Video Games As Art, No Matter What Roger Ebert Says

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Roger Ebert conceded last year that he'd been wrong to say that video games can never be art. As much as Ebert's a Wise Old Man of popular culture, his admission of defeat, or at least neutrality, isn't as important for the artistic recognition of video games as two things that happened this week. First, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that it is turning its Arts on Radio and Television grants program into an Arts in Media program that will include digital games. If you're a game designer, you're eligible for $10,000-$200,000 to develop, produce, and distribute your project if you can convince a grants committee by September 1 that the game you're working on can be considered a work of art. It'll be interesting to see where that standard ends up being set in this process.

And second, the Smithsonian American Art Museum finished the voting to see which games will be included in its Art of Video Games exhibit that opens next year. As a Star Wars extended universe nerd, I'm glad to see one of Michael Stackpole's projects make it in there. But I'm more glad the exhibit is happening at all. Much like with fashion, which has occupied a sort of bastard position in the art world, a museum show on video games codifies what the rest of us know, that they can be art as much as Michaelangelo's ceilings, Kara Walker's cutouts, or the amazing and eccentric folk art altar SAAM also has on display. Now that they're getting a show, what will be important is not that game are displayed but how they're displayed. As Jenna Sauers points out in a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Alexander McQueen exhibit, with fashion "Elaborate styling, stupid wigs, and busy show design in these kinds of exhibitions is not only unnecessary, it's disrespectful to both the clothing and its audience — because it sends the message that a dress, unlike a painting, can only be understood with significant curatorial intervention."

It's not that without government support, people won't make games, or people won't acknowledge that they're art. But institutional support for that consensus matters. Broadening the definition of art makes it easier for people to see that even if they're not going to the opera or museums, art is a major part of their lives, that support for the arts is important.