I think video games can be art, and it's ridiculous to think that they can't be. But to understand why you have to understand how games compare to other mediums like film, photography, painting, etc....
Cowboy
Everything you discribed is related to entertainment not exactly art.
There is escapism in art too, but art need ideas, thoughts, concepts and feelings...
Which many video games have. You need ideas, thoughts, concepts and feelings to create an artificial living world. Far more than a painting needs.
And why do you separate entertainment from art? Doesn't art offer entertainment? Didn't michelangelo's statues offer ornament to the city square or at the churches? Didn't Beethoven's music offered entertainment? Doesn't architecture offer a pleasure to our senses? Doesn't a book offer the same thing? This whole skewing of what is called art started when new mediums started to appear. Photography, cinema and now video games are gaining more and more power over the traditional mediums. But a photo is not less beautiful than a painting, a movie or video game is not less deep and immersive than a book.
Everything you discribed is related to entertainment not exactly art.
There is escapism in art too, but art need ideas, thoughts, concepts and feelings...
Which many video games have. You need ideas, thoughts, concepts and feelings to create an artificial living world. Far more than a painting needs.
And why do you separate entertainment from art? Doesn't art offer entertainment? Didn't michelangelo's statues offer ornament to the city square or at the churches? Didn't Beethoven's music offered entertainment? Doesn't architecture offer a pleasure to our senses? Doesn't a book offer the same thing? This whole skewing of what is called art started when new mediums started to appear. Photography, cinema and now video games are gaining more and more power over the traditional mediums. But a photo is not less beautiful than a painting, a movie or video game is not less deep and immersive than a book.
I never said Art can't be entertaining or Art can't be beautiful but Art doesn't need any of those details to be expressive. Der ring des nibelungen is very entertaining and it is a masterpiece of Art.
While games and "hollywoodian" cinema need to entertain to be accessible.
I think you didn't understand what I ment by "need ideas, thoughts, concepts and feelings ". I am not talking about creative ideas but the union of experiences, filosophies and original ideas where there is no need to entertain or be accessible.
As I said before, those ideas expressed in a painting, composition, photography related to pure art are much more than you see at first glance (from the music of Prokofiev, to the fine art of Ivan Aivazovsky, to the Dodecafonia expressed in Arrigo Barnabe works to the expressive caveman painting), the ideas you mentioned about an "atificial living world" are related to ratinal skills to build a functional system.
Yes, a "world" in a videogame will need a bit of sensibility and artistic style to look interesting, but this world is a funcional system accessible to consumers in first place. If you get a nice illustration and use it in a functional t-shirt, the t-shirt will not be a Piece of Art, it doesn't matter how complex is to made this "t-shirt" but even with art on it, the t-shirt it not a piece of Art.
You said a photo is not less beautiful than a painting, but beauty is relative in Art since the Romantism, powerful mediums are much more related to accessible productions that express marketing, entertainment and fast sentimentalism than deep human thoughts or art movements. Of course a Photography can be Art, it doesn't need to be functional, it can express a deep experience and ideas without the need to be acessible, to be a mass product, we can't say the same about games.
The Photography and Cinema that are gaining more powerful today are not the art photography or the art cinema, on the contrary.
You said a videogame is not "less deep" than a book. Well, what book are you talking about? There are religious books, filosophical books and pure entertainment books. If you take a William Blake, Victor Hugo or Nelson Rodrigues book and analize how they were signifcative for their time, social thoughts and art movement you can say they are Pieces of Art, and yes games are less deep than that, especially because they need to sell they need to be functional. Take those books with the model Fabio in the cover, you know and the author kow those books need to entertain, they are made to make people happy, they are made to be accessible, to sell, just like videogames that are expensive to make.
Immersion doesn't mean anything, a person could be scared with a Von Stuck or Schiele painting and never understand the reason behind the images and be immersed with the image of a cute bear in a chocolate box. Someone could watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and and fell asleep but be immersed with Transformers and everyone in the production of this movie know they produced an entertainment piece and not Art.
Edit
Not every painting and illustration is Art, a painting can be just a beautiful ornament.
Not every movie is Art, most of popular cinema productions are entertainment mass products (and there is nothing wrong with that).
Not every photography is Art, a photography can be just a object of remembrance, a piece of marketing etc.
