Can Video Games Be Art?

Roger Ebert said no, at great length, on his blog fairly recently. But we're not so sure about that. For one thing, as he freely admits, "never" is a dangerous word to throw around, and then there's the question of what constitutes "art," something we're not prepared to get into here. Ebert contrasts "art" and "games" fairly well:

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

You could say, however, that this is cheating. If a video game ceases to have a clear objective and becomes an immersive experience, then he no longer defines it as a game, which means it can be art (according to his definition), but many contemporary games offer exactly that kind of experience. What is the point, really, of something like Animal Crossing? And many people spend time just tooling around in Grand Theft Auto's rich environments, wreaking havoc rather than bothering to solve puzzles and complete tasks. Even if a game theoretically has an objective, you don't have to play it that way, so does Ebert rely on the game's designers or the people who play it to make his determination.

And then there's Deluxx Fluxx, the New York (and previously London) art installation highlighted on the New York Times's "The Moment" blog and pictured above. Is it about the games, or is it about the experience? And does it count as video game art?

Don't touch the art!

Most seasoned museum-goers have experienced the cautionary warning from a museum attendant after leaning in too close to scrutinize a painting or sculpture, and visitors would never dream of blatantly touching a work of art on display. These understood standards of behavior don’t seem to resonate with all viewers of performance art. The Museum of Modern Art’s “Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present,” on view through May 31, employs a number of nude performers to reenact pieces performed by Abramovic and others in the 1970s.

Having live beings on display as opposed to inanimate objects brings up interesting problems and issues. These performers are works of art for a short span of time and then return to being people. Their protection in the museum setting does not stem from the traditional fear of damage and need for preservation but from concerns of harassment, molestation and damage to their images. Violations by visitors range from inappropriate touching to photography of nude performers (which is forbidden) and stalking on social media such as Facebook. Performers are also subjected to degrading or inaccurate comments about their physical appearance. These interactions and accidents such as stumbling into participants or stepping on their feet usually cannot be prevented.

Despite the risks and discomfort, the performers are often exhilarated by their experiences and have, overall, a positive view of their involvement. An article in the New York Times provides accounts from performers who say “there are plenty of magical moments with strangers, including those who innocently touch bare skin, whisper ‘thank you’ or do improvisational little dances that have the usually stoic performers cracking up.”

One performer, Gary Lai said, “You get immediate feedback. You’re causing a definite reaction in the audience, different from the typical reaction you want in a regular stage performance. This is more about human nature.”

Photograph: Suzanne DeChillo,The New York Times

No touching!

Apparently, museum patrons need reminding of the same rules most strip-club patrons already know to be the case.

Because we can't get enough

Fans of “Lord Love You: Works by R.A. Miller from the Mullis Collection” and “Amazing Grace: Self-Taught Artists from the Mullis Collection,” this article from the New York Times about another self-taught artists, Vollis Simpson, may be of interest.

Simpson, 91, of Lucama, N.C., is a retired farm-equipment repairman turned artist. Simpson received no formal training for his creations; he attended school through the 11th grade and then went on to join the U.S. Army Air Corps. It is easy to see how his sculptures evolved from his repair business, which, in turn seems to have grown from a childhood talent for fixing things that served him through his time in the armed services, after the war and now in his artistic expression.

At first Simpson did not consider what he was doing “art.” His son, Leonard Simpson, said, “He just did it for enjoyment.” Now his works are selling for thousands of dollars, and he is receiving recognition for his place in the genre of “American homemade art by self-taught practitioners.”

Rebecca Alban Hoffberger is one of Simpson’s supporters. Back in the mid-1990s she was forming the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, and she decided that Simpson was the perfect artist to supply the museum with its signature piece. That piece is called “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” and it is a 55-foot tall, 45-foot wide, 3-ton whirligig.

Simpson’s whirligigs bring back memories of the works of R.A. Miller, whose work was on exhibition last year at the Lyndon House Arts Center in a show organized by the Georgia Museum of Art.

