f13.net

National Endowment for the Arts is now accepting grant proposals for digital media projects including digital games and other gaming platforms (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/34509/NEA_Announces_New_Grant_Opportunity_For_Video_Game_Projects.php)

Not that this will change much I suspect, and whether or not this will open up any new ideas in game design remains to be seen.

I just don't get why anyone cares if they can be considered art.

People want to be validated, yo.

It's ok not to make money in Art.

"Man, Dikatana sucked!"

"You're just too plebean to get its message."

Art is protected speech, among other things.

Mostly, however, it's the same pissing fight that always happens between generations. Rather than just being, say, a slapfight over whether Victor Hugo's serialized (and paid by the word) stories in newspapers are 'literature' or just 'shit that the masses like, not like Homer' the fight is over a change in medium as well.

I'm not schooled enough in art history to be sure, but I'd wager a small amount that a similar slapfight occured between painting/drawing and photography, and again between photography and video.

The illusion of participating in something with a veneer of respectability probably

I think games have moved more into the art direction, but I actually think this is BAD for games.  The more artsy a game is, generally speaking the worse the mechanics are.  I want to play games to play games.   If I want art, I'll go to see an orchestra, or watch a movie, or go to a museum (all things I've been known to do).  But to me games have always filled a different space than that, and generally speaking I'd prefer to keep the over lap to a minimum.  

Incidentally (or not), this is likely why  I've found single player games to be a lot less interesting over the years than they used to be.  They just tend to have a lot less "game" in them than they used to.  It seems like single player games are more and more often meant to be experienced, rather than played.  

So for movies you just watch, say, the "Scary Movie" franchise? (Which I think we can all agree isn't art). But hate 'artsy fartsy' films like The Black Knight?

"Art" is not synomous with "boring shit". Admittedly, there's a genre called 'art film's' (or something close) but that doesn't mean only those films are art or artistic (in fact, many really aren't!).

Same with games. Art in games isn't gorgeous visuals -- art in games has to encompass gameplay. Hell, it IS gameplay. Portal, for instance, is art. It's a strongly crafted story, a unique and challenging gameplay, and a strong identity. Mass Effect 2 is art. Hell, the Halo games can even count.

"Everything we do is kung fu."

You have what I'm saying completely wrong.  I'm not saying that games aren't art, I'm not saying art is boring shit.  I'm saying, when games get closer to being art, they get worse AS GAMES.   Its the reason I think Multiplayer Black Ops is a great game, and the reason I'd rather watch a run through of Single player Black Ops on youtube than play it.

I LOVE the fine arts, I'm not calling art boring shit at all.  You're talking to somewhere here that regularly goes to the ballet and has written a master's thesis on the history of avant garde film in the Soviet Union.  My appreciation for the arts is deep and profound, but I thats not necessarily what I'm looking for in video games.

You're trying to apply "Art as it applies to not-games" to games. Games "getting closer to art"?

Artistic games, by their very nature, have to be fun games.

You can't have "boring ass artistic games". Boring ass games fail at the core definition of games, which means they can't be artistic games.

They might have gorgeous visuals, might have great music or excellent story, but those aren't 'artistic games' -- that's image art, music, and literature/story telling. An artistic game must be a fun one.

I don't think you can define a game as 'art' and it be unenjoyable. It's like....judging music by the standards of photography. It doesn't make sense.

If you are defining art just as "anything, done well in the context of that thing" then, fine, I'll retract everything I've said, cause frankly, there is no point arguing with you if thats the game.  In that case football is an art because its a good sport, chess is an art because its a good board game, and nike running shoes are art because they are fantastic for keeping my feet comfortable while jogging.  It seems to lose all meaning at that point.

No. "Fun" is intrinsic to a "game". There's no "Game" without "Fun". If you're going to have artistic games, they have to be fun.

I don't know what YOU consider an "Artistic game" -- you've given no examples, only to say they suck. (You sorta referenced Call of Duty, but not whether you really considered it artistic or how). No examples of how they are more or less 'artistic' than any other game. You haven't even defined what you consider 'artistic' for a game!

