determine what is or is not valid culture. He cannot rob you, retroactively, of wholly valid experiences; he cannot transform them into worthless things.

He's simply a man determined to be on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the human drive to create, and dreadfully so; a monument to the same generational bullshit that says because something has not been, it must not and could never be.

All of this is true. Ebert, film critic, is no different from the people a century ago who proclaimed that film could never amount to anything; that it was not real art. His views will end up on the ash heap of history, and we know it, and he knows it.

What do you think?

What is art?

Do video games constitute art?

The Desecration of the Sacred in the Arts

Roger Scruton has an interesting article in City Journal about modern aesthetics. He argues that since 1930 or so, one of the major themes of the arts -- and a new one in the Western tradition -- has been to intentionally depict ugliness:

I used the word “desecration” to describe the attitude conveyed by Bieito’s production of Die Entführung and by Serrano’s lame efforts at meaning something. What exactly does this word imply? It is connected, etymologically and semantically, with sacrilege, and therefore with the ideas of sanctity and the sacred. To desecrate is to spoil what might otherwise be set apart in the sphere of sacred things. We can desecrate a church, a graveyard, a tomb; and also a holy image, a holy book, or a holy ceremony. We can desecrate a corpse, a cherished image, even a living human being—insofar as these things contain (as they do) a portent of some original sanctity. The fear of desecration is a vital element in all religions. Indeed, that is what the word religio originally meant: a cult or ceremony designed to protect some sacred place from sacrilege.

Scruton provides several examples of the glorification of evil, not in the sense that evil is represented as good (e.g. Nazi propaganda films), but that evil is praised for being evil. It is a rejection of the hero/journey motif for a villain/destruction one and a nihilism that is all too present in postmodern life, from Robert Fisk's praise for his attackers to the movie Natural Born Killers. It is an urge to simultaneously destroy and be destroyed.

How Juxtapoz Magazine Changed the World

Greg Beato has a new article up at Reason about the upcoming 100th issue of Juxtapoz, the magazine that ushered in the Lowbrow Art movement. This led to an egalitarianization trend in the art world:

They evoked movie posters, tattoos, comic books, and pulp novels, and while they contained plenty of surrealist ambiguity, they didn't require an aesthetic translator from Artforum to decode them. Fine art, Juxtapoz insisted, could speak to more than just curators, collectors, gallery owners, and critics. It could speak to a much wider audience, and not just from the tastefully generic walls of the nation's most corporate-sponsored museums. A Zippo lighter, a skateboard, a pair of sneakers—they were all potential canvases.

I wrote about this subject previously here. Beato notes that Juxtapoz currently has a higher circulation than any other art magazine in America, including more highbrow fare. Art is for everyone, regardless of artificial social distinctions. Juxtapoz is helping to erode those barriers.

Canons of Great Literature

I remember back in seminary a professor excoriated me for selecting unpopular, if not virtually unknown books as influential in my life. I had demonstrated a lack of spiritual maturity by not agreeing with his choices.

There's a lot of literary spinach out there -- stuff that's supposed to be good for you, even if it's boring. Well, I don't really care what people think of my tastes in art, literature, or anything else. Every now and then I get the bug to try out heavy literature. Recently, it was Kerouac's On the Road. Before that, it was Nabokov's Lolita. But if it doesn't grab me, I put it down and read something else.

Years ago, I met a high school girl who kept a copy of Atlas Shrugged around. She would pull it out and conspicuously read from it so that people would be impressed by her intelligence. And I think that many of the works that make it into and stay in the canon of great literature do so only because rejecting them would make a person like a dullard. Sort of like abstract art.

As for me, I don't apologize for what I like and what I don't like.

Which is not to say that there is not an advantage to a culture asserting an aesthetic canon. A common body of literature (or other arts) gives cohesion to members of that culture. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra and all that. But at a certain point, it's time to strike out on one's own and set one's own aesthetic values.

Highbrow, Lowbrow, Mebrow, Youbrow

John Derbyshire laments the decline of high art in America:

Well, pop culture has always been there; and while it's now pretty much all filth, there are still a few diamonds in amongst the dung — a movie, a song, a sitcom that is fun, even instructive, even moving. It sure has swamped high culture, though, with a mighty assist from the "Higher Superstition" of those college flim-flam courses in literary deconstruction, post-colonial studies, and the like. High culture just ran out of gas some time in the early 20th century. It is now a museum culture: pictures painted 400 years ago, symphonies written 200 years ago, operas, poems, and novels written 100 years ago.

Somewhere in Goebbels' diaries there is a passage that haunts me. He's going down into the bunker for one of the last times, as the allies close on Berlin, and he expresses his joy at the sight of "bourgeois civilization" disappearing in flames. (How they loved their Wagner!) He was of course right. Now we have Madonna, Damien Hirst, Milton Babbitt, Regietheater, and Maya Angelou.

There ain't no such thing as high art and low art, as I've written before. In terms of the work of art itself, there are no distinguishing criteria between fine and commercial arts (tell me why a Jackson Pollock is aesthetically superior to a Mitch McConnell). What separates highbrow culture and lowbrow culture are context and audience.

