Category Archives: Blog

Isaac Butler on A Good Prometheus, SPOILED

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Yesterday I goaded Isaac Butler into writing a SPOILER-FILLED review of Prometheus in comments. I’m going to put it here, because I feel strongly that it is the mission of HU to SPOIL all of everyone’s art forever. So, you know, you’ve been warned. (And if you want a non-spoilery review, check out Alex Buchet’s from yesterday.

Okay, here’s Isaac Butler. Spoilers ho.

Aw screw it, I can’t sleep.

Okay, this is going to be ALL SPOILERS.

Keeping in mind that on a visual and directorial level, I was quite taken with the film, I think that it really doesn’t work on a screenplay level. The screenplay suffers from many problems, but the four biggest are that it’s predictable, that it sinks under the weight of demands outside of telling of a story, that it crams too much content in for its running length and that it ultimately doesn’t makes sense logically.

I don’t care whether Earth being seeded is plausible or not. On almost all things, I’ll grant them their basic premise, and I actually thought that, were the film longer (or a mini-series) this would provoke some interesting religious and philosophical inquiry, the way Battlestar Galactica sometimes was capable of as it pitted genocidal monotheistic robots again polytheistic somewhat more sympathetic humans.

And I know that Alex acknowledges above that there are logical problems etc. with the film, so this is less any kind of counterargument to this post than simply an explanation of why the screenplay-level problems sank the film for this particular viewer. This was one of those instances where I enjoyed the ride but almost immediately afterward, the film fell apart.

Anyway… Let’s start with the logical problems. The biggest one is the film’s premise. The premise of the film is that the aliens who seeded Earth left behind a map to lead us to them. But the twist at the end is that Noomi Rapace et al did not discover their homeworld, but rather discovered essentially a moon-sized Trinity site, a place where they designed and developed extermination weapons that were meant to wipe out all mankind.

So why– back when they liked us– did they leave us a map to their weapons testing facility? I say “back when they liked us” because the film makes it clear the downed alien spacecraft were going to fly to Earth to deliver their payload of spongy penis and vagina monsters. So they didn’t need us to come there to exterminate us. They were going to come to us.

So why does the map go there? The film doesn’t even bother with attempting an answer, it just kind of hopes that you don’t realize that happened. At the end, Noomi and Michael Fassbender’s Head set a course for wherever the aliens came from, so we have it double-confirmed at the end that this planet isn’t their home world. This one particularly rankles me because it’s fixable with like two lines of dialogue “Why did the map lead up to the testing site?” “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”

That’s the biggest of the film’s story-level problems, but it’s not the only one. Logan Marshall Green’s character chooses a horrific, painful death via flamethrower when we already know the air on the planet’s surface is toxic due to high carbon dioxide levels and would like deliver a much less painful death in under two minutes. The medi-bay that Noomi Rapace uses to remove the alien from her body is configured for a man even though it’s in a woman’s cabin. (This actually turns out to likely be bungled foreshadowing as to Guy Pearce’s presence on the ship. Bungled because we already know that he’s on the ship as we’ve seen Michael Fassbender communing with a hidden person in cybersleep and Guy Pearce’s Mr. Weyland is the only other character in the entire film and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put two and two together. )

Then there’s the characters who don’t behave the way people actually behave. Noomi Rapace’s lack of ever telling anyone “Oh hey, this expedition we’re taking right now is being lead by a robot who is probably not on our side, given that whole trying to force me into hypersleep with an alien fetus monster inside of me.”

Next are the extra-screenplay demands. The film is both a sequel and, clearly, an anchor-film for a new franchise within the Alien Universe. As the third act happens, the film gets taken over by these demands. In particular, there’s a total fan service moment when the chair-gun-thing finally appears and this– rather than anything having to do with character or story– is treated as the emotional climax of the film. The entire staging of the final major action sequence is done so that the ship will be in the right position to be investigated by Sigorney Weaver et al to investigate it in a few years. At the same time, all human and android presence in the ship or on the planet has to be eliminated as well. At the same time, no summer blockbuster can be self-contained unless you’re Christopher Nolan and so it has to have an open ending.

