The Factual Age

John Sharp says that we’re leaving behind a “visual age,” shifting from a culture of aesthetics to a culture of play, interaction, and discursive collaboration.

In his On The Media appearance (and in the book he was there to plug), David Weinberger points toward another, equally important historical shift: we’re moving from a culture of indisputable facts and “stopping points” (the culture of books) to one that “includes difference and disagreement as a part of knowledge itself.”

With the Internet, Weinberger argues, “we finally have a medium that is big enough for knowledge,” allowing us to worry less about the place of things in “the order of the universe” and more about the act of constantly, incrementally contributing to collective human understanding. Knowledge has moved from something fixed and immutable to something that necessarily, constantly, and explicitly contradicts itself, “a huge mass of contradictory connections that you travel along forever.”

This new epoch has its drawbacks: nowadays, “facts are not going to settle the issues we want them to settle. There is no conceivable additional evidence to convince Americans that our president was not born in Kenya, yet a sizable percentage of Americans continue to believe that. Facts are not going to settle our disputes.”

But then, the factual age had its share of epistemological bugaboos, too: because the platypus fit so poorly into contemporary taxonomy, it was entirely possible to look at a platypus right in front of one’s own face and say “This cannot be!”

Do give the piece a listen if the above sounds interesting.

Selling Art by Marketing “Art”

This is the fifth post in a series on the limits of art as a term.
Parts One and Two and Three and Four might help new readers, context-wise.

This past year, I’ve been working to establish a small business called Gray Blush Gallery. I’ve tried to mention the project on this blog from time to time without just coming right out and saying buy art buy art online buy original art online buy original art online and do it right now because the original art that you can buy online at Gray Blush Gallery is really quite good and you will rather like it.

Restraint has not always come easily.

Gray Blush Gallery is a place to buy gallery art online, but we usually refer to it simply as a place to buy art online, and I’d like to talk a bit about why that is.

Our advertising and traffic data is (1) necessarily somewhat private, (2) probably boring to most people who are not us, and (3) still inconclusive. But I’ll say this: people don’t usually find us by searching for paintings (even though we have a lot of paintings), or by searching for an art gallery (even though we most certainly are an art gallery, albeit a gallery of ones and zeroes rather than bricks and mortar). And certainly, no one is searching for gallery art, since that’s a term I more or less made up.

The data suggests that people who are looking for an art gallery don’t expect to be able to buy anything. They anticipate a one-way communication in which the gallery presents stuff for them to look at and appreciate, and then they look at it and appreciate it, and that’s that.

Likewise with paintings. Your average Google-user doesn’t seem to be searching for paintings in order to buy them.

When people want to find the sort of stuff that Gray Blush sells—unique art-objects in traditional gallery media—they seem to search simply for art. This means that Gray Blush Gallery gets stuck in among art galleries that don’t sell the work they display, abstract academic discussions about art as a concept, and the sorts of mass-produced art prints in which Art.com tends to traffic.

Now, I’m not badmouthing any of those three groups. I love museums, I’m (obviously) interested in discussing art, and I have no issue with mass-produced art-objects of any kind.

What is sort of an issue, for me personally and presumably for others with similar business models, is that there is no word in contemporary English that clearly indicates the difference between a Starry Night poster in editions of ten-million and the original Starry Night, of which there is only one. We can agree that there’s a difference—and indeed, some will say with great vitriol that the former is not art—but how does one explain that difference to another person, let alone to a search engine?

Words like original and unique do describe the difference, but they can easily be misconstrued as value judgments. A print of Salvador Dali’s work could reasonably be described as unique in its style and original in its aesthetic intent, at least when viewed in its proper historical context.

And besides, lots of contemporary artists are creating original art that is meant from the first to be mass-produced. So neither original nor contemporary will do the trick.

No, as I’ve said, when we want to describe unique art-objects in traditional media, we generally just call them art. Which would be fine, if not for the unruly gelatinous mass of alternative definitions that burdens the term at all times.