Not every book is Art...a book can be many things.
This is why I don't agree with the argument that videogames can never be art, but mainstream Videogames today and in the past are entertainment functional products with a bit of art sensibility in it (even the most artistic games like Syberia) and they NEED to sell... They are not a piece or pure Art.
And remember, it is not like Kojima are making games, pop directors are making accessible mass movies and photographers are taking marketing photos and saying they are making pure Art , they are not. People just want to call what is beautiful to them or what they like as Art, is nothing more than self affirmation on the consumers side.
Edit 2
You said "This whole skewing of what is called art started when new mediums started to appear"... you are wrong, even before there was a separation between fine Art related to a line of thoughts, folklore expressions, ornaments and pure entertainment creations and one doesn't make the other higher or lesser, just different concepts and different purposes.
You said "This whole skewing of what is called art started when new mediums started to appear"... you are wrong, even before there was a separation between fine Art related to a line of thoughts, folklore expressions, ornaments and pure entertainment creations and one doesn't make the other higher or lesser, just different concepts and different purposes.
Maybe my ignorance is showing, but I've always thought it was about higher/lesser - you strive for the higher to free yourself from your vile and vulgar instincts. Man is a beast, and can only become human by studying and acquiring culture. The unwashed masses are indeed lesser, because they reject this culture and refuse to better themselves.
In more recent times, this distinction cannot really be maintained as the borders have become so blurry, and there's too much going on to really keep the map updated. But even though you may say that "art" and "entertainment" are just different concepts, people will still perceive the higher/lesser-distinction and balk at what they - not unreasonably - see as elitism. Some old-timers (like Ebert?) are sticking to their guns, though - maybe not because they think they can ever win this battle, but because it feels good to stand up for what you believe in sometimes.
Doesn't video game development involve concept art, 3D modeling and story-telling/writing? Technically put this way, a video game is a conglomeration of art. If you cannot call video games art, the same can be said for any drawing, form of writing or any other media that utilize 3d modeling.
With any of these forms, I can admire ones work as any and interpret its roles and meaning in different ways. What more is there to meet in this criteria of art? Does it have to exist then die off and be appreciated hundreds of years later?
This is absolute ridiculousness and I agree, this is Ebert's big troll bait. If he denies video game as a form of art, he's denying many other things as being art as well.
Man so tired of those aged art critics telling us what art is. I bet this exact same argument was presented when movies became a popular form of entertainment, as well as novels.
For all the usage of High Art/ Low Art/Fine Art and just general veneration of any form of Art that posters percieve as being deserving of a capital A (their own perception being of course as paramount as Ebert's is to him), there's a point being missed.
How can we know what High Art is without wading through masses of lesser stuff? How can Ebert on the basis of a few games shown in an presentation (some of which were dubious looking to say the least) outright deny the possibility that games can be an art form? People have mentioned Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, and to my mind these are perfect examples of games qua art. They are beautiful, compelling, affecting and cohesively meld all the media that goes into them into a sum greater than its parts. There are multi-media exhibits in just about every art-museum you could mention, people like Jenny Holzer have made a career from questioning the definition of "Art" and using new media to provoke discussion, to subvert familiar forms into something darker, something deeper, and something that is ultimately "more" than the medium and the message on their own.
Holzer is without doubt, an artist. You can look at Mondiran or Rothko and say "blah blah, lines of colour, blah", but if you've stood in the Tate, in a room full of Rothko's work, you'd know that the "blah blah" reaction is impossible when you are faced with the paintings themselves - I saw this happen with a friend of mine who grumbled at being dragged to the exhibition, then stood rooted to the spot and didn't want to leave the room.
Saw David Lynch's exhibition in Paris a couple of years back, and there was a looping, eerie soundtrack echoing through the museum, it added to the atmosphere to the extent that it made some of his work harder to look at, it recast even the simplest images as something malevolent. A play on the senses, a deepeing of the experience, a way of forcing a change in perspective.
You can argue all day long that games contain too much of a mixture of art-forms to stand alone as art, that the music and graphics, the story and the gameplay all taken together amount to "too much" to qualify as art. To my mind all of those things matter, all of them, poperly done, can combine to transcend the medium. That is my own personal definition of art (apologies, but I'm averse to capitalising it), something that transcends the medium in which it is created, making a painted canvas something that is experiential and affecting rather than just eye-candy. Just about every medium/mixtrure of media in the right hands and with the right vision can be art. Games are in no way excluded form that.
