ART. WHAT'S IT GOOD FOR?
When Yehuda posted his Are Games Art? post, I put up a little something on Best of Boardgames noting that I disagreed in part, but was coy as to what I actually thought about the matter.
Coy no longer!
Yehuda has three things that define art (the bold bits are quotes):
Art must be made, not found. For me, art implies deliberate design. Naturally, I immediately thought of Duchamp's Readymades, as I consider those to be art, but I imagine they come under the same heading as "A found rock is not art, nor is a piece of paper on the floor, unless the paper was put on the floor in a particular way." (Emphasis added.) Certainly this is "normal" for art; and as I have no idea what a "Readygame" would be, it doesn't much impinge on the current discussion. (I disagree with Chris in the comments that Chess, Go, Backgammon, etc aren't created, as they have evolved over time. Just because we don't know the designer, and they've accumulated some errata over the years, doesn't mean they sprung from the earth.)
Art must be original. An exact replica of another created work, or even generic imitative copies of some work, can only be considered craft, however beautiful they may be. Craft may be lovely; craft may even be art. I'm not entirely certain craft deserves an "only," but that's beside the point. Anyway, it brings up interesting questions for games.
I think we can talk about the "substance" and "accidents" of games. The substance would be the underlying mechanics, the accidents the theme, art, flavor text, and so on. I would argue that all ho-jillion versions of Monopoly are the same game in their substance, if not in their accidents. An interesting question, then, is whether Cat-opoly should be considered an instantiation of Monopoly, or a different game. If you go down the winding road far enough, can one say that one's personal copy of any game is "the real game," or just a version of it? After all, I doubt it was an original creation for you. It's like owning a print, or a poster.
I would argue that one should only consider the "substance" of art and games, rather than their accidental manifestations. Broadway Boogie-Woogie should, somehow, be appreciable as art (or as not-art, see point below) regardless of whether one travels to MoMA or looks at a mere image of it in an art history book.
Analogously, I would argue that a game should be considered without its theme. I'll note that this only matters for this particular discussion--whether games are art. Theme plays a bigger role in determining whether a game is good--but theoretically that shouldn't matter here.
Art must tackle one of the 'deep' issues, such as beauty, truth, faith, innocence, divinity, evil, love, etc. I guess this is my hang-up. For one thing, I have a little trouble--in the current endeavor--with any definition which is so culturally contingent--ironically, with the aim of creating a non-relativistic definition of art, Yehuda backed into one anyway. Note the hypothetical example:
"Two people can paint the same mountain. One might make a beautiful picture of the mountain, but it would be considered craft. The other may make a picture of the mountain, but when you look at the picture you see faith, or hope, or glory. That's art."
The trouble here is that "you" are a 21st century individual, laden with cultural baggage. If "I" look at the second painting of a mountain, and don't see faith, or hope, or glory, is it not art? What if I don't see it, but you do? What if we see something the artist didn't "mean" to put there? What if, two thousand years from now, people see art in our non-art, and non-art in our art? Was it ever really art? I visited an art museum where one of the pieces was a huge mound of candy, meant to represent love and death. I would not have known that if not for the brochure, but I still thought it was kinda neat.
It's probably come out by now, by inference, that I'm a modernist. I'll take Rothko over Watteau any day of the week. I don't think a lot of it says "boo" about anything, but I still think it's art. (Some people think it does mean something, speaks to some...thing or other. I think they're nuts, but I don't care.)
Herewith, my definition, which may send Yehuda to a hospital:
Something is "art" if its creator says it is.
I'm using "creator" here somewhat loosely, so as to mean to include Duchamp nailing a urinal to the wall.
I think "meaning"--along with beauty, value, even function--is so culturally slippery as to not advance the definition.
Now...the interesting part of my definition is that art only exists because no artist believes me. Why would someone call something "art" if all it meant was a new label, otherwise empty of meaning?
The point, then, is that underneath "my" definition is a huge welter of definitions, which everyone has--generally subconsicously--which animates our attitude towards art and artists. I have one, but it's not enormously strong. I say I have "art" in my apartment; it consists of a few ceramic pieces and abstract canvases. I purchased them not because they were "art" but because I think them beautiful and they give me pleasure to own and look at. If Yehuda were to come by Springfield--who knows why, but bear with me--and declare them to be not-art, my artistic worldview would not be shattered. Art is created to appeal to a marketplace for art, which has certain expectations and ways to appreciate it.
Are games art, then? I've never heard of a game designer try to claim one is. Given my definition, I wouldn't say that "games" are art, in general. That said, people evaluate games in much the same way they evaluate art. We like both to make us feel something--typically good. We speak of "elegance" in both. We talk of how they represent reality, or not. (Even in the "substance" of the games--"These logistics rules are bogus," for example.) There are significant differences, however--art generally doesn't have multiple patrons in competition with each other, or against the art. (No reason art couldn't, though. But it'd be pretty experimental.) Part of this--as suggested in the parenthetical--may just be our cultural expectations of art; a century from now, we might be more willing to think of art as a potentially competitive activity.
I suppose I've come across as a relativist here, but that's not my intention. For one thing, I've tried to define art in such a way to make it not relative to the observer's frame of reference. Nor am I saying that "all art is created equal in worth," although I would say that the ultimate arbiter of whether a piece of art is good or bad rests with the observer. (Just as you shouldn't think a game you like is bad just because the average BGG rating is a 5.7 rather than a 7.5.)
Another question. Yehuda, in summing up, says:
"Some games are good art, when they are original and provide the player with a deep perspective on essential truths. An example of this, in my opinion, would be Go.">
I'm curious what perspective on which essential truths Go might impart. I have enough trouble trying to count out ladders without dwelling on what Go is telling me about the difference between men and women. I think Go is beautiful, elegant, has deep structure, and twenty-two other wonderful things, but I'm not sure what one could learn from Go other than how to play Go.
This may just be me. My appreciation of a lot of things is essentially aesthetic. I like poetry, for the most part (but not exclusively) for how it sounds, the beauty of its imagery; I like art for the "taste receptors" it excites in me, and so on. I've been enjoying the latest Gathering CD, "Home," immensely although I couldn't tell you three words of the lyrics of any given track. (I'm like that for an awful lot of my CD collection.) As my Tajiki professor said, during one of the class's many, many digressions on literature: "If I wanted philosophy, I'd read philosophy."
1400 words is plenty right now, especially since there's another topic I'm interested in...
