Intellectually Challenged

Before I post anything frighteningly intellectual I have to say, I'm tired. I helped my sister move house sungay night. She picked me up at 7:30 and we finished by 1:30. I am a weakling and I hate the exercises so for me this was like... hellish. I still haven't recovered.

This afternoon I was reading a newspost by Tycho Brahe about whether or not video games should be considered art. Considering I'm an art student it's not unreasonable for me to be interested especially when this kind of conceptual argument is the sort of thing my uni aims to equip it's students to do. (As opposed to some others that prefer to train artists in artistic skills and let them sort that conceptual shit out for themselves - He says having never attended one of these "other" universities) In any case it happens to be a topic that I've had arguments about before.

What constitutes art? You could say that it's something you make - except that people have presented artworks they didn't make for example Duchamp (There are older examples of paintings being done by apprentices with masters only doing hands and faces or sculptures making small scale models while the carving of the actual sculpture is outsourced.) You could say it's something beautiful or aesthetically pleasing but people have made ugly artworks on purpose not to mention what is aesthetically pleasing is to subjective to be a definitive method of identification. Some dude (Art Theory? What's that?) said that "everything is art" which is pretty nice in some ways - Congratulations on being a work of art! - but isn't particularly workable in the grand scheme of things.

My own view has always been that for something to be a work of art there must be some intention for it to be a work of art. This could be in an objects creation but doesn't have to be. Duchamp placed found objects in a gallery space and these became artworks by his intention. But as Tycho points out, in this postmodern age, intention means dick. It's all about interpretation now. If you see something as a work of art who's to tell you it's not?

So as far as I'm concerned you're all free to read video games as art or comics or movies or scribble. But please, don't be surprised if you don't read any critical analysis of "Halo as a postmodern text" written here.