Roger Ebert Backs Down On Video Games As Art 265
Jhyrryl writes "Roger Ebert has again posted about video games. It's an apology of sorts, for having publicly said that games are not art. He wrote, 'I should not have written that entry without being more familiar with the actual experience of video games. ... My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times.'"
He Did No Such Thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so.
Then he goes on to say that there were 4,547 comments left with ~300 supporting his view. He claims it's longer than Anna Karenina, David Copperfield and The Brothers Karamazov.
... and of his dismissal of this he says, "I was too damned bull-headed."
... permanently.
What he said is that he shouldn't have said it. That he should have been more informed of video games before making that statement. But, in the end, he's still saying that video games can never be art. Ebert is bull headed. I've seen the footage where he breaks down into a fight [youtube.com] with Siskel. A decent argument [youtube.com] is one thing but Ebert's harder to sway than a dead mule. So he made a statement. And what you're going to get is the definition of the word 'art.' He even admits Sony bent over backwards to give him the chance to play a beautiful non-combat oriented game
Roger Ebert is a brilliant man. However, as oft occurs with brilliance, he will not admit a mistake, a misstep or that he was flat out wrong. You've squeezed all you can squeeze out of him which is basically that he regrets saying it but he still believes it is true.
We call movies art. We call literature art. We call silence art [wikipedia.org]. We call a single color art [wikipedia.org]. Hell, we even call graffiti art [wikipedia.org]. The crudest symbols our kind could muster [wikipedia.org] gets to be called art. But, goddammit, for some strange reason the second you express yourself through a series of complexly arrange ones and zeros interacting with the viewer, you can't call it art.
Mr. Ebert, I may be far younger than you and I may be far less informed than you but I cannot understand what possesses you to reserve the word art from being applied to games. I can only take solace in knowing that future generations will see it differently
Re:Critics (Score:5, Insightful)
As i like to say: Those who can, do. Those who can't, criticize.
And as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit."
Re:Early failure leads to later triumph (Score:5, Insightful)
To say that they can "never" be art is either to make a stupid and almost certainly wrong prediction about the technological future, or to attempt to impose a definition of "art" so special-purpose that the statement "video games can never be art" is basically just a tautology masquerading as an insight.
Still a jerk (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:He Did No Such Thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Roger Ebert is a brilliant man. However, as oft occurs with brilliance, he will not admit a mistake, a misstep or that he was flat out wrong. You've squeezed all you can squeeze out of him which is basically that he regrets saying it but he still believes it is true.
Yup. This isn't Ebert 'backing down', this is Ebert taking his ball and going home. He just says "I still think I'm right, but I'm not going to argue any more", which is a fantastic strategy in that he can't lose an argument he doesn't have.
That said, I don't particularly care what he thinks (never been a big fan to begin with). I know what I think, and I know what future generations will probably think. Oh well, his loss if he never plays Braid.
Art in the machine (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:He Did No Such Thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually he quite specifically, and at length admits the possibility that games may someday develop to the point where even he sees them as art. He also admits, that since he refuses to *play* any current games, his opinion is largely irrelevant. Basically he maintains the opinion that in his largely ignorant and limit experience, games he's seen are not art as he defines it. Which is a pretty fair position really.
As a gamer, there really are a vanishingly small number of games that come close to being "art". The potentially is there, and a few games come close to reaching that potential, but realistically not many. I mean how many variations of "Person with a variety of weapons shoots, blows up, or otherwise destroys various entities intent on destroying the world" have there been in the last 20 years?
For a gamer's view of why video games have such a hard time being taken seriously, I rather like this [cracked.com] article on Cracked.com. Put simply, until games companies accept that they are no longer producing exclusively for 17 year olds, and until we gamers start refusing to accept that the vast majority of games are produced for 17 year olds games will have a hard time being seen as artistic.
Re:He Did No Such Thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, Ebert is in good company. Ten years ago when I was heavily into games, there was a (deliberately) little-known site named Planet Crap that gamers in the know and game developers often frequented, and I was on its messageboard quite a bit, and had a few discussions/debates with Charles Broussard [wikipedia.org] about games, art, division by zero, etc.
One of these debates was whether or not video games were, or could be, art. He was of the opinion that video games AREN'T art, and he was the one behind Duke Nukem.
Well, I think Duke Nukem 4ever proved him wrong; DN4's protracted absence [wikipedia.org] is most certainly art.
We call movies art. We call literature art. We call silence art. We call a single color art. Hell, we even call graffiti art. The crudest symbols our kind could muster gets to be called art.
If you want the REAL definition of art, art is what art historians call art. Silence CAN BE but is not necessarily art, and in fact usually isn't. Whether or not a single color can be art depends on the work; just painting a canvas a single color doesn't make it art. Graffiti? All art is graffiti, but not all graffiti is art.
Your kid doesn't make art. The cave paintings you linked are art in the sense that science [wikipedia.org] in the 16th century was science.
Ebert and Broussard are both wrong. Many games are, indeed, art. DN4 certainly is, and I'm sure future historians are going to agree.