Originally posted by Shiperzz Anyone who is under the impression that video games can't be art just hasn't played AoC. Seriously, play it in high quality and check out some of the armour and scenery. It really is a work of art.
When they say 'video games can't be art', they weren't talking about the artwork.
Anyone who is under the impression that video games can't be art just hasn't played AoC. Seriously, play it in high quality and check out some of the armour and scenery. It really is a work of art.
When they say 'video games can't be art', they weren't talking about the artwork.
Yep, and i wish ppl would bother to read the thread before they post their examples of "games that are art".
What the player is actually doing in most of the games that were mentioned (if not all):
- Run, jump, kill and collect stuff.
- Solve some puzzles.
- Highlight: Decide which answer to give to an NPC, which has a minimal impact on what happens.
So... where do you find meaning in any of this? What did it make you think about, what did you learn, how did it change your life? Why is important that you experienced the whole thing as a game, and not a movie?
And I guess i should point it out once again: I'm referring to the actual gameplay and interaction, not a tacked-on story or pretty graphics.
Necroing this to say suck it Ebert. Smithsonian Institution is putting on a video game art exhibit. For those of you that don't know, it is the largest museum chain in the U.S.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
Necroing this to say suck it Ebert. Smithsonian Institution is putting on a video game art exhibit. For those of you that don't know, it is the largest museum chain in the U.S.
I commented on the thread re: his 'apology' too. His apology was not genuine by any stretch. He is probably the best troll ever with over 4000 responses to this 1st post on the subject.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
Art tends to be defined by the times. I doubt Leonardo da Vinci would consider abstract paintings as art. Simply because of the way art tended to be thought of at the time.
I don't consider horse scribbles to be art, but some people do o.O
I will say this much, like movies, not all games are art, many are made just for profit. Of course for some people there's still a debate that film can be art.
Roger Ebert's apolgy was,"Sorry I said it, because I can't concretely prove or disprove my stance." Honestly that's a pretty pitiful apology. I call it pitiful because he still thinks that way, but he's not willing to stand up for it.
Though to be fair art, like religion is open for debate, everyone has their own thoughts and beliefs and they don't always intertwine.
I don't consider horse scribbles to be art, but some people do o.O
I will say this much, like movies, not all games are art, many are made just for profit. Of course for some people there's still a debate that film can be art.
I heartily disagree with you here and I think you are much on the same page as Ebert. Ebert's crucial flaw is saying "X" is not art, when he really means "X" is not art that I like."
There is a lot of art that I don't like, Jackson Pollock comes to mind, but by any dictionary or common usage definition, it is art.
EDIT: However, I suppose that are some movies (Pr0n for e.g.) and some video games, where the authors never attempted to make them artistic and were concerned only about mechanics.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
I don't consider horse scribbles to be art, but some people do o.O
I will say this much, like movies, not all games are art, many are made just for profit. Of course for some people there's still a debate that film can be art.
I heartily disagree with you here and I think you are much on the same page as Ebert. Ebert's crucial flaw is saying "X" is not art, when he really means "X" is not art that I like."
There is a lot of art that I don't like, Jackson Pollock comes to mind, but by any dictionary or common usage definition, it is art.
EDIT: However, I suppose that are some movies (Pr0n for e.g.) and some video games, where the authors never attempted to make them artistic and were concerned only about mechanics.
I don't consider horse scribbles to be art, but some people do o.O
I will say this much, like movies, not all games are art, many are made just for profit. Of course for some people there's still a debate that film can be art.
I heartily disagree with you here and I think you are much on the same page as Ebert. Ebert's crucial flaw is saying "X" is not art, when he really means "X" is not art that I like."
There is a lot of art that I don't like, Jackson Pollock comes to mind, but by any dictionary or common usage definition, it is art.
EDIT: However, I suppose that are some movies (Pr0n for e.g.) and some video games, where the authors never attempted to make them artistic and were concerned only about mechanics.