By calling gallery art art, we grant gallery spaces and traditional media a mystical, totemic power. We keep them those media and institutions at a distance. We make them remote at best, and frightening at worst.

And if we use a more precise or less intimidating term than art, then ironically, what we’re saying immediately becomes less clear to most readers, listeners, and potential art-buyers. We’re compelled to rely on a word that is vague and spookily unfixed.

So the solution is not merely to start using a different word (which would only confuse matters). The solution, rather, is to demystify gallery art—which is easier said than done, of course. But hey, we’ve worked hard to make Gray Blush Gallery inviting, accessible, and substantive. So that’s a start.

And understanding the history of the word art, and its quagmire of contradictory definitions, and its shaky utility in the marketplace—I would like to think that understanding all of that is a pretty good start, too.

What We Mean When We Say “Art”

This is the fourth post in a series on the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here, Part Two is here, and Part Three is here.

So. When we say art, and we are not referring simply to paintings and sculptures and stuff, we usually mean one of the following things.

1. Art is something that takes skill to make or execute well

When Julia Child wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she probably meant that French cooking was an art in the pre-Renaissance sense: pies and crepes as “well-crafted functional objects.” We all need food (which the functional part), but it takes an accomplished chef to make truly great food (which is the part that makes it art).

But contemporary readers tend to understand this usage as a metaphor, and indeed, Child herself might have meant it as one. It’s not that French cooking is an art, this argument goes, but rather that if you’re sufficiently good at French cooking, the results can be like art.

2. Art is something that seeks meaning and explores the human condition and does nothing else

When we say that French cooking is like art, but not actually art, this is the kind of art we’re saying it’s like. As discussed in a previous post, this is an extraordinarily and pointlessly restrictive definition.

It also makes very little internal sense. Operating on this definition, we often try to separate art from entertainment, despite the great number of things that explore the human condition while simultaneously entertaining us, from the Shakespeare canon to The Colbert Report. A skilled writer can find time for high-minded ruminations on morality and numerous dick jokes.

We could say that some entertainments contain art, or that they contain art-moments, but at that point entertainment and art are officially intermixed anyway. It’s too late to take the chocolate out of the milk–and what would be the point of doing so, anyway?

3. Art is something that well-educated people respect, and that people of good taste enjoy

I have several friends who become angry when they see conceptual art of pretty much any kind, and I suspect that their anger stems from this definition. They always want to say “That’s not art!” or “You’re telling me this is art?” because they have internalized the idea that art means something they have to respect (which is a hard sell where stolen urinals are concerned, which was sort of Marcel Duchamp’s point).

As I’ve said before, this makes it impossible to talk about bad art, dumb art, art that tries and fails, or art that you can understand and even respect without liking. If only the really successful attempts get to be included in the conversation, then we miss out on a whole lot of really interesting work, and that’s a shame.

4. Art is something that is meaningful and important without being enjoyable

This is appreciating art as a synonym for eating your vegetables, and the arts as a blanket term for those entertainments that we should probably keep around even if no one really finds them entertaining.

It’s this definition that leads people to sit quietly with their hands folded at the opera, nodding off occasionally and glaring at anyone with the audacity to applaud too often–despite the fact that opera was as rowdy and lowbrow a popular art-form as any in its heyday. The more you respect opera, the less you expect to enjoy opera.

And in galleries, when visitors encounter visual art that is overtly playful, or layered with historical meaning, or salacious and moronic, they tend to regard it all with the same sort of uniform, glassy-eyed seriousness. Nothing sufficiently respected has the opportunity to mean much of anything.

So enough with all the stultifying respect already.

Art has to be something that we all have permission to love, hate, kinda-like, kinda-dislike, laugh at, cry over, intellectualize, or engage viscerally on a case-by-case basis, or else there’s very little point in talking about it.