Re:He Did No Such Thing (Score:3, Insightful)
He's saying "I could be wrong". For someone who forms and expresses opinions for a living, that's about the best you can expect. :)
Don't be so sure. The future has a tendency to surprise us.
And perhaps your loss if you never read one of his books or watch one of his favorite films? Or read one of my favorite graphic novels? There's a lot of great stuff out there to experience, and the fact that someone finds something other than your favorites to enrich his life (and might even find your favorites... uninteresting) doesn't make him the poorer for it.
Art is always up for debate (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:He Did No Such Thing (Score:5, Insightful)
There certainly aren't many. And surely none who have reached so many people. Eberts most important contribution is bringing serious film criticism to the masses, without watering down his scholarship.
And, he has always remained first and foremost a fan, which is always an endearing quality in a critic.
Since when did "good enough" matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when did something have to be "good enough" to be art? I think that would come as a surprise to Duchamp and the whole modern art establishment he had spawned.
For whoever doesn't know the story, the whole modern art phenomenon started in 1917 with a guy called Marcel Duchamp, who signed an urinal and sent it to an art gallery under the title "Fountain."
It was not the first of Duchamp's "readymades", basically just objects he found and signed, but otherwise didn't even make or anything. The first was a found bicycle wheel he signed and displayed under the name "Bicycle Wheel" in 1913. Sometimes he at least used funny names for them, like titling a shovel "Prelude To A Broken Arm" in 1915, others were like that Bicycle Wheel. But the urinal is what became famous and redefined art.
The funny thing is that Duchamp spells it out in interviews, some even much much later, that he just wanted to destroy "art". He found the whole establishment to be little more than a circle-jerk clique (not his exact words, but the general gist of it) and obsessed with form above and beyond anything else. He wanted to destroy it all. His urinal was supposed to convey the message, basically, "your work is worth as much as this urinal to me."
But funnily that's not what the art world understood. The art world suddenly found itself trying to imitate the unconventionalism and shock value of that urinal. And it's been in that rut ever since.
And funnily enough everyone seems to still don't get what Duchamp actually did there, even if you show them an interview where he says it himself. E.g., I remember an interview with Michael Craig where he explains that Duchamp actually wanted to show that even everyday objects can be beautiful and art. (No, he didn't.)
In the meantime we have a fine arts establishment where a stack of bricks is called art. A tent made of PVC tubes is art. A set of 4 folded and straightened sheets of paper is called art. (No, really, I've actually seen exactly and literally that in someone's private collection.) A glass of water on a shelf is art. Or a hack like Hirst can pay someone else to put a grid of random coloured dots on a rectangle, sign it and not only get it called art, but be acclaimed for it. (Here's one sample of his 300+ pictures made of dots: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/08/Hirst-LSD.jpg [wikimedia.org].) A rectangular box made of sheet metal can be called art. A flickering TV in an empty room can be called art. A crucifix in a jar of piss can be called art.
We're in a world where calling someone's work "pretty" is the most grievous insult you can get away with in front of a professor, in some arts colleges. But it is an insult and use it only if you want to make an enemy. Nowadays you don't want "pretty", you want "thought provoking", and "original", and such.
So Ebert is, what, telling me that it isn't art because it's completely unlike what he calls art? Has he checked with the aforementioned modern art establishment? Because it seems to me like that being different is exactly what would make it "art" there.
(And I've played plenty of games which fit the "thought provoking" criterion too. But then I'm the kind of guy easily provoked in that aspect. E.g., Chucky Egg provoked much thought about the struggle of the working class against the oppressor chickens.;))
Heck, probably the best example is another painting I've seen in someone's private collection. Essentially it looked like a screenshot of Tetris. No, literally. I'm not exaggerating. Yes, I know what "literally" means. I mean it. It looked not just sorta like Tetris, but exactly like a screenshot of Tetris. Well, except for the part that in actual Tetris two rows should have been removed because they were full, but obviously on the painting they hadn't been. I wonder if it was supposed to be symbolic of the unfairness of life or something ;)
So basically, let me get that straight: _that_ is art, or so I'm told, but Ebert tells me that if it were actually animated as a game of Tetris, it wouldn't be art any more? Why? It's the same image.
I replied with this: (Score:5, Insightful)
Countless works of art has been created, most of them do not measure up to Shakespeare, and a great majority of that art can't be properly compared because they are in a different medium (would you compare The David to MacBeth?). All because they can't measure up or can't be compared does not mean games are not art.
We have been trolled. We have lost. (Score:4, Insightful)
Interaction (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Critics (Score:2, Insightful)
"Those who can't teach administrate" goes a lot further towards explaining the wonderful state of our schools.
It's more than that... (Score:3, Insightful)
He's saying something much more honest, insightful, and true than he's getting credit for.
He seems to be saying that he not only could be wrong, but that he really isn't qualified to comment. He's admitting that he's not willing to get the required experience (play enough games) to be able to comment and be taken seriously. Given these two things, he's bowing out.
