http://www.paulcallaghan.net/blog/2010/05/02/synecdoche-games-control-subtext-and-art/ Writing; Games; Culture. All opinions are my own. Thu, 24 Nov 2011 06:00:34 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://www.paulcallaghan.net/blog/2010/05/02/synecdoche-games-control-subtext-and-art/comment-page-1/#comment-3852 Freeplay 2010 « DuncanWritingEditingPublishing Sun, 29 Aug 2010 00:42:34 +0000 http://www.paulcallaghan.net/?p=492#comment-3852 [...] related links: Grassisleena’s report, an exhaustive wrap-up from Critical Damage, some deep thoughts from festival director Paul Callaghan’s blog and a great piece on Sleep is Death. There. [...] [...] related links: Grassisleena’s report, an exhaustive wrap-up from Critical Damage, some deep thoughts from festival director Paul Callaghan’s blog and a great piece on Sleep is Death. There. [...]

]]> http://www.paulcallaghan.net/blog/2010/05/02/synecdoche-games-control-subtext-and-art/comment-page-1/#comment-3546 Pykk Tue, 01 Jun 2010 04:59:26 +0000 http://www.paulcallaghan.net/?p=492#comment-3546 When I saw that post of his I laughed and thought of Theodor Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, writing, in the context of art: "The moment a limit is posited, it is overstepped and that against which the limit was established is absorbed." [translated by R. Hullot-Kentor] The moment you ask whether games can be art or not, the moment you introduce that question of "Can they?" into the minds of artists and people who love art, the more inevitable you make their eventual absorption into the category of art. Does it seem reasonable to picture a sea called 'art' running up to the border of a continent called 'computer games' and stopping there forever, kept magically at bay by some component of a game that makes it utterly superior to, or alien from, everything else that was once not part of the art world and now is (West African clay heads, Aboriginal dot paintings, abstract expressionists, knitting, a urinal), isolating it in a new category of its own? Games have qualities that are theirs alone, but do those qualities have the power to repel artists? I don't think so. When I saw that post of his I laughed and thought of Theodor Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, writing, in the context of art: “The moment a limit is posited, it is overstepped and that against which the limit was established is absorbed.” [translated by R. Hullot-Kentor] The moment you ask whether games can be art or not, the moment you introduce that question of “Can they?” into the minds of artists and people who love art, the more inevitable you make their eventual absorption into the category of art. Does it seem reasonable to picture a sea called ‘art’ running up to the border of a continent called ‘computer games’ and stopping there forever, kept magically at bay by some component of a game that makes it utterly superior to, or alien from, everything else that was once not part of the art world and now is (West African clay heads, Aboriginal dot paintings, abstract expressionists, knitting, a urinal), isolating it in a new category of its own? Games have qualities that are theirs alone, but do those qualities have the power to repel artists? I don’t think so.

]]> http://www.paulcallaghan.net/blog/2010/05/02/synecdoche-games-control-subtext-and-art/comment-page-1/#comment-3139 The Ebert Response | The Game Critique Mon, 17 May 2010 06:02:24 +0000 http://www.paulcallaghan.net/?p=492#comment-3139 [...] Post #2 Ben sent me. Art, Critical Responses, Roger Ebert [...] [...] Post #2 Ben sent me. Art, Critical Responses, Roger Ebert [...]

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