But one of the major problems with the screenplay is simply that it’s got too much content for its running time. I’m all with Alex Buchet on finding the thematic content of the film really interesting. But there just isn’t enough time to explore it, develop character, set up the scares and the action and move the plot along. As a result, everything gets short-changed.

The final problem is the film’s predictability. This is partially not the writers’ fault. After all, the trailer gives away that an enemy spaceship eventually takes off out of the ruin. But there isn’t a single story beat that you can’t figure out from about five minutes into the film. I found myself relieved when Michael Fassbender was going to put Noomi Rapace into cold storage because I thought for a moment they were going to pull a “Psycho” and take out the headlining actor partway through the film. It turned out this wasn’t the case.

I love Ridley Scott, I really do. Alien and Blade Runner are two of my favorite movies and while Gladiator is a totally ridiculous and campy swords and sandals epic… well… so are all the other swords and sandals epics. I’ve enjoyed his minor efforts like Matchstick Men, his competent hackwork like American Gangster and I think The Duelists and even Legend are pretty aces. And the work he does here is admirable. The terrifying segments really are terrifying. There’s some really interesting integration of visual design and theme. Michael Fassbender is wonderful.

But sadly the screenplay just doesn’t work beyond getting you from point A to point B. Compared to Hampton Fancher’s Blade Runner screenplay or Dan O’Bannon’s Alien screenplay it’s just junk. A far better version of this movie was made a few years ago. It was called “Sunshine,” and Danny Boyle directed it and it bombed hard in the States.

Okay, this was a bit rambly but as I said it’s two in the morning over here and I’ve taken some Tylenol PM. Cheers all…

Rorschach, Superstar

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A bit back, Sean Michael Robinson talked about a production of the Diary of Anne Frank that interpolated the music of the Carpenters. Sean noted that the production was wonderful, moving, inventive…and also illegal.

Anne Frank’s words, however, and the translation of her words on which we were relying for much of our text, were a different matter, as was the authorized play (Diary of Anne Frank), which provided much of the rest of the text. All of these elements are still under copyright, and will continue to be so for several years. (In fact, copyright in the theater is more restrictive than in almost any other field. You can, after all, read a book or listen to an album any way that you wish once you’ve purchased a copy–but to publicly perform a play one must conform to a dizzying array of limitations set out by the author or the author’s agents–usually, that every word of the play will be performed, i.e. no cuts or insertions without permission, and that the appearance, gender and even staging etc will honor the stated intentions of the author regarding the script and contract.)

Sean’s prescription — with which I agree, is that we need to rethink our insanely restrictive copyright laws in order to make it possible for people to reimagine older works, and create new ones, without having their asses sued off.

This does bring up a rather uncomfortable issue for me, though. Mainly…if I think that art is built out of other art, and that the copyright laws should reflect that, then what exactly is the deal with my recent article on Slate, where I discuss my deep disgust with DC’s Before Watchmen? After all, as Jones pointed out with his usual logician’s obsessiveness, Alan Moore has ripped off everybody from C.C. Beck to H.G. Wells, and probably other people whose names begin with A, X, Y, and Z as well. If I think high school kids should be able to mash up Anne Frank and the Carpenters, and I think that Alan Moore should be able to mash up Dorothy and Wendy and Alice (which is probably not the best word choice there, but onward), then what exactly is the problem with having DC put out a new! Watchmen! prequel! — or for that matter, a Watchmen toaster? Isn’t there some moral inconsistency here?

Possibly. But let me try to think through the differences.

— First, it’s useful to remember the purpose of copyright. According to our Constitution, the purpose is not to protect creators. The purpose is to encourage art. Copyright is supposed to give creators a monopoly on their own works so that they will have a financial incentive to create those works in the first place. If as soon as you write something, everybody else can publish it under their name, then you’re going to limit the people who will write to hobbyists who don’t need the money. (Not that there’s anything wrong with hobbyists, he says as he writes for free on his blog. The point is just that ideally you want to encourage other kinds of writing as well.)