Photos: Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times

Position at GMOA

GMOA has received approval to hire for a part-time temporary clerical position that will assist our curators and deputy director. To find out more, go to UGA's iPAWS page and click on "search and apply for staff positions." From there, click on "search postings," on the left and then select "021-Georgia Museum of Art" from the drop-down search box. We'll have news soon, too, about our Pierre Daura graduate intern search, so keep checking back here for more on that, and we're beginning to look for undergraduate interns for the summer semester, including May (the application for the latter is here). Please get in touch with the department that piques your interest for more information and avert your eyes from this New York Times story that questions unpaid internships (it's mostly about for-profit employers, which we are decidedly not)!

In-Room Entertainment

Should you happen to be staying at one of the four locations of the Standard Hotel (New York, Hollywood, L.A. and Miami), the New York Times' culture blog The Moment/T Magazine has a post up about a new option on the TVs in their rooms. The arts organization Creative Time has selected an array of art videos that will be available for your viewing pleasure, including Marilyn Minter's "Green Pink Caviar," which supplied the image above and (intentionally or un-) kind of can't help but remind us of this Internet phenomenon. Video art is one of the easiest media to get out and about in the world, and we think this idea is marvelous.

Art Restoration

We joked yesterday on Twitter about hoping patrons try to keep their balance in the museum, despite the fact that there's no "you break it, you buy it" rule in place, but yesterday's New York Times has a great in-depth look at what, exactly, may have to be done to restore the early Picasso painting that was recently damaged at the Met. It's considerably more complicated than the layperson may realize, especially in cases where, as the article points out, multiple paintings may exist on the same canvas. Conservators and art restorers can do phenomenal things, but it's a rather involved process. Slate has different but equally interested details of some of what may be involved.

New Media Gives the Public a Role

The New York Times ran a great article yesterday about specific ways museums are using new media to interact with their patrons. As the author puts it, "While museums have been experimenting with the Web for years, these projects have often consisted of little more than an exhibit photo gallery or online guestbook. In recent years, however, the rise of social media has given Web users the technological wherewithal to play a more active role in shaping the direction of museum collections." The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which isn't yet open has a Virtual Shtetl project to help collect photographs, videos and audio recordings "related to life in 1,300 towns with Jewish populations before and after World War II." The Smithsonian provides another example:

Last February the Luce Foundation Center of the Smithsonian American Art Museum invited Web users to help decide which paintings should be displayed in its visible storage facility, typically frequented by art historians and other scholars. Museum staff created a Flickr group called Fill the Gap, which allows users to suggest items to fill the bare wall spaces left when paintings are removed for conservation or lent to other institutions.

Fill the Gap represents a tiny but potentially precedent-setting step for the Smithsonian as a whole, where a larger conversation is starting to percolate around the changing role of curators in a Web 2.0 world. That institution recently began an ambitious initiative called the Smithsonian Commons to develop technologies and licensing agreements that would let visitors download, share and remix the museum’s vast collection of public domain assets. Using the new tools, Web users should be able to annotate images, create personalized views of the collection and export fully licensed images for use on their own Web sites or elsewhere.

The Smithsonian’s new-media director, Michael Edson, described the initiative as a step in the institution’s larger mission to shift “from an authority-centric broadcast platform to one that recognizes the importance of distributive knowledge creation.”

“Distributive knowledge creation” can be a tricky business. While social-media platforms may open up possibilities for user participation, they also carry the risk of promoting bad information and questionable judgments and of eroding the authority of institutional curators. In this sense museums are grappling with the same technological conundrum as other cultural institutions, like universities, publishers and newspapers: how to reconcile institutional principles of order with the liberating impulses of electronic networks.

The rest of the article focuses on the last question, and while there are disagreements and the right method to handle shifting nexuses of power is still evolving, the discussion is worth reading.