Was the work created for its own sake, or to sell something? Was it created for a gallery or a magazine? Was it a solitary work or mass produced? These questions determine the context in which the work of art was created.

The answers point us to the audience of the work: who created it and (more importantly) for whom? Was it created for commoners or the elites? This is the only true distinction; the sole reason that there is a motivation to separate high culture from low culture: classism. It is the fear that the lower classes might prefer arts of their own; that they might make aesthetic decisions on their own; and worst of all, that even if given the choice, they might prefer not to hear the aria in the symphony hall or read the confusion of a Joyce novel.

The lower classes might cease to envy the elites. And that would be intolerable.

The Middlebrow Culture of America

Terry Teachout has an intriguing editorial in Arts Journal. He points to a recent story in The Guardian in which the author laments popular ignorance of the fine arts. The critique is based on a British survey, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that 49% of Americans would be unable to identify the creator of the Mona Lisa. Nor, like Teachout, do I think that this is necessarily a bad thing, for American culture allowed people to question the aesthetic assumptions of the West and decide for themselves what they considered to be art:

Ours is essentially a popular culture, of course, but in the democratic culture of postwar America, there was also unfettered access to what Matthew Arnold so famously called "the best that has been thought and said in the world"--and, just as important, there was no contempt for it. When I was a boy, most Americans who didn't care for high art still held it in a kind of puzzled respect. I doubt that Ed Sullivan cared much for Maria Callas or Edward Villella, but that didn't stop him from putting them on his show, along with Louis Armstrong and the original cast of West Side Story (not to mention Jackie Mason and Senor Wences). In the Sixties, all was grist for the middlebrow mill.

This is as it should be: cultural values should be determined by individuals in free market environments, and not regulated by force or even substantially influenced by elitist standards. An observer can't look at art effectively without first peeling away the aesthetic presuppositions of cultural norms and letting a piece speak for itself. Forced cultural blinders which say "This is bad art" and "This is good art" can only distort the perception of the individual.

Teachout then moves on to the main focus of his column, the decline of a unified national culture:

The catch was that the middlebrow culture on which I was raised was a common culture, based on the existence of widely shared values, and it is now splintered beyond hope of repair. Under the middlebrow regime, ordinary Americans were exposed to a wide range of cultural options from which they could pick and choose at will. They still do so, but without the preliminary exposure to the unfamiliar that once made their choices potentially more adventurous. The rise of digital information technology, with its unique capacity for niche marketing, has replaced such demographically broad-based instruments of middlebrow self-education as The Ed Sullivan Show with a new regime of seemingly infinite cultural choice. Instead of three TV networks, we have a hundred channels, each "narrowcasting" to a separate sliver of the viewing public, just as today's corporations market new products not to the American people as a whole but to carefully balanced combinations of "lifestyle clusters" whose members are known to prefer gourmet coffee to Coca-Cola, or BMWs to Dodge pickups.

Teachout is, of course, referring to the Long Tail -- the economic phenomenon of mass production that allows individuals to be very selective about their aesthetic desires (among other cultural and financial habits). Due to telecommunications, people can form very specific microcultures and identity groups free from any geographic limitations.

The downside, as Teachout points out, is that people within a geographic area, such as the United States, have a diminished national, common culture:

What's really sad is that most people under the age of 35 or so don't remember and can't imagine a time when there were magazines that "everybody" read and TV shows that "everybody" watched, much less that those magazines and shows went out of their way to introduce their audiences to high art of various kinds. Those days, of course, are gone for good, and it won't help to mourn their passing. I'm not one to curse the darkness--that's one of the reasons why I started this blog. Even so, that doesn't stop me from feeling pangs of nostalgia for our lost middlebrow culture. It wasn't perfect, and sometimes it wasn't even very good, but it beat hell out of nothing.

HT: The Corner

The Decline of the Miss America Pageant

Laura Vanderkam writes about the declining interest in and ratings of the annual Miss America pageant:

But the biggest challenge, by far, has been the public’s declining interest. In the late 1960s, Miss America was one of the top-rated broadcasts each year. In 1996, NBC dropped it because of low ratings. ABC picked it up, then declined to renew its contract in 2004, effectively kicking Miss America off network TV.

There are many theories about the pageant’s decline and, in 2002, I offered my own in a USA Today column: “Once, the competition at least had pure Sports Illustrated-swimsuit-issue appeal,” I wrote. “Now, it’s a search for a girl who’s pretty but not overwhelmingly pretty; talented, but only in a parlor-after-dinner way (usually she sings or plays the piano); intelligent, but not dangerously so; and who will feign interest in the most politically correct cause imaginable.” As I said then, “the pageant has become a search for the nation’s most inoffensive woman.” There are a lot of bad TV shows out there these days, but even so, I doubt that concept would make it off the napkin and into production minus an 88-year history.

My wife would, with all justification, not approve of me watching a show that constituted leering at women. But with even that consideration aside, I've always found the Miss America and Universe pageants incredibly boring.

All the women look exactly alike: the same dress, swimsuit, hairdo, and vacuous smile. They're so similar to each other that they're not attractive.