Now, it does seem like it took a lot to get it here. It seems he's acknowledging that he was "bull-headed" and that he's mostly writing this because of the barrage of criticism he's received. But what he's actually said is right on -- he isn't qualified to comment, and if he really wants to, he'd have to both solidly define art and play some games, which he's not prepared to do.
I don't have a problem with "backpedaling". I don't like that it took him this long, and I do wish he was a bit more explicit and humble in his wording. But he's realized exactly what he should have, given his experience, and he's said so. I wouldn't expect more.
Re:He Did No Such Thing (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean how many variations of "Person with a variety of weapons shoots, blows up, or otherwise destroys various entities intent on destroying the world" have there been in the last 20 years?
How many variations of "nude female" or "pastoral landscape" have there been in the last 100 years? Sure, not all of them are fine art, but that doesn't mean a nude or landscape can't be fine art.
Re:Since when did "good enough" matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
Heck, I'll be the first to bemoan it myself, and I thought the tone of my post would make it pretty clear that I'm not exactly a fan of modern art. But nevertheless it _is_ called art, and the vast majority of the population seems to have no problem with that. Whatever meaning the word "art" has nowadays, obviously it _does_ include stuff like a signed urinal or a flickering TV in an empty room.
Not quite sure what you mean there, so I can't comment much. I'm certainly not dismissing the idea that 99% of modern art is garbage. (And the other 1% is savagely panned by critics for not being modern enough.) But nevertheless the common meaning of the word "art" nowadays does include them.
Re:He Did No Such Thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Thomas Edison: Brilliant!
The same Thomas Edison who fought AC power distribution well beyond the point of its having been proven superior and actually successfully deployed in numerous cities?
Einstein: Brilliant!
The scientist who fought quantum mechanics to his last breath, in the face of some outstanding theoretical work to the contrary? The man who actually said "I, at any rate, am convinced that [God] does not throw dice." because he completely distrusted the statistical, seemingly random, nature of quantum physics?
These men are actually some of my heroes, and were since my childhood. But never forget, they're human, and that means they can wind up irrationally invested in their own opinions and beliefs, especially if the state of their art has moved on without them.
If "brilliant" means "mentally flexible enough to change a strongly held opinion in the face of strong evidence", very few human beings are brilliant.
Re:hurrh (Score:1, Insightful)
I rarely see movies; I refuse to see movies, and I bash them largely on the basis of the last movie I saw, "Dude, Where's My Car?" Based on my limited data set (which I refuse to expand), I can conclude that Ebert's profession is reviewing vapid nonsense that isn't art either.
Is this opinion useful to anyone else? Probably not.
Re:Since when did "good enough" matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is, now you've introduced the debate to a rather stupid issue.
Namely, the point of art is to explain something beyond what is actually there. It must invoke emotion or something, or it's just a thing.
That's why 90% of photographs aren't art, but the other 10% are. It's because 90% are trying to show the thing that was photographed, while the other 10% are trying to show how the scene made the person taking the picture feel. It's why this post isn't art, but a haiku of a much shorter length is. There's the actual meaning of the symbols, of what is represented, and then, to be art, there's another meaning on top of that.
The problem arises is that a lot of current 'art' doesn't invoke that second level. It's too obscure, or, as you said, a deliberate attempt to mock the entire process. Hell, a lot of it doesn't even have a first level, or has one that's clearly just been slapped together.
If it doesn't have two levels that the vast majority of people can distinguish, it's entirely reasonable to take a position that it's not 'art' in any meaningful sense. People don't have to enjoy, or even think it's well done, but to think something is art, they at least have to be able to say 'This is supposed to make me sad, although it doesn't really work'. Even bad art should be able to be recognizable as art, because you can see the (crappy) second level. Often current 'art' is not recognizable, or at least not recognizable to the public in general, and thus fails an 'art test'.
Of course, pretty much all games have two levels. Often not well, but they have background music, they usually have thematic lighting, etc, etc. They are art, or at least consist of 'art parts'. They don't fail the 'art test' the same way modern art fails.
Ebert, OTOH, seems to have thought they failed in some other manner, because you had to actively participate in them.
Re:Since when did "good enough" matter? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, I am aware of Ebert's argument that it's not art if you participate in any way, and basically it's such a blatant No True Scotsman fallacy, that I didn't even think it merited being addressed much.
But if anyone feels that it has to be addressed: having such choices isn't even something video-games only. E.g., since another answer mentioned Manet's Olympia, I'm reminded of another famous nude and arguably the first to present a naked woman as just a naked woman and not some Venus or such: Goya's La Maja Desnuda. (The Naked Maja.) But the funny thing is, Goya also painted an otherwise identical painting of the same woman, in the same pose, on the same bed, only clothed this time: La Maja Vestida. (The Clothed Maja.) Basically you have the choice of the same woman clothed or naked.
Granted, it's only one choice, but it's still not much less than the choices you get in, say, a Japanese dating simulator.
Would someone's getting the choice to buy one or the other (I assume it must have been offered for sale at one point or another) make it non-art? I think even Ebert isn't prepared to call Goya's paintings not art.
Re:He Did No Such Thing (Score:3, Insightful)