Take Your Vitamins, Artists

If you haven't been appreciated yet, maybe you just haven't been alive long enough. The New York Times has an article on 94-year-old Carmen Herrera (with slideshow), who didn't sell a painting until she was 89 despite the fact that she's been creating them for six decades. So take care of yourselves, but "don’t be abstemious!" as Herrera says... The other entertaining part of the article is a brief discussion of what we assume is the work pictured above:

When pressed about what looks to some like a sensual female shape in the painting, she said: “Look, to me it was white, beautiful white, and then the white was shrieking for the green, and the little triangle created a force field. People see very sexy things — dirty minds! — but to me sex is sex, and triangles are triangles.”

Hmm...

Museum Expansions

Prompted by an article in the New York Times that declares in its headline, "In the Arts, Bigger Buildings May Not Be Better," CultureGrrl has some good thoughts on the matter, pointing out some inaccuracies and some crucial cases overlooked, as well as taking a more measured stance. Yes, many arts institutions seem to build huge structures on a whim, focusing on sexy architecture and the potential of increased tourism more than actual needs, and perhaps we're particularly sensitive to criticisms of this sort, being right smack in the middle of a building project ourselves (a desperately needed expansion!), but the article does seem like the kind of not particularly thoughtful questioning of what the journalist perceives as received wisdom. Here's the key paragraph from Rosenbaum's response on her blog:

Nevertheless, museum expansion isn't an evil to be avoided, as Robin's article seems to suggest. It just needs to be done for the right reasons and with a secure financial underpinning. That means not only knowing in advance where the necessary construction money is coming from, but also amassing the endowment funds required to cover the increased operating costs of the expanded facility. If you don't know where that money is coming from, you need to delay the project. There's nothing wrong with that.

MOMA's New Strategy

In a recent article, New York Times writer Ted Loos focuses on innovative museum projects, ingenious and revolutionary in their aim to attract more audiences but preserve older, loyal ones. In particular, Loos delves into the decisions of Ann Tempkin, chief curator of painting at the Museum of Modern Art, essentially to rearrange the sacred assembly and display of part of the modern, high modern and contemporary galleries at MOMA. For one, she got rid of frames: “frames domesticated the paintings in a way that obscured how radical they were.”

In the two years Tempkin has been in her position, she has been trying to break with the past, especially with the permanent collection. She also started exhibiting artists who didn’t make it in the official art schools—less Bauhaus, more Ordinary Art School. Some of the galleries now have more works by female artists than before. Pepe Karmel, chair of the department of art history at New York University, was first shocked by this rearranging and tweaking but finally came to terms with Tempkin’s ordering and even admitted that he was impressed with her inventiveness. He likes that visitors can come back and see something different, but still visit their favorite pieces. Some of the galleries remained untouched. Room 2 on floor 5 is the only place in the world where one can see the development of Cubism all together, so that room will stay intact. All she is doing, Tempkin says, is rearranging furniture and striving for a rhythm of change. Hard times have fallen upon museums, but those that try innovative display systems might have a better chance of thriving.

Reasonable Middle Ground

We don't know if you've been following all the weighing in over the past week or so with regard to the New Museum's upcoming exhibition drawn from Dakis Joannou's collection, sparked by Tyler Green (who has all of the relevant links, including to the recent front-page New York Times story on the subject), but Richard Lacayo, in Time, has a very measured response to all of it (Green even points out that he agrees with Lacayo), including the following important point:

I've written about these single collector shows before and as I said then I don't see the point of an absolutist position against them. Especially for smaller museums and museums outside the biggest cites, collector shows are a way to offer visitors a look at work the museum could never otherwise offer them. Obviously, the same could be said for a show in a larger museum. But those institutions, which are more likely to be on the circuit for big traveling shows, have other options for bringing in works from outside.

Lamar Dodd Alumni: A Hit in New York Art Scene

Also, two LDSOA alumni, Javier Morales and John Michael Boling, have been mentioned in The New York Times for being actively involved in technological art referred to as glitch art or datamoshing.