What I’m trying to ask is whether the word art is really worth hanging onto, given all of the above. It’s a term that means at least five different things, none of them all that useful, most of them highly problematic, and at least one of them actually nonsensical.

But even so, I think we’re sort of stuck with the word, at least for the moment–and in my next post, I’ll discuss how running an online art gallery has lead me to that conclusion. If we can understand what makes the word necessary right now, we can better address the goal of making it less necessary in the future.

Non-Gallery Art and Inexact Music

This is the third post in a series on the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here and Part Two is here.

When we say art, we’re often referring to paintings and sculptures and stuff–those well-established visual arts that are generally found in galleries, and that I therefore refer to as gallery art here on this blog. It’s an improvement over just calling those things art, I think, because it doesn’t lazily imply that film and television (and books and games and music and clothing and so on) are somehow not art.

It’s kind of like classical music. We generally understand that term to mean Bach and Mozart and Tchaikovsky and such, even though Mozart’s music is the only one of those three that is Classical-with-a-Capital-C. Bach’s music is Baroque, Tchaikovsky’s Romantic. But colloquially, classical music just indicates that Bach and Mozart and Tchaikovsky have more in common with each other than they do with Duke Ellington, The Beatles, and The Roots.

So fair enough. An imperfect term, but a fairly clear one, at least. Leonard Bernstein once tried to come up with a better, clearer, more accurate one, and he settled on exact music–as in, music that is supposed to be performed exactly as it is written on the page, as distinct from improvisation-heavy forms such as jazz, blues, and rock and/or roll.

But of course, Baroque music includes a fair bit of embellishment, interpretation, and improvisation. And it wasn’t until Beethoven that sheet music habitually included metronome markings, so it would be disingenuous to say that tempos were all that precise or uniform prior to the early 1800s.

Besides which, Bernstein could not have foreseen Techno. We now have multiple electronic forms that are more regular, more metronomic, and indeed, more exact than any “exact” music. So we may as well stick with classical music for the sake of clarity.

Because if we referred to that music simply as music, we’d be suggesting (with more than a hint of snobbery) that only “exact” music qualifies as music. Which would be supremely unproductive, for reasons that are hopefully self-evident.

So for the moment, gallery art. I’ll go with that, even if it’s unlikely to supplant art, despite art’s many problematic alternate definitions, which I’ll unpack in my next post.

The Visual Age

This is the second post in a series about the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here.

In his appearance on the Brainy Gamer Podcast, art historian John Sharp suggests that we are “leaving a five-hundred year period that [was] dominated by visual culture, and moving into one that’s much more about systems.”

Prior to the Renaissance and the dawn of the visual age, Sharp argues, “the whole idea we have of art today did not exist.” Before that, art referred to what we now call design. “These well-crafted functional objects–that’s all there was, really. There wasn’t such a thing as these objects that we created simply for enjoyment, for aesthetic appreciation, and so on.” The Renaissance signaled a cultural shift toward the visual, toward using our eyes “as the primary filter for thinking about the world.”

Painting, sculpture, print media, and eventually photography were not just the predominant forms of Western art. They were art as such. So much so that, as cinema and television came to be considered worthy of aesthetic contemplation, so too did they come to be categorized as primarily visual media, despite the inclusion of sound in the majority of cinema and virtually all of television.

Just as the idea of autonomous art-objects (and artists as a special creative class) has a specific historical context, so too does the oft-cited idea that the sole function of true art is to converse with the sublime, or to explore profound truths about the human condition. “That’s this very Romantic 19th Century notion… a bit of cultural baggage” that tends to limit our understanding rather than expand it. Just because that’s what Vincent Van Gogh (or rather, our posthumously mythologized version of him) was up to does not mean that all artists must necessarily live and work along similar lines. To think of commercial art, or bad art, or disposable art as oxymorons is to take an unnecessarily narrow and restrictive historical view of the terms involved.