However. Giving someone an infinite monopoly on their work also limits creation. It makes it hard to comment on older works, or to remix them, or to use them as inspiration for newer works. That’s why copyright is limited; so that works will eventually enter the public domain where they can be used by other artists with no strings attached to make things like League of Extraordinary Gentleman…or what have you.

The point is that there’s no particular contradiction between arguing that, on the one hand, Alan Moore is being screwed, or that, on the other hand, basing a work on Bram Stoker — or even on C.C. Beck — is okay. I’m personally in favor of a copyright of about 50 years from date of publication — which would mean Watchmen would still be under copyright, but that a lot of works Moore has lifted from would not be. A fifty year copyright would also put Anne Frank out of copyright…though not the Carpenters.

— Second, even when works are under copyright, I think there needs to be a vigorous fair use provision. Such provisions can include, for example, flat fees for using music (like the Carpenters) without giving the creator veto power over how or where that music is used (which, yes, would mean that idiotic republican presidential candidates could use Bruce Springsteen’s songs if they wanted even if the Boss objected. I think that’s a reasonable price to pay for a vigorous public domain, personally.) I also think that in situations where there is no profit, as in Harry Potter fan fiction, for example, most bets should be off.

Soooo…again, how is all of this different than DC publishing Before Watchmen…or than Marvel using Jack Kirby’s characters (which are certainly on the verge of my 50 year timetable) without paying him?

Which brings us to my last point.

—The issue with DC and Marvel is not that they are creating new work using somebody else’s characters. As I’ve suggested, artists do such things all the time; it’s a big part of how art is made. Without it, we wouldn’t have Shakespeare, much less Alan Moore.

So the issue with DC and Marvel isn’t use of the characters. The issue is, specifically, lousy business practices. Moore and Kirby never got to exploit the copyright for the characters they created; instead, Marvel and DC used crappy contacts, evil industry practices, and disproportions of power to gain the benefits of the law for themselves. So it’s not that Marvel and DC shouldn’t use those characters. It’s that they shouldn’t be able to reap a monopoly windfall for using those characters based on dubious business practices.

And, in a bitter but by no means isolated irony, the excessively insane draconian provisions of our copyright law mean that the creators are actually much more extensively screwed than they would be if copyright were reasonable. If copyright were only 50 years, Marvel would be in the process of losing its rights to its properties one by one — which would mean that anybody could make a Spider-Man movie or an Iron Man movie, which would make Marvel essentially worthless, which would mean it would go out of business — which wouldn’t benefit the Kirby family financially, of course. Still, you’d think his ghost would at least get a kick out of it.

In any case, the point is: the creators working on Before Watchmen are not despicable because they are using someone else’s art to make art, because that’s what all artists do. They’re despicable because they are knowingly helping DC exploit a monopoly that was obtained by fucking over the people who created it — and because one of those fucked over creators has verbally erected the equivalent of a picket line. Hughes, Straczynski, Cooke, et. al. are not thieves. They’re scabs. I hope that’s a comfort to them.
 

Odd Superheroine Out

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This first ran on Comixology.
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Female super-heroes can be many things: Amazon warrior, out-of-control telepath, deadly ninja assassin. But whether in swimsuit, bodysuit, fishnets or boob window, they’re almost always cheesecake.

There’s no particular mystery as to why this is. Super-hero comics are male genre literature. Guys like to look at cheesecake. QED. There are some exceptions to the rule — but they’re usually built around genre exceptions as well. For example, the Claremont/Byrne X-Men made some effort to appeal to YA girl readers through the character of Kitty Pryde. Thus, Kitty got to mostly wear civies, rather than the skintight and/or improbably cut-out costumes that were the lot of her distaff teammates. (Not that the internets are above a certain amount of Kitty Pryde cheesecake of course.)