A global movement is hacking, subverting and critiquing the hardware, software, content, visuals — even the philosophy of wired world…In 2007, the gallery gave Paul B. Davis, one of Beige’s members, his first solo show. It has since held several shows for Mr. Davis as well as for other technology artists, including the New York duo John Michael Boling and Javier Morales and the Californian Eric Fensler. “There is a new regime of aesthetics emerging out of technological,” Mr. Pieroni said. Datamoshing, also know as compression aesthetics, is an example: a recently developed form of glitch art, it manipulates compression frames, giving an overly pixilated appearance, he said.

The NYTimes on Authenticity: Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo scholars and collectors around the world have jumped into debate right after the publication of a new art book containing never-before-seen Kahlo paintings and diaries. Some Kahlo experts-- most notably relatives of Kahlo’s-- have arrived on the stage to reverse the publishing process as they believe the pieces are counterfeit.

Carlos Noyola, the art and antiques dealer who acquired the collection, says he has proved that it is. There are 1,200 items, worth a fortune if they were Kahlo’s, everything from stuffed hummingbirds, like the one she wears as a necklace in a 1940 self-portrait, to a small notebook of private thoughts and sexually explicit drawings

The Princeton Architectural Press, which published and distributed the art book, will continue to sell it, as the objects are still under study.

While such discrepancies do not prove anything, they do raise significant questions. But Mr. Noyola wonders why the experts dismiss the opinions of those he consulted. He said that he had become the target of a group of powerful interests who wanted to keep their monopoly over Kahlo’s name and the right to study, sell and show her works. “They are slandering us,” he said. “They are terrified that this book will validate the work.”


Click here to access the New York Times article

Museum Issues

Inside Higher Ed has a good article titled "Avoiding the Next Brandeis." It calls attention to the ACUMG petition we informed you of a while back, which you can still sign if it slipped your mind, and gets a lot of good material from David Alan Robertson, president of ACUMG.

He noted that campus museums are in an unusual situation in that many of them receive substantial funds from non-college sources and yet report to colleges. At Northwestern, he said, about 35 percent of the annual budget for the museum comes from the university, another 18 percent from endowment funds designated for the museum, and the rest is from a variety of source -- gifts, grants and so forth. Much of the outside funding comes with goals relating to the public, and there can be "a tension between the museums' public responsibilities and their university responsibilities," he said.

The new task force has already held meetings with two of the regional accrediting agencies for higher education, trying to impress upon those bodies that museums shouldn't be viewed as extras, but as "teaching institutions and research institutions" that are central, Robertson said.

Another strategy being discussed is encouraging colleges to define the financial exigency plans -- or what they would do in a severe financial crisis -- and to make the case that museums should not be the first institutions to be closed, Robertson said.

In less serious news, you may also want to check out this New York Times article on the spread of the verb "curate."

For many who adopt the term, or bestow it on others, “it’s an innocent form of self-inflation,” said John H. McWhorter, a linguist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “You’re implying that there is some similarity between what you do and what someone with an advanced degree who works at a museum does.”

We actually try not to use "curate" as a verb--it's a pet peeve of our director's.

Follow-up

Here's an interesting follow-up to the Van Meegeren story our intern John blogged about this summer: a painting formerly identified as a Van Meegeren forgery has now been reattributed as a genuine 17th-century work. It'll be interesting to see what Errol Morris weighs in with.