Knowing that, we can easily understand the past century of “is x art?” hand-wringing. It’s not that a stolen urinal or a guy getting shot in the arm isn’t art (whatever that would mean), but simply that those things aren’t addressing themselves to the tradition of visual perfection that has been art’s perceived aim since the Renaissance. What matters isn’t how those things look, but rather how they fit into larger systems, and what they demand of the viewer.

In that specific sense, large swaths of art theory have failed to keep pace with art practice. Try to evaluate Dada on the same terms as you would evaluate Piet Mondrian (let alone the representational art of the Renaissance), and you’ll just end up confused. I think that when people walk into an art gallery and feel lost, confused, or intimidated, it is this disconnect that is tripping them up. Art galleries are designed for looking at things, but they’re now filled with art that is not meant exclusively, or even primarily, to be looked at.

So all of that muddles our understanding of art, both as a usable word and as an intuitive, unspoken concept. In my next post, I’ll break down that problem.

Playing Art

So I wrote this piece about FADEout, an art installation currently on display as part of the University of Chicago’s Arts|Science initiative. The idea is to bring artists and scientists together to create work that neither could or would create individuality.

In the case of FADEout, it’s a text about loss and the passage of time, digitally printed onto semi-transparent screens, broken apart in a pre-recorded video, and (perhaps most prominently) turned into a motion-controlled game. A Microsoft Kinnect interprets your movements, which allow you to physically move around bits of text and break them down into smaller and smaller parts. Phrases become words, which become letters, which become chunks of letters.

Installation artist Granite Amit provides the text and architectures the interaction, and research scientist Yali Amit provides the technical underpinnings–the algorithm that breaks the letters down, the system by which the Kinnect turns gestures into visual feedback, and so on. Both seem aware that they’re created a hybrid object, a true collaboration, a thing that would not be if not for this meeting of the minds.

But I’m not sure that they realize they’ve made a game–even though people are playing it, and even though they’re playing it with a video game controller, and even though (as I discuss in the article linked above) a fair number of viewers insensitively race toward the win condition, such as it is.

Still, it’s an art installation, because it’s in an art gallery and there’s only one of it, and so it can’t be a game, right? It’s strange: in contemporary art galleries, interactivity is all the rage, and yet game designers rarely get invited to join in on interdisciplinary collaborations, even when the thing being made is inescapably a game.

Without taking anything away from FADEout (which I really enjoyed), I think that the separation of gallery art from everything else has created unnecessary rifts between people doing similar work, alienated a large portion of the general public from art galleries as a concept, and rendered the word art needlessly confusing. Each of those things is a shame, to some degree, and so I would like to address the historical role and current limits of art as a term.

This will probably take a few posts.

The Perversity of the Successes of The Binding of Isaac

The Binding of Isaac is a surreal mash-up of the original Legend of Zelda, a roguelike, and Smash TV, in roughly that order. It’s also a reflection of the collective fears of Christian fundamentalists, and of everyone else’s collective fears of Christian fundamentalism. And it’s also a shooter where the bullets are a child’s tears. In short, it’s an Edmund McMillen game.

McMillen is the designer of Super Meat Boy, Gish, and more than 20 other (mostly free) games, including Coil, Time Fcuk, Aether, and Grey-Matter. But nothing he’s done previously–no, not even 2008’s Cunt--is quite as bonkers as The Binding of Isaac.

Visually, this latest game is preoccupied with a small number of disgusting things: blood, poo, and bodies that are falling apart, or that were never put together correctly in the first place. It’s gross, and it’s dark, and it’s stuff that kids shouldn’t have to confront–and yet at the same time, it’s exactly the kind of stuff that tends to fascinate kids, and particularly kids in bad situations.

Add to that the random generation, with its constant cycle of adaptation, learning, and skin-of-your-teeth near-failure (usually followed by actual failure, and getting booted back to the beginning), and it all starts to gel: Isaac’s world is morbid in the way that kids can be morbid, and cruel in the way that kids can be cruel.