Still, there are a few inexplicable blips. Foremost among them, perhaps, is a minor DC early-80s super-hero who first appeard in Mike W. Barr and Jim Aparo’s Batman and the Outsiders. She was called Katana, and when Aparo drew her she looked, improbably, like this.

That’s a remarkably un-fetishy costume. She’s fully covered, and her blouse isn’t especially tight or revealing: no boob window here. Compared to her teammate Halo, who gets a standard curve-emphasizing form-fitting single piece, Katana seems distinctively to not have gotten dressed with the male reader in mind.

Throughout the series, too, Katana is basically never placed in cheesecake poses or situations. When she gets captured and tied up, for example, there’s none of the bondage imagery you get throughout Wonder Woman’s history. Instead, Katana (or Tatsu, since she’s out of costume in this sequence) is wearing a dowdy hospital gown. She does get stripped down later…but Jim Aparo makes sure we see almost nothing; just a head and shoulders shot from a bizarre ceiling angle, making her look like a twelve-year old boy.

Part of this might be chalked up to Aparo’s particular style; he’s always been more interested in panel composition and shading than in cheesecake for its own sake. But writer Mike W. Barr also played a part in the character’s resolute unsexiness. Katana played the part in the Outsiders that Wolverine played in the X-Men; she’s the bloodthirsty killer with the sharp pointy object, always wanting to dash into danger and slaughter something. While men like Wolverine who play that role are generally just aggressive, the standard script is for women of that type to also be sexually aggressive — a la Elektra, or really anyone else that Frank Miller has ever written. The fact that Katana is Japanese only makes the clichés all the more inevitable; she should be a dragon lady.

But she isn’t. True, she is, somewhat wearisomely, a samurai, since any superhero from Japan has to be either a samurai or a ninja. But she isn’t at all a sexual fantasy. On the contrary, Barr writes her not as a sexual predator, but as a mother. Her tragic backstory involved the death of her husband and two kids, and her closest relationship in the Outsiders is with the amnesiac, innocent Halo, who Katana treats very much as a daughter — going so far as to become her legal guardian. At least through the first couple of years of stories, Katana, still grieving her husband, has no romantic interest at all. In fact, in the two-part origin revelation where Katana’s husband comes back from the dead, Katana actually re-kills him herself in order to prevent him from hurting Halo. The ridiculous vicissitudes of the plot aren’t really worth describing in detail; the point is, Barr goes out of his way to make sure the reader understands that Katana’s primary emotional commitment is to her surrogate daughter first; any men in her life are decidedly secondary.

So, both narratively and visually, Katana deliberately denied the fanboys the flirty cheesecake they wanted. How did they respond?

As near as I can tell, they liked her fine. As everyone from Han Solo to Wolverine has demonstrated, a tinge of amorality does wonders for a hero’s popularity; Katana’s willingness to occasionally kill people certainly didn’t hurt her standing.In fact, in the letter columns, she quickly became a favorite figure; Mike W. Barr would often answer mail as Katana, threatening to show various letter-hacks their own lungs and/or other bits. Here, for example, she’s responding to Mr. Peckham, a correspondent who initially thought Katana was too much like Elektra, but then provisionally changed his mind.

“Dear Michael:
Tell Mr. Peckham he may rest easy, at least “for a few more issues.” When he arrives at a final verdict as to my role as Katana, I will arrive at a final verdict as to the disposition of his internal organs. Perhaps the next two issues will influence him favorably. In the meantime, it might be wise to lay in a supply of paper towels and sponges. Yours, Tatsu.”

Despite the positive fan reaction, though, Katana never became a major DC heroine. This was probably mostly due to the fact Barr’s letter-column joshing was by far the best writing he did for the series. His actual scripts were watered down versions of the Wolfman/Perez watered down Clarmeont/Byrne X-Men — and, of course, the Claremont/Byrne X-Men were not unwatery to begin with. Batman and the Outsiders was an uninspired teen book melodrama, stuffed with unmemorable villain teams, stiff character interactions, and final page plot twists that didn’t so much twist as sit there blinking feebly in the wan revelatory half-light. Jim Aparo’s art is always worth looking at…but eventually he backed out for a number of less engaging artists, and then there was really no reason to think about the series, much less read it. The Showcase reprint volume is a massive testament to the fact that DC is willing to reprint any damn thing in a Showcase reprint volume.