American Pie, Transformers, or Scary Movie? not art. Forest Gump, Shawshank, District 9? tends to be thought of as art.
edit: What I ment by horse scribbles, was "paintings" done by a horse. Not to say a really crappy drawing of a horse lol
I only saw transformers of those. I did not like the movie, but the movie had people working on CGI, set design, etc. Not art that I like but ipso facto = art. Inherent in all subjective definitions of art is that if someone intends it to be art it is art, even if crap.
And this all is further bolstered by the fact that the Smithsonian American Art Museum is putting up a lot of voting for ancient crap console games...as art.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
I only saw transformers of those. I did not like the movie, but the movie had people working on CGI, set design, etc. Not art that I like but ipso facto = art. Inherent in all subjective definitions of art is that if someone intends it to be art it is art, even if crap.
And this all is further bolstered by the fact that the Smithsonian American Art Museum is putting up a lot of voting for ancient crap console games...as art.
That'd be like calling a B2 bomber art because someone decided to paint a lady or shark on it.
The art of a movie is usually defined as an emotional or intellectual story. Shindler's List has no art in it, but it is art itself.
I liked Transformers, but I wouldn't consider it art. Transformers has CG art in it, but fails as art as a whole because it wasn't put out with art intent. It was put out to nestalgia and big robot explosion money. Both of which I like.
Like you said, intent makes something art. Difference between pr0n and erotic art, is a fine line of intent.
Comments
As someone once said;
" I may not know art but I know what I like." Today, that's all that matters.
Pulp Fiction is considered a work of art. And it's a film, Ebert is a film critic.
It doesn't have any pretty pictures. But it does say something about the human condition.
I think an MMO can be art like Pulp Fiction. How can you do good story telling in an MMO?
I don't know if I'd want to play an artsy MMO.
Dragon Age Origins is about the artiest RPG around. It has a very good story. But it's a solo player game and you can do things like change history.
Fallout 3 is arty too.
With MMOs, at least todays MMOs there are too many restrictions on the story.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
Which many video games have. You need ideas, thoughts, concepts and feelings to create an artificial living world. Far more than a painting needs.
And why do you separate entertainment from art? Doesn't art offer entertainment? Didn't michelangelo's statues offer ornament to the city square or at the churches? Didn't Beethoven's music offered entertainment? Doesn't architecture offer a pleasure to our senses? Doesn't a book offer the same thing? This whole skewing of what is called art started when new mediums started to appear. Photography, cinema and now video games are gaining more and more power over the traditional mediums. But a photo is not less beautiful than a painting, a movie or video game is not less deep and immersive than a book.
I never said Art can't be entertaining or Art can't be beautiful but Art doesn't need any of those details to be expressive. Der ring des nibelungen is very entertaining and it is a masterpiece of Art.
While games and "hollywoodian" cinema need to entertain to be accessible.
I think you didn't understand what I ment by "need ideas, thoughts, concepts and feelings ". I am not talking about creative ideas but the union of experiences, filosophies and original ideas where there is no need to entertain or be accessible.
As I said before, those ideas expressed in a painting, composition, photography related to pure art are much more than you see at first glance (from the music of Prokofiev, to the fine art of Ivan Aivazovsky, to the Dodecafonia expressed in Arrigo Barnabe works to the expressive caveman painting), the ideas you mentioned about an "atificial living world" are related to ratinal skills to build a functional system.
Yes, a "world" in a videogame will need a bit of sensibility and artistic style to look interesting, but this world is a funcional system accessible to consumers in first place. If you get a nice illustration and use it in a functional t-shirt, the t-shirt will not be a Piece of Art, it doesn't matter how complex is to made this "t-shirt" but even with art on it, the t-shirt it not a piece of Art.
You said a photo is not less beautiful than a painting, but beauty is relative in Art since the Romantism, powerful mediums are much more related to accessible productions that express marketing, entertainment and fast sentimentalism than deep human thoughts or art movements. Of course a Photography can be Art, it doesn't need to be functional, it can express a deep experience and ideas without the need to be acessible, to be a mass product, we can't say the same about games.
The Photography and Cinema that are gaining more powerful today are not the art photography or the art cinema, on the contrary.