A Case for Extensive Wall Labels

In the September 14 issue of the New Yorker, Anthony Lane writes about the photographer Robert Frank's The Americans, now on view again at the Met, as this New York Times article covers. It's a wonderful article in its own right. Despite the fact that Lane is primarily a film critic, he's easily able to venture outside that narrow field to write about literature, art and more, and he delves deep into the ways different groups have viewed Frank's work as well as his own take it (documentary, not polemical or explicitly political), but in the course of doing so, he explains why wall labels should cover more ground rather than less:

What pulls me into the picture is the fuzz of its focus and the murk of its grain; Frank was using Kodak Tri-X, a famously tolerant film, which only proves how low the light was on the assembly line. Sometimes, to judge by the contacts, he switched to Plus-X, a slower emulsion, but nobody in the catalogue can tell us whether this was a deliberate choice, or a simple matter of loading what came to hand. Again, what lens did he fit to his Leica for the River Rouge shot? Much of “The Americans,” I would guess, was shot on 50-mm. or wider, but the way in which the Ford workers are stacked up tight suggests a short telephoto lens; if museumgoers are informed, by a small plaque, that a painting was executed in egg tempera, or oil on poplar, why should lovers of photographs be left in the dark? These things matter, whenever battle is joined over art. It matters, for instance, that Jasper Johns’s “Flag,” on which he labored from 1954 to 1955, was painted in oil and encaustic, a wax-based medium: first, because it allowed him to embed barely visible scraps of newsprint beneath the pigment, like messages from the journalistic beyond, and, second, because the rough stickiness of the surface—so uncomfortable a contrast to the dry nap of an actual Stars and Stripes—added to people’s genuine unease about whether he was paying due homage or making insubordinate sport.

Media are especially easy to overlook in a book, where, no matter how good a photograph and scan are, texture tends to blur, but they are indeed a crucial aspect of any work of art and well worth examining.

Staying Afloat as an Artist Today

LentSpace is a new project going on in New York which developing companies are lending their unfinished project sites to artists and public arts foundations. The artists benefit from the public exposure, and the lenders can make a little bit of money from the renting an otherwise developmentally stagnant space. Eric Konigsberg of the New York Times writes:

The lot is on loan for about three years from developers who had hoped to build there by now — the project will be called LentSpace… the real estate market undoubtedly contributed to “the generous length of time” of the loan

It seems as if many artists and curators have been taking initiatives to help revitalize the arts while contributing to economic betterment. By helping themselves to cheaper venues, not only do they perpetuate the public art culture in New York, but they also help businesses make a little bit of money while their production is on hiatus due to low funds. Similar symbiotic relationships are developing around the world, assuaging the economic pains with smart lending. Earlier  this month, I wrote about a similar New York Times’ article reporting on recuperating businesses lending out spaces to artists and curators while waiting for a buying offer to come along. The artists benefits from commercial exposure and cheap rent, while the company lending space benefit from attention, which might lead to a purchase.

Attribution

Is it or isn't it? An article in the New York Times this morning discusses the Metropolitan Museum of Art's decision that the painting pictured above really is by the hand of Diego Velázquez, but blogger CultureGrrl, who we read every day, has her own strong opinions about the seesaw back and forth. So what do you think?

Edit: Ah-ha. It's another attribution issue she questions. We just didn't follow the link to this page on a hypothetical Michelangelo. Still, as we're currently wrapping up the long, long project that is the three-volume "Corpus of Early Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections: The South," attribution is on our minds. Many of the entries deal with the differing opinions of scholars about just who painted a given image, as with the Lowe Art Museum's "The Savior," currently attributed to Benedetto Diana but previously to an artist of the Venetian school (ca. 1500) and to Girolamo Mocetto.

Thinking Inside the Box

This New York Times article about English artists making use of vacant commercial space for temporary galleries is attracting a lot of attention (it's one of the most popular articles on the site), and it makes us wonder if something similar could work in Athens, Ga. What to do with the empty big-box stores has been a perennial issue of debate in the Classic City, as this article from the Athens Banner-Herald in January shows (the photo's from it). One space on the ground floor of the Bottleworks development on Prince has already been used by ATHICA to show art, presumably while the owners are looking for a tenant, so why couldn't similar installations work elsewhere? Why couldn't the space that was Steve and Barry's house a temporary gallery devoted to large works of art? Admittedly, many of the vacant commercial spaces in Athens aren't in central areas of town, which would seem to make them less appealing for this kind of purpose, but what other good are they doing sitting empty?