And I know, bodily fluids and difficult video games are Edmund McMillen’s bread and butter. None of that is new to him, and so none of it is in this particular game purely for thematic effect. But McMillen’s obsessions are more cohesive than they might at first appear, and so accidentally or not, the terrifying world of The Binding of Isaac makes a sick kind of sense.

 
Surreal and Sacred Things

When I said that the game was surreal, by the way, I used the term advisedly. Blood, poo, and dead-or-messed-up bodies are not just obsessions that morbid children and Edmund McMillen have in common. They are also what surrealist painter Salvador Dali described as the three central themes of his work, and the three physical substances most closely tied to the sacred.Strange though it may seem, there’s an illustrious history in art of trying to process the sacred in a dreamlike way, and ending up with the piles of primal, indeterminate bodily stuff that define Isaac’s imaginary world.

The Binding of Isaac is nothing if not obsessed with the sacred, and with people’s batshit-crazy reactions to what they consider sacred. It would be a shame to spoil anything specific, but suffice to say that Issac plays on the (totally imagined) connection between Dungeons and Dragonsand Satanic cults, and on the (unfortunately not-so-imagined) tendency of unbalanced people to hurt others on assumed instructions from God.

To understand how that relates to the action in The Binding of Isaac, you have to know the Biblical story from which the game takes its name: Abraham hears the voice of God, which demands a blood sacrifice in the form of his first-born son, Isaac. Abraham is both ready and willing to do as he’s told, until at the last possible moment, God informs him that he has been punk’d.

It’s a truly bizarre test of faith. Existentialists like Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre have spilled a whole lot of ink trying, and failing, to puzzle out just what Abraham’s actions meant, ethically and theologically. But whatever the story is supposed to teach us, we can certainly agree that, if someone were to follow in Abraham’s footsteps today, that person would very rightly be considered nuts.

So in McMillen’s version, it’s Isaac’s mother who hears (or thinks she hears) the voice of God, commanding her to kill her son. The game takes place in the imaginary world to which Isaac escapes while awaiting his fate. Like I said, people: dark stuff.

 
Escapism and Empowerment

Now, Isaac is hardly the first kid to escape into a videogame–I know I’ve done it once or twice–and the scenario makes me wonder: Why do we want to escape to worlds where everything is trying to kill us?  Is it that mastering that kind of danger against all odds makes us feel capable? I did feel pretty powerful when I (finally, finally) defeated Isaac’s final boss.

Indeed, the sick joke at the heart of the game is that even Isaac’s central tears-as-bullets ability, pathetic as it is, represents an empowerment fantasy. Little kids cry to make the monsters go away. Isaac’s tears actually do make the monsters go away. Especially once he’s found the laser tears upgrade.

Come to think of it, there’s a second sick joke in the way that, after a few hours of playing, you stop noticing the game’s pitch-black themes. You’re just playing to win, blood and poo be damned, and religion and child abuse are the furthest things from your mind. What’s on your mind is making your character über, and finding all the secret items, and unlocking the alternate characters. You know, video game stuff.

Videogames tend to dull our sensitivity to generic, photorealistic depictions of violence, and we might think that’s because intellectually undemanding kinds of killing–killing that makes the player feel like a badass, or the Chosen One, or both–are not all that affecting. But The Binding of Isaac shows that we can become equally numb to abstracted, deeply personal (frankly more interesting) depictions of violence. Even a damaged, traumatized protagonist is really just a ship for us to upgrade and take into battle.

That’s The Binding of Isaac in a nutshell. The fact that I can turn a blind eye to the game’s darkness, and just enjoy the mechanics and the design–that’s a big part of what compels me to keep playing. But ironically, it’s also the darkest thing about the game. What’s sick isn’t that Edmund McMillen made a game about religious fanatics, child abuse, and murder. What’s sick is that he made that game this much fun.

