[-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?

[Lichty, Patrick]

I agree with Domenico in saying that the discussion of art is a dead end.  When I was in graduate school, we had the "what is art?" conversation.
I said, "what sort of art?", to which we agreed, "Contermporary".

The consensus that I led along with Greg Little was that the "art" subculturelives in a communal social structure that exists as a cloud of affine conversation around lists, blogs, online communities, festivals, etc.  It's basically a huge cofee shop conversation that's generally welcoming as long as you have something to give or are generally knowledgeable about the subject or are willing to learn.  New media is an overlapping Venn Diadgam field, as is Social Practice, Psychogeography, much like Higgin's Intermedia chart.

Now, the "art world" is as Fabio Paris once told me is a "hard animal".  It's a cybernetic system which is based on contemporary (and I love Agamben's discussion of what this is) subjects that are relatively part of fashionable taste, articulationof those ideas, and legitimation by critics, galleries, museums, and connoisseurship with its own star system, just like music, movies, etc.  "Art" as such lives on a very fenced in paddock, and talks in very constrained lines, and in my opinion, is rather boring.

What I love is when the usually unacceptables get curated in by a forward-thinking/playful curator or there are interventions.  I think this is where it gets fun.



Patrick Lichty
Asst. Professor
Dept of Interactive Arts & Media
Columbia College Chicago
916/1000 S. Wabash Ave #104
Chicago, IL USA
"Never mind the logic of the thing..." - H. S. Thompson