What is “real” art, and who gets to decide? The artist? The
original inventor of art as a whole? A group of old white men
sitting in a conference room? The Guardian certainly had their
opinions on this topic after writing an article entitled
Sorry MoMA, video games are not art when MoMA declared that
Nathalie Lawhead’s unconventional video game-esque interactive
zine Everything is Going to be OK was going to be featured
in its galleries. Lawhead knew the criticism she was going to
receive when choosing this unconventional medium but did it anyway
because she refused to reduce her art to fit with traditional art
standards. Her refreshing oddity of an art piece proves that art
is just a form of self-expression that should be void of rules by
challenging traditional conceptions of what real art can be.
The work’s opening scene brings you to a directory screen
displaying the 27 interactable zine pages that ignore all forms of
design principles and techniques typically seen in fine art
pieces. Visually, this page looks like a mistake -- something that
is broken -- because it features a fever dream of clashing colours
such as bright reds, greens, and cyans, glitching page buttons,
unsettling sound effects, flashing posterized graphics, and
indecipherable background imagery that one could describe as
anxiety-inducing and eye-straining. Lawhead does this to emphasize
that although this aesthetic found on the opening page and
throughout the game does not follow traditional art conventions,
it does not reduce its quality as art because real art should not
have any rules.
While one could get lost in the never-ending labyrinth of unusual
graphics, the unconventional dialogue featuring intimate thought
pieces and poetry addressing highly stigmatized topics such as
suicide, anxiety, and depression shows that she is using this
piece as a means of self-expression. For example, an excerpt from
the piece reads: “If life were a person, I would shun life and
hate life and resent life for everything that it put me through.
For everything that it did to me”. The uncensored and blunt nature
of Lawhead’s borderline crass comments defies the poised and
refined values associated with fine art. It proves that she is not
afraid to express her emotions and thoughts to their full extent,
which is the main goal that real art should have.
So if all of this is true, why is there so much controversy on
classifying video games as art? According to the Guardian, “No one
'owns' the game, so there is no artist, and therefore no work of
art”, in other words, they believe that something has to be owned
to qualify as real art. This is a flawed argument because as we’ve
learned through the readings of this class, art should be timeless
and speak universal truths on its own, so I believe that real art
should be thought of as independent from its creator or owner,
contrary to what the Guardian believes.
This dark-humoured piece embodies and accepts the broken and
makes room for everyone in the fine art world by redefining what
real art can be. Art shouldn’t be thought of as something that can
be gate-keeped or owned by a particular group. It is a flexible
and free-flowing form of self-expression that anyone can
participate in. Thanks to Lawhead, everything broken, weird,
rejected, or discarded can find its home here between the lines of
HTML code and amalgamation of saturated colours and MS Paint-esque
graphics. Artists should continue to follow in her footsteps to
reclaim the fine art world to make it more inclusive and
accessible to everyone. So, sorry Guardian, but video games are
art.