Beauty is found in individuality, not uniformity.

Art and Ideology

Will Deuel has an intriguing post up in which he muses about the intersection between art, ideology, music and homiletics. At the end, he ponders several questions:

1. Is the sermon an art form?

2. If so, is the art best served by being in tune with my own deepest passions, desires, fears, hopes, dreams?

3. Is the art well served by being in tune with the congregation’s deepest passions, etc.?

4. Am I guilty of preparing art in the service of ideology rather than passion?

Christ, Culture, and Creativity

Yesterday, I linked to this post by Al Hsu about the culture war that Dungeons & Dragons sparked when it first appeared in 1974. Some Christian leaders found its content objectionable. The whole post is a real gem, and I didn't dig into its main point. Hsu argues that they failed to win the public argument over gaming because they merely critiqued culture, instead of creating it:

In short, Gygax created culture, whereas Gothard merely condemned culture. Gothard did not create a compelling alternative to D&D - he merely argued that it was evil. Whatever one might think about his perspective, the larger issue for Christians is whether we will create compelling, dramatic narratives and stories for people to participate in, or if we only react against what other people create. Andy Crouch's forthcoming Culture Making argues that Christians cannot change the culture by condemning it, critiquing it, copying it or consuming it. The only way to change culture is to create more culture.

I agree. Christianity must be more than a voice declaring "No!" If we are to live in the image of our Creator, then we, too, must be creative and celebrate beauty where it can be formed and found.

HT: Jollyblogger

Wesleyan Aesthetics

Philip Yancey:

I finished Wesley's Journal impressed with his physical endurance, his austere lifestyle, and his absolute devotion to the clusters of believers springing up all over Britain. But I could not help noting Wesley's lack of appreciation for the beauties and cultural riches that abound in that island nation.

Gazing at a lovely flower garden, he quickly demurred, "What can delight always but the knowledge and love of God?" He toured one of England's historic great houses and noted, "How little a time will it be before the house itself, yea, the earth shall be burned up!" And after marveling at the talents of a blind organist he added, "But what is he the better for all this, if he is still 'without God in the world'?"

Even the British Museum failed to make an impression. After remarking on its collections, Wesley wrote, "But what account will a man give to the judge of the quick and dead for a life spent in collecting all these?"

In short, Wesley viewed the common graces of beauty and culture with an attitude approaching disdain. More than once I wrote in the margin, "Lighten up, John!" (But by the standards of ascetics who lived atop poles and ate only bread and water, John Wesley himself was an aesthete.)

I've got to admit, Wesley had a point. So does Yancey. I'm not sure where is the balancing point between these two conflicting values. Further thoughts here.

Hat tip to Jay Voorhees at the Methoblog.

From a Christian Perspective, When Is Art Good?

I am presently reading Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue by William A. Dyrness. Dyrness is a PCUSA minister and a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. In this book, Dyrness describes the history of Christian aesthetics and attempts to lay out a theological perspective on the arts.

This is an interesting passage:

But if art is nothing special, it can be a part of something that is. What is special is God's revelation of himself and the call of creation to praise him in response...The call of God goes equally to everyone to respond to this revelation of God: To reflect and embody his purposes with all of his or her life and activity. These purposes of God are comprehensive. They include the whole of life -- how we dress, eat, work, play, and yes, the works of art whose purposes cannot be reduced to any of these activities. All of these can be taken up into the truly exciting program of God that Scripture calls God's reign.

How does art relate to this program of God? Human art, when it is good, manages some echo of this reality -- either to praise or to curse. This does not mean that art cannot be mostly for fun -- a quick sketch or shriek of delight in life itself. Even this delights the Creator. Nor does it mean that all art has to aspire to some deep spiritual purpose. But art that is worthy goes with the grain of a God-inspired and Spirit-upheld order, or it stands against this order, or more usually, it stands in some ambiguous relationship to it. Ultimately, the created order holds us accountable, and we either see through it to the loving hand of the Creator, or we make it something of an idol -- something that refers only to itself.

The final point is the most comprehensive and perhaps the most controversial. In some mysterious sense, all art aspires to be worship. This is not to say that every artist wants to use his or her art to witness to something larger than this or that temporary and finite form. Art that is serious always hungers to be a part of something larger; it wants to be a kind of summing up exercise that brings the pieces together and that reflects and comments on the ultimacy of order or disorder -- even to celebrate (or perhaps curse) this larger reality. And the world, for its part, is made in such a way that one day every particle of it will contribute its share to the praise of the eternal Triune God. One way or another every artist anticipates that day.

This is an intriguing train of thought. Art does indeed inspire reverence and sanctity. I remember when I saw my first Bouguereau. I was 24 and not yet a Christian, but when I turned a corner at the Birmingham Museum of Art and was suddenly met with L'Aurore, the whole universe seemed to pause in a sacred moment. So is this painting a small part of the created order that will one day be restored from its Fallenness? The fact that L'Aurore literally depicts a false god (the Greek goddess of the morning sun) would require that it is Fallen...and yet beautiful in a way that spurs spiritual longings.

Hmm.