Two Interviews: Greg Kasavin of Supergiant Games and Carlos Bordeu of ACE Team

So I’ve been doing some interviews for The Kartel, and if I do say so myself, they’ve been going quite well. Below you’ll find an audio interview with Supergiant Games’ Greg Kasavin (who game Bastion is out now) and ACE Team’s Carlos Bordeu (whose game Rock of Ages will be out next month).

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Fresh from the success of their unapologetically trippy first-person brawler Zeno Clash, ACE Team announced Rock of Ages, a “tower offence” game about arranging great works of art from five periods–Classical Greek, Medieval, Renaissance, Rococo, and Romanticism–and then crushing them with a giant boulder. Carlos Bordeu (the C in ACE Team) sat down with The Kartel to discuss the game’s art-history-by-way-of-Terry-Gilliam look, and how the team’s process has changed since Zeno Clash.

The Kartel: You’ve said that ACE Team was somewhat “unbalanced” while making Zeno Clash, with way more visual artists than programmers. Has the division of labor changed for Rock of Ages?

 
Carlos Bordeu: In a sense, the development of Rock of Ages tended to balance itself out since we moved from Valve’s Source Engine technology to Epic’s Unreal Engine which, being a different beast altogether, required our entire studio to be actively looking for ways to improve our processes and methods while distributing this knowledge with the rest of the team. Learning to maneuver in Unreal forced us to do many small-scale local tests for several parts of the game in order to get the best gameplay and graphical experience we could deliver.

In terms of our work force, we had a more balanced team. There were three programmers who worked onRock of Ages, instead of David alone who almost entirely had to make Zeno Clash for the PC.

TK: The visuals in Zeno Clash don’t look quite like anything else, but in Rock of Ages you’re explicitly working from the styles of other artists. Has that been an adjustment?

CB: The process itself involved doing a lot of research about artists and styles we are fond of and distilling what we consider the most valuable and in tune with our game vision and we go with it. However we do believe that a certain “ACE Team” style has been applied to the game overall, and we’ve not just simply tried to only reference the art periods. Certainly using classic art as a reference for the game has given us a chance to once again produce visuals not very commonly seen in videogames.

Come to think of it, Goya's paintings do kind of look like World 6 of Yoshi's Island.

TK: Did the chronological order of the game’s levels lend itself well to introducing new game mechanics, and to a difficulty curve?

CB: Although the main game concept consists of placing your defenses, and then going to destroy the opponent with your giant boulder, the game progression is set up to slowly introduce the the player to different defensive units to maintain the focus on learning new strategies while you advance.

The level design also plays a very big part of the game’s design. Some strategic units work extremely well on certain types of levels, but not so well on others. Not all the same units are available on all levels which means learning a specific strategy and repeating it for all the game will never work. The boss levels [such as the confrontation with Michelangelo's David in the original trailer] are also a pretty big deviation from the traditional gameplay during the campaign.

TK: Could you talk a bit about the story in the single-player campaign? How does the myth of Sisyphus figure in?

CB: To be quite honest, the story is quite *as Dr. Evil would say* inconsequential. It jumps from one place to the next in a very dreamlike fashion, always in the style of old Monty Python movies and Terry Gilliam short animations.

But yes… Videogames in general are about being resilient in the pursuit of a goal, which usually means doing the same thing over and over until you conquer it (a bit like the Greek myth of Sisyphus pushing his boulder up a hill forever).

I think that we can all relate.

Shameless Cross-Promotion

A large portion of this blog is me complaining about things. It’s the nature of a solo writing project, I suppose. When motivated neither by external deadlines nor by a shared sense of purpose, one tends to write primarily, if not exclusively, about outrages and annoyances and such. That’s motivation: Saying things that seem to need to be said, and feeling the relief of having hopefully said them well.

It’s satisfying, to be sure. And it’s a great way to sharpen one’s rhetorical skills. But it is not always, strictly speaking, productive.

Which is why I am so happy to share with you–you being anyone who happens to be reading this–a project that does provide me with practical motivations and deadlines, and that does allow me to share a common purpose with others. It is a project of which I am immensely proud to be be a part, and a project that aims to do genuine good.

