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Is pop culture art? Or is it pop culture? Again, all art is part of culture, but not all culture is part of art.
You speak of brilliance, which makes me think we are on the same page. Even if we disagree as to which games are more artistic or complex, we agree that some games can be more artistic or complex, therein admitting of a standard by which to judge and hold what is produced in the medium accountable.
I'm less concerned with anointing any game "art" than I am with defending the existance of a standard by which we can all agree to argue about where videogames succeed and where they fail.
The nihilistic abyss I fear is one wherein people say with regard to videogames "to each his/her own," and as a result no one stands up and holds the art from to account; praising it when it achieves something, but even more importantly criticizing it when it does not."
Is my piece rife with call backs to classical conceptions of rhetoric? Please point them out.
“that’s ultimately all it takes to be art.”
Why is no justification needed? Why does calling it that make it so?
“The U.S. government once ratified a document that listed blacks at 3/5ths of another human being—and people thought that sounded about right.”
Now it doesn’t so things have clearly changed. Are you denying the possibility of progress on these issues? Because clearly there has been progress, at least narrowly conceived.
“That may seem tangential, but the point is simple: We once had a legal document that devalued the humanity of an entire culture—and many of those injustices continued into the modern era. We’re not going to agree on what is or isn’t art, and any consensus, no matter how warm it makes us feel in our tummies, is going to revoke or ratify the art or works of another.”
And this seems the whole point. We HAVE made moral progress, maybe not fast enough, but it’s happening. If we look at other disputes in other fields, what’s to think that progress is any less possible there? Pointing out disagreement doesn’t prove that’s in any way necessary. Even with regard to the question of “what is art” there are a handful of schools of thought, with some in better repute than others, as well as a lively, and rightfully so, fringe of other views. And while this landscape of ideas is bound to change, the fact that it exists in no way indicates there can’t be, at the very least, better and worse answers to these questions.
“But hey, even if I’m wrong about my definition, and Battleship the Movie is somehow art too—I’m not going to argue for or against it by using the voice of scholars that would have mistaken a film for sorcery.”
Have I done this somewhere? Quotes? I’m not sure what you are trying to engage with, but it doesn’t seem to be the above essay."
