Friday, October 29, 2021

art versus Art & the organicism of industry

A month or two back, a very smart friend asked me in an email if I believed comics can be art. 

Naturally, I showed him Punisher 2099.

(June 1994)

Beautiful. It's poetry, is what this is.

At some point I got sick of asking myself whether video games could be or always have been art, what qualifies Super Mario Bros. (1985) as art (if it is art) and what disqualifies Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude (1992) from being art (if it isn't art), if a basic but economical and ingeniously designed game like Ms. Pac-Man (1982) has more artistic value than a beautiful, evocative, poetic, and utterly muddled game like Chrono Cross (1999), et cetera, et cetera. The partial solution I arrived at was to refrain from asking the "art" question at all.