Gray Blush Gallery is a new online art-space conceived as a service to artists, to art-buyers, and to those who want to become art-buyers. Our goal is to create a home for what we are provisionally calling mid-market art–that is, a home for all of the wonderful art-objects currently being produced that do not fit neatly or exclusively into the rarefied world of top-tier galleries, or into catch-all “handmade” spaces such as Etsy.

Some artists are comfortable in both of those worlds, and some are comfortable in neither–yet most of the spaces that bridge that gap tend to focus on prints and reproductions rather than unique art-objects. This leaves original paintings, drawings, sculptures, and myriad forms of mixed media art with relatively few opportunities to find buyers, no matter how exciting or well-executed the work it self may be.

So Gray Blush Gallery means to do something about that. If you want to buy art but don’t know where to start, we want to help. If you’re deep into contemporary art and want to see exciting new talent, we want to show it to you. If you produce innovative work and are looking for a gallery that shares your values, we want to be that space, is the idea.

We’re committed to giving our artists the highest possible percentages of our listing prices, we’re committed to packing and shipping the art in an environmentally friendly manner (and also to energy-efficient servers), and we’re committed to direct social engagement. Currently, the family of companies of which we’re a part is working to further agricultural development, health care education, support to previously trafficked women, and elementary school construction in southwestern Ethiopia.

If Gray Blush Gallery sounds like your kind of thing, then take a look at our preview site (which will be around at least until the full site launches) or drop us a line at info@grayblush.com.

That’s what I’ve been up to lately. And while I don’t plan to forswear complaining anytime soon, being productive is awfully nice, too.

Curate/Upvote: The Art of Video Games at the Smithsonian

No one ever wins or loses an argument about whether a given medium qualifies as art. No, what happens is that the medium in question eventually becomes so omnipresent, so culturally important by any reasonable measure, that the whole Art or Not argument begins to look like what, in fact, it always was: a waste of time. Some people will fret over whether games are art, but meanwhile, others will be talking about why games are important, which is a better discussion anyway.

So when the Smithsonian American Art Museum began working on their new exhibition, The Art of Video Games, they wisely approached the artistic status of video games as a foregone conclusion. It’s not worth asking whether video games display “striking visual effects and the creative use of new technologies.” Of course they do. The question is simply which video games best exemplify these qualities. And for that question, the Smithsonian wants to hear from you, or at least from someone with the same amount of Internet access as you.

From now through April 7, 2011, anyone with a valid email address can vote on which games will be included in the exhibition. The nominees are divided into five eras, somewhat haphazardly covering every platform from the Atari VCS to the Playstation 3, and then subdividing the list into genres. The exhibition does have a curator–Past Pixels founder Chris Melissinos, along with a panel of advisers from within the games industry–but in keeping with the built-in populism of digital media, the input of Internet passers-by will play a large role in shaping the show.

Some of the match-ups are a conspicuously arbitrary. In the Xbox 360 Adventure Game category, for example, Mass Effect 2 (a 30+ hour guns and conversation epic with a branching, dialogue-heavy narrative) is up against Limbo (a three-hour trial and death platformer with a dialogue-free, absolutely linear narrative). Space-apples and purgatory-oranges, right?

But these kinds of impossible decisions make much more sense when viewed through the lens of the Smithsonian’s refreshingly specific criteria. They’re not asking whether Mass Effect 2 is better than Limbo, or which should be Game of the Year, or what have you. They’re asking whether Mass Effect 2 is a better example of “striking visual effects and the creative use of new technologies” than Limbo is. It’s still a difficult question, but it’s a fair one, and one on which you probably have an opinion.

So go vote! Given that the only registration requirement is an email address, the process is ripe for exploitation–and the more legitimate voters we can steer in the direction of the Smithsonian’s website, the better the chances that the Art of Video Games exhibition will live up to its name.