You said a videogame is not "less deep" than a book. Well, what book are you talking about? There are religious books, filosophical books and pure entertainment books. If you take a William Blake, Victor Hugo or Nelson Rodrigues book and analize how they were signifcative for their time, social thoughts and art movement you can say they are Pieces of Art, and yes games are less deep than that, especially because they need to sell they need to be functional. Take those books with the model Fabio in the cover, you know and the author kow those books need to entertain, they are made to make people happy, they are made to be accessible, to sell, just like videogames that are expensive to make.
Immersion doesn't mean anything, a person could be scared with a Von Stuck or Schiele painting and never understand the reason behind the images and be immersed with the image of a cute bear in a chocolate box. Someone could watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and and fell asleep but be immersed with Transformers and everyone in the production of this movie know they produced an entertainment piece and not Art.
Edit
Not every painting and illustration is Art, a painting can be just a beautiful ornament.
Not every movie is Art, most of popular cinema productions are entertainment mass products (and there is nothing wrong with that).
Not every photography is Art, a photography can be just a object of remembrance, a piece of marketing etc.
Not every book is Art...a book can be many things.
This is why I don't agree with the argument that videogames can never be art, but mainstream Videogames today and in the past are entertainment functional products with a bit of art sensibility in it (even the most artistic games like Syberia) and they NEED to sell... They are not a piece or pure Art.
And remember, it is not like Kojima are making games, pop directors are making accessible mass movies and photographers are taking marketing photos and saying they are making pure Art , they are not. People just want to call what is beautiful to them or what they like as Art, is nothing more than self affirmation on the consumers side.
Edit 2
You said "This whole skewing of what is called art started when new mediums started to appear"... you are wrong, even before there was a separation between fine Art related to a line of thoughts, folklore expressions, ornaments and pure entertainment creations and one doesn't make the other higher or lesser, just different concepts and different purposes.
Maybe my ignorance is showing, but I've always thought it was about higher/lesser - you strive for the higher to free yourself from your vile and vulgar instincts. Man is a beast, and can only become human by studying and acquiring culture. The unwashed masses are indeed lesser, because they reject this culture and refuse to better themselves.
In more recent times, this distinction cannot really be maintained as the borders have become so blurry, and there's too much going on to really keep the map updated. But even though you may say that "art" and "entertainment" are just different concepts, people will still perceive the higher/lesser-distinction and balk at what they - not unreasonably - see as elitism. Some old-timers (like Ebert?) are sticking to their guns, though - maybe not because they think they can ever win this battle, but because it feels good to stand up for what you believe in sometimes.
Doesn't video game development involve concept art, 3D modeling and story-telling/writing? Technically put this way, a video game is a conglomeration of art. If you cannot call video games art, the same can be said for any drawing, form of writing or any other media that utilize 3d modeling.
With any of these forms, I can admire ones work as any and interpret its roles and meaning in different ways. What more is there to meet in this criteria of art? Does it have to exist then die off and be appreciated hundreds of years later?
This is absolute ridiculousness and I agree, this is Ebert's big troll bait. If he denies video game as a form of art, he's denying many other things as being art as well.
Man so tired of those aged art critics telling us what art is. I bet this exact same argument was presented when movies became a popular form of entertainment, as well as novels.
For all the usage of High Art/ Low Art/Fine Art and just general veneration of any form of Art that posters percieve as being deserving of a capital A (their own perception being of course as paramount as Ebert's is to him), there's a point being missed.
How can we know what High Art is without wading through masses of lesser stuff? How can Ebert on the basis of a few games shown in an presentation (some of which were dubious looking to say the least) outright deny the possibility that games can be an art form? People have mentioned Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, and to my mind these are perfect examples of games qua art. They are beautiful, compelling, affecting and cohesively meld all the media that goes into them into a sum greater than its parts. There are multi-media exhibits in just about every art-museum you could mention, people like Jenny Holzer have made a career from questioning the definition of "Art" and using new media to provoke discussion, to subvert familiar forms into something darker, something deeper, and something that is ultimately "more" than the medium and the message on their own.
Holzer is without doubt, an artist. You can look at Mondiran or Rothko and say "blah blah, lines of colour, blah", but if you've stood in the Tate, in a room full of Rothko's work, you'd know that the "blah blah" reaction is impossible when you are faced with the paintings themselves - I saw this happen with a friend of mine who grumbled at being dragged to the exhibition, then stood rooted to the spot and didn't want to leave the room.