Katana still pops up on occasion — often with a costume redesigned for slightly more va-va-voom. Stil, that hasn’t made her a marquee character. On the contrary, and counterintuitively, she was most successful at the beginning of her run, when, perhaps through an accidental oversight, she looked nothing like a pin-up.

Al Rio reimagines Katana as fanboy wet dream.

Utilitarian Review 6/2/12

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At HU

I talk about the mundane blankness of Jason’s Low Moon

I review the autobiography of country great Charlie Louvin.

Ng Suat Tong on comics adaptations of Lovecraft.

Kailyn Kent on Jeff Gabel and gallery cartoonists.

Kurt Buseik on why why Batman is not Green Lantern.

Robert Stanley Martin on Tolstoy and heroes.

Richard Cook on the Smithsonian’s video games as art exhibit.

I talk about Roy Lichtenstein and the heartbreak of appropriaton.

An R&B, blues, and soul download mix.

 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Slate I explain why Alan Moore is right to be pissed.

At Slate’s double X blog I talk about the first queer superhero not Alan Scott.

At Splice I talk about the surprisingly positive results of Obama’s support for gay marriage.

At Splice I’m disappointed with the new Squarepusher album.

&mbsp;
Other Links

Nice Tucker Carlson hit job by Alex Pareene.

The Reader with some quality snark in the direction of their new owners.

Jones on comics’ crappy coloring.

Charles Reece on Mad Men.

Et tu, Tucker?

Nice Edie Fake cover.

The NYT on Anthony Heilbut’s great new book on (among other things) gospel and gayness in the black church.
 

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: You Don’t Know Nothing About Love

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A soul, blues and R&B mix. Download You Don’t Know Nothing About Love.

1. Anna — Arthur Alexander
2. That’s the Way Love Is — Bobby “Blue” Bland
3. Country Style — Little Milton
4. Take Out Some Insurance — Jimmy Reed
5. Don’t Wreck My Life — Wilbert Harrison
6. Tell It Like It Is — Little Willie John
7. I Apologize — Aretha Franklin
8. You Don’t Know Nothing About Love — Carl Hall
9. Can’t Stay Away — Don Covay
10. You Can’t Hold a Man — Ann Peebles
11. The Babysitter — Betty Wright
12. One More Chance — Little Johnny Taylor
13. Show Me the Way — Ben E. King
14. Ruler of My Heart — Irma Thomas
15. My Heart Cries — Etta James
16. Rainin’ In My Heart — Slim Harpo
17. She Won’t Be Like You — William Bell
18. A School For Fools — Doris Troy
19. A Man Needs A Woman — James Carr
20. You’re Still My Baby — Otis Redding
21. Let The Four Winds Blow — Fats Domino
 

The Origin of Roy Lichtenstein

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In comics circles, Roy Lichtenstein is often condemned as a no-talent snob who condescended to comics artists even as he made millions by ripping them off. R. C. Baker in a takedown from last year, for example,not only nails Lichetenstein for his knee-jerk dismissal of his sources, but even sneers at him for his compositions, claiming that Lichtenstein’s “flabby lines, blunt colors, and graceless designs are invariably less dynamic than the workaday realism of the comic pros.” Lichtenstein took the vital, outsider pulp energy of comics and flattened it out into flaccid high-brow capitalist dreck. Rather than elevating commercial product into art, he turned art into commercial product.

This criticism, obviously, doesn’t erase the high-art/low-art binary so much as it flips it. High-good/low-bad becomes high-bad/low-good. Lichtenstein may be a transformative genius or a parasitic hack, but either way he’s defined through his relationship to something else; the thing that is not high art which he is blessing or debasing.

