Image: Mat Honan

American film critic Roger Ebert has caused a stir with his latest blog “Video Games Can Never Be Art”. It has attracted over 2000 comments, many by gamers declaring that he ‘just doesn’t get it’ and passionately sticking up for their favourite ‘artform’.

Coincidentally last night I also caught the first part of the BBC 4 documentary Goldsmiths: But is it art? which similarly was concerned with what can be rightfully tagged as ‘art‘. Hot on the heels of School of Saatchi I couldn’t help but think that the programme exploited the general public’s distrust for contemporary art.

Both of these items made me think about our preoccupation with defining the cultural worth of something through this one simple and often unhelpful question. It’s a question that can generate some good discussion if the answer attempts to critically engage in the work (as demonstrated in Ebert’s piece) but if it doesn’t it just becomes an arbitrary classification floated about by critics and commentators (evident in the Goldsmiths documentary).

Often I think that it would be better to look more generally at the cultural worth of something. A quick anecdote to illustrate my point: I’ve never really had much of an appreciation for graphic novels but once found myself in a ‘cultural studies’ class where I was given a copy of an adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass. To my surprise it was quite brilliant and far more innovative and intelligent than I had expected. Whether I think graphic novels qualify as art because of this is beside the point, but I did gain a new appreciation from the experience and that seems far more important.

The BBC documentary team behind the Goldsmiths programme might have posed the question ‘is it art?’ but it doesn’t appear that they thought much about the value of asking that question in the first place.