Saw David Lynch's exhibition in Paris a couple of years back, and there was a looping, eerie soundtrack echoing through the museum, it added to the atmosphere to the extent that it made some of his work harder to look at, it recast even the simplest images as something malevolent. A play on the senses, a deepeing of the experience, a way of forcing a change in perspective.
You can argue all day long that games contain too much of a mixture of art-forms to stand alone as art, that the music and graphics, the story and the gameplay all taken together amount to "too much" to qualify as art. To my mind all of those things matter, all of them, poperly done, can combine to transcend the medium. That is my own personal definition of art (apologies, but I'm averse to capitalising it), something that transcends the medium in which it is created, making a painted canvas something that is experiential and affecting rather than just eye-candy. Just about every medium/mixtrure of media in the right hands and with the right vision can be art. Games are in no way excluded form that.
When they say 'video games can't be art', they weren't talking about the artwork.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
Yep, and i wish ppl would bother to read the thread before they post their examples of "games that are art".
What the player is actually doing in most of the games that were mentioned (if not all):
- Run, jump, kill and collect stuff.
- Solve some puzzles.
- Highlight: Decide which answer to give to an NPC, which has a minimal impact on what happens.
So... where do you find meaning in any of this? What did it make you think about, what did you learn, how did it change your life? Why is important that you experienced the whole thing as a game, and not a movie?
And I guess i should point it out once again: I'm referring to the actual gameplay and interaction, not a tacked-on story or pretty graphics.
Hype train -> Reality
Necroing this to say suck it Ebert. Smithsonian Institution is putting on a video game art exhibit. For those of you that don't know, it is the largest museum chain in the U.S.
http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2012/games/
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
might as well also link his apology then, to be fair
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/07/okay_kids_play_on_my_lawn.html
I commented on the thread re: his 'apology' too. His apology was not genuine by any stretch. He is probably the best troll ever with over 4000 responses to this 1st post on the subject.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
I disagree simply because art is subjective and consequently ANYTHING can be art.
Art tends to be defined by the times. I doubt Leonardo da Vinci would consider abstract paintings as art. Simply because of the way art tended to be thought of at the time.
I don't consider horse scribbles to be art, but some people do o.O
I will say this much, like movies, not all games are art, many are made just for profit. Of course for some people there's still a debate that film can be art.
Roger Ebert's apolgy was,"Sorry I said it, because I can't concretely prove or disprove my stance." Honestly that's a pretty pitiful apology. I call it pitiful because he still thinks that way, but he's not willing to stand up for it.
Though to be fair art, like religion is open for debate, everyone has their own thoughts and beliefs and they don't always intertwine.
I heartily disagree with you here and I think you are much on the same page as Ebert. Ebert's crucial flaw is saying "X" is not art, when he really means "X" is not art that I like."
There is a lot of art that I don't like, Jackson Pollock comes to mind, but by any dictionary or common usage definition, it is art.
EDIT: However, I suppose that are some movies (Pr0n for e.g.) and some video games, where the authors never attempted to make them artistic and were concerned only about mechanics.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
Your edit is exactly my point.
Psyconauts? art. Madden #19? not art.
American Pie, Transformers, or Scary Movie? not art. Forest Gump, Shawshank, District 9? tends to be thought of as art.
edit: What I ment by horse scribbles, was "paintings" done by a horse. Not to say a really crappy drawing of a horse lol
I only saw transformers of those. I did not like the movie, but the movie had people working on CGI, set design, etc. Not art that I like but ipso facto = art. Inherent in all subjective definitions of art is that if someone intends it to be art it is art, even if crap.
And this all is further bolstered by the fact that the Smithsonian American Art Museum is putting up a lot of voting for ancient crap console games...as art.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
That'd be like calling a B2 bomber art because someone decided to paint a lady or shark on it.
The art of a movie is usually defined as an emotional or intellectual story. Shindler's List has no art in it, but it is art itself.
I liked Transformers, but I wouldn't consider it art. Transformers has CG art in it, but fails as art as a whole because it wasn't put out with art intent. It was put out to nestalgia and big robot explosion money. Both of which I like.
Like you said, intent makes something art. Difference between pr0n and erotic art, is a fine line of intent.