An artistic game, to me, require solid visual, story, music and gameplay elements. Portal is an artistic game. Halo: Reach, to a much lesser extent. Okami. Katamari Damancy. Bioshock. Civilization.

An artistic that was decent as art was The Path.

Edited to add; I think bioshock is a great example of what I'm talking about actually.  So much effort went into making something that was supposedly thought provoking, but in the end it was a run of the mill shooter with a boring storyline.

Why? (I've never played it).

For me, Portal stands out in terms of recent games. Humor, writing, plot, music, voices, visual style and gameplay.

*shrug*. Most mass-market art isn't all that great, or at least hard to judge at the time.

Hugo's work was considered pulpy trash. Shostakovich's stuff started a riot. (Or was that Strazinski? The Russian that did Rite of Spring). 98% of the literature produced a year is trash, 2% is critically acclaimed, and what ends up being considered 'must reads' and 'artistic' won't be settled for decades.

Same with video games, especially as a burgeoning artistic field. I find it heartening that they're experimenting. It certainly beats Shooter 47: Just like the first 46, but with more polygons!

Storyline is part of it -- videogames are a mixed medium, after all. A very mixed medium. Each game is going to be strong or weak in different elements.

Games are art man, look at the work that goes into those models, the score, the design, the acting, the dialog, the scenery, the control system, the UI, the programming. That's just to mention a few artforms that games use. I think you're thinking of art as all formaldehyde encased dissections of bovine.

Yes, it did. As well as slapfights over whether abstract painting was art compared to photorealistic paintings, whether photographs should be manipulated in the darkroom or just be what you shot, etc. etc. etc.

I think we're having the discussion on video games NOW because video games have reached a sort of critical mass -- both in number and range of titles, but even more that the first generation of people to grow up and keep playing games has hit their thirties and forties.

Shit rarely is considered "Art" unless it's done by and appreciated by adults.

Title depth and number is important, because it means we're getting enough diversity and depth to start working out what IS and ISN'T "good games", "Artistic games", etc.

Motherfucker.

Maybe that will help.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlMgEYwdzEU

Now THAT'S art.

It's just "jazz/rock/rap/sampling/etc isn't music" all over again.

Exactly.  Once someone defines art, I'll worry about categorizing things that way for personal gain.

honestly, does everything have to be validated as capital-A, big frown, Penguin Classic, BravoTV, hip Wired magazine, New Yorker trauma story, Western Tradition PBS "ART"?   

 Games don't need the categorization of "Art" just like Opera didn't need it when it was starting.  Games (video or otherwise) are complex, popular, with a growing history of artifacts that are referential to give it its own design vocabulary.  Worrying about games being compared to "Art" objects is not necessary.  It'll end up there regardless in a generation.

Oh and that Ebert argument was mostly posturing by PA, who in a typical self-promoting PA move, promoted it as a crisis.

The funny thing is I haven't even been saying that games can't be art.  I'm just saying that something like Capture the Flag is a *game* to me (in the context of TF2, CoD, or just, actual real life capture the flag), whereas the single player player games seem to have a lot less gameplay as their focus and more on the user "experience."   Its not like there is a magical cut and dry cutoff point.  I'm simply saying that I think games as art don't make for especially good games, they can make for good experiences though.  Maybe the distinction I'm making doesn't matter to most people so I sound like I'm nitpicking .

Whether or not Bioshock is equivalent to Bach in some sense is utterly unimportant to me, I'm much more concerned about the way developers are approaching their games because they view them as an experience rather than a game (sometimes).  I think that is related to the art question, personally.  If you divorce it from that distinction, then I honestly don't care at all.

I think it honestly depends on the game. Perhaps single player stuff just isn't your bag. I recall finishing Vampire:TM and feeling like I'd just taken part in a movie. It was pretty damn cool. Several other games since then have done the same for me. I like story in single player stuff. Gameplay tends to take a backseat to storyline for me. Obviously, this isn't true for you. Diffrent strokes and what not.