Seeing the current Lichtenstein retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago calls that narrative into question in some interesting ways. Mainly, the show makes it clear that Lichtenstein didn’t copy pulp because it was pulp. He copied pulp because he copied everything. From his early AbEx experiments which look more like half-hearted imitations of AbEX than like the real thing; to his lifetime of imitating other high art painters from Picasso to Matisse; to a series of bizarre Chinese landscape images which include, for no apparent reason, Lichtenstein’s famous imitation Ben-Day dots; to a series of drawings of his own studio in which Lichtenstein imitates his own most famous imitations — the man was a compulsive aesthetic magpie.

Moreover, the way he treated his non-pulp sources was in many ways similar to the ways in which he treated his pulp sources. For instance, here’s his version of the Laocoon:
 

 
I’m not sure that this really comes across in the reproduction, but in the massive original, there’s a stark contrast between the flat moire patterns Lichtenstein uses in the background and the AbExy swoops of paint that define the figures. Lichtenstein also, of course, obscures the characters’ expressions and blurs the narrative action. Some of the energy and pathos of the original are retained, but only in a deadened form. The emotion is presented as thin; a few slashes of paint against a surface that asserts itself precisely as patterned, meaningless surface.

Of course, this is what happens in Lichtenstein’s comics, too. The romance and war panels are lifted out of their narratives. The larger than life emotions end up as merely transparent, flat signs of “larger than life emotions”.
 

 
Like Laocoon, the drowning victim here is abstracted from her predicament and inflated; the energy, concentrated and expanded, collapses under its own weight. The panel is just its surface, there is no Brad outside it, and the only thing to do (for good and ill) is to sink.

I think the usual way to read this is as a playful satire of authenticity; a repetition which parodies the original and mocks its melodrama. Often this is seen as a mockery of comics or pulp in particular, but pieces like Lichtenstein’s Laocoon suggest that his target is not so limited. Rather, he seems to be sneering at sincerity and vitality itself — not at melodrama per se, but at emotion. Whether low art romance comics or high art tragedy, both point to depths, and are therefore ridiculous.

I’m sure there’s some truth to that reading…but it’s not necessarily how I see what Lichtenstein’s doing. Rather, at least for me, his work is suffused not so much with contempt as with a kind of etiolated longing. Surely there’s something almost quixotic in those Ben-Day dots; the painstaking hand-crafted effort to replicate the incidental byproduct of mass production. It’s as if Lichtenstein is trying not to ridicule the melodrama, but rather to reclaim it. the replication in this reading is not playful mockery but compulsive failure. He’s trying to frame that originary energy, and is condemned to keep trying and trying until he succeeds, which he never can.

My wife, who is a Lichtenstein skeptic, commented that he’d just had one idea, and it wasn’t all that great an idea, and he’d just kept at it with a numbing regularity. There’s definitely truth to that, and you certainly can see his inability to bottle the energy he alternately/simultaneously mocks and covets as related to his own aesthetic limitations.

You can also see it, though, as part and parcel of the historical moment Lichtenstein was in…and which we’re still in, to a large extent. Late capitalism is not an ideology that cares much about origin myths. Social authority doesn’t come from the divine right of kings, but from the repetitive images of value and community that circulate endlessly without any necessary prototype. Even the Founding Fathers are little more than a subcultural marketing trope at this stage; George Washington is just a cutesy infantilized placemat distributed for fun and profit. Which, not coincindentally, is what Lichtenstein’s version of George Washington crossing the Delaware looks like.
 

 
Lichtenstein is obviously a beneficiary and an exploiter of post-modernism…but he also can be seen, perhaps, as a victim of it. Imitation isn’t necessarily flattery, but it almost always has something to do with desire. When he has one of his cartoon women declare , “Why Brad, darling, this painting is a masterpiece!” it may be a sneer at pulp’s idea of high art, but it also seems like a nostalgia for that instantly recognizable work of genius, which that character, and that comic, may believe in, and so perhaps achieve — but which Lichtenstein himself can only wish for.
 

 
It’s tempting to see Brad’s sad frowny face as self-portrait; a depiction of that distance and that distress. But of course Lichtenstein is never in his paintings. At best, he’s on the surface.
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Folks may also want to check out Kailyn Kent’s recent discussion of Lichtenstein. Scroll down for numerous comments.

Respect my Hobby!

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A few weeks ago I visited The Art of Video Games exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. The exhibition is relatively small, and if you don’t stop to play any games you can easily walk through all the rooms in about half an hour. It’s divided into three main sections: an introductory area, an “arcade” area where visitors can play famous games such as Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros., and a “best of” area where various gaming devices (consoles, PCs, etc) were on display along with video samples of well-regarded games. It was also completely free, which is the right price for me.

Setting aside the particulars, the basic idea of video games in an art museum is an odd one. Paintings and sculpture are designed to be viewed, but games are meant to be played (preferably while seated in a comfy chair). While the “arcade” section makes a certain amount of sense, the rest of the exhibition involves looking at games rather than actually playing them. The traditional manner of museum display (look but don’t touch) is inappropriate for the medium.

But a more significant problem is that the exhibitors never show how video games are art. To be fair, “art” is difficult to define even when discussing a more established medium. However, common definitions of art usually mention creativity, the unique expression of an idea, or an aesthetic accomplishment above mere craft. How does something like Pac-Man qualify as art? It was certainly unique when first released, but is there any underlying idea beyond cute ghosts and a chomping circles? How is Pac-Man more than mere craft? I suppose if you define art in the broadest possible terms – including Michael Bay movies, talk shows, and Superman dolls – then there’s no reason not to accept Pac-Man as well. But if art is simply a synonym for entertainment, then the entire exhibition is nothing but pretense. Displaying video games in an art museum is clearly a statement that video games are on par with the fine arts that usually appear in museums or galleries. But if any amusing diversion can qualify as art, then the only reason to put it in a museum is the “snob factor.” It’s in a museum/gallery, therefore it’s respectable.

On a more favorable note, the strongest feature of the exhibition is the evolution of graphics and visual design, with numerous examples from each decade. One of the earliest games, Pong (1972), is nothing more than a white square on a black background that bounces between two white lines on opposite sides of a television screen. Flash-forward to 2010, and games like Mass Effect 2 sport cutting-edge graphics, 3-dimensional environments, and a visual design that rivals any sci-fi blockbuster. The technological progress that allows for flashier visuals also allows for a full musical score and voice actors. While the exhibitors no doubt want to draw attention to the increasing sophistication of gaming narratives, that sophistication would not be possible without technological breakthroughs. In fact, no other entertainment medium has experienced such radical change in such a short time, and that was all driven by improvements in computing technology (film experienced several technological leaps, such as synchronized sound and the switch to color, but these changes were spread across a century, and many other aspects of filmmaking have changed little).

And yet the  actual  technology of gaming is mostly absent from the exhibition. There’s a small exhibit that explains some technical terms like the difference between 16-bit and 64-bit, but the attendees are never allowed to “look under the hood.” The wires, chips, processors, hard drives, and other do-dads are not on display. There are obvious reasons why this is the case. After all, this is an exhibition in an art museum, not a science and technology museum. But the science cannot be easily separated from the art (if we’re willing to call it that), so the exhibition feels incomplete.

The Art of Video Games exhibition reminds me of the similar effort by comic professionals to gain academic and institutional respectability. Comics have largely been successful in this regard, and scholars now refer to the medium as art without rolling their eyes.  Perhaps video games will find equal success, though it probably won’t happen any time soon. When comic creators made their bid for respectability they could at least point to a few works that were acclaimed by critics from outside the comics community (Maus, Jimmy Corrigan, and classic strips such as Peanuts). By comparison, few critics outside the insular gaming community speak of Pac-Man with reverence. And even the best video games are little more than addictive diversions (Angry Birds, Tetris) or solid genre product (Mass Effect, Grand Theft Auto).

But then again, who am I to argue with the Smithsonian? If they say shooting zombies in 1080p resolution qualifies as art, then I’ll go along with it. I’m an art lover.