I agree with you 100%, but thats kind of my point.  I don't want games that make me feel like I've taken part in a movie, and I feel like the the "games as art" trend make those kinds of games more likely to be made.  Thats all I've been trying to say.

I see where you and Morat20 are coming from, because you're looking at things from completely different angles.

The term "Art" has been abused in the past to justify the direction something took that nobody liked. "Art" has also been stated as the pursuit of people who don't actually know what they're doing but couldn't come out and say that. This is very rare, but it happens enough to sully to term "Art". There's of course also the non-artist's layperson's impression of artists as efeet snobs who speak in a language only they understand with pinky finger in the air.

On the flip side, we have these incredibly complex games designed to deliver experiences people want. They're designed (what I crassly refer to as "art to achieve an end user goal") and the best ones achieve their goals through a combination of interesting premises, great mechanics and unique twists. There is an art to making these games, which over time is becoming "art". It just isn't "art" as defined by people who have previously defined other "art", but that's always been the case. Ya both have already covered the friction between established art and new found art. Art is always created first and then defined as art later.

I think this thread is timely given the Upcoming Exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanart.si.edu%2Fexhibitions%2Farchive%2F2012%2Fgames%2F&h=0516e).

To abuse a phrase: Art is both in the eye of the beholder, and in the eye of the generation following the one in which that art was first created.

(http://i.imgur.com/qHeKm.jpg)

there, i did it

Whatever man, that is totally derivative. It isn't even Yeg's real face!

still authentic  :oh_i_see:

I think MMOG's will be the source of art.

What if there was a train in WOW... and there was a can of spray paint next to it. And allowed you to spray graffiti into the boxcars. A semi-fun activity, but then what if there was a website that showed every single train someone had ever made, sorta like a huge andy warhol type thing.

That would make the players the artists, rather than the programmers/modellers/etc.  Also not sure why you'd say MMOs would be the source for this kind of thing, given that most of the titles that would allow for this kind of creativity have been single player games.

All Ebert is trying to say, and despite apparently never having played a video game he's right about this, is that the very best video game narratives  (Planescape, Grim Fandango, Bioshock) only rise to the level of a mediocre fantasy novel, or maybe a Hollywood blockbuster.  I loved all those games, and there are works in the canon of western literature that are not super high quality  (say, Uncle Tom's Cabin, or maybe Pamela), but I don't know of any game that can compete with the greatest literature of all time.  It's an unfairly high standard, but I think that's what Ebert is trying to say.  Think about it -- everyone gushes like crazy over Planescape: Torment because it's just about as good as a Dungeons and Dragons novel.  As people have pointed out, what he misses with this analysis is the way in which games can create their own kind of meaning and their own kinds of aesthetic experiences, in the way Mario is, or Portal.

No... it makes the act the art...

This is a perfect opportunity to repost An Apology for Roger Ebert by Brian Moriarty (http://www.ludix.com/moriarty/apology.html). 

I thought post-modernism had decided that anything could be art and the only interesting question was if things were good art or not?

I've yet to play a game that I felt crossed the boundary from superb entertainment and into good art, and that's subjective. As art has to be, surely?

Excellent read.  Given Moriarty's description of games as following: "Games are purposeful. They are defined as the exercise of choice and will towards a self-maximizing goal."  If this is the case I agree with him wrt 'games as art'.  But I think this is a shallow definition of games, or at least one that what we would normally classify as games can differ from.  While I agree some modicum of choice is necessary for a game to be a game, it's not the case that all choice must work towards a clear self-maximizing goal.  Sandbox games are an obvious counter-example, but I think that the games that bridge the art-game divide specifically make unclear the goals of the game, or perhaps subvert them.  Second, while 'flow' is going to be necessary for a game to be a game, I think that games aren't necessarily prisoners of it.  Gameflow can be used as a sort of fuel or training wheels, something of only transitive importance, instead of being the entire purpose of the game.  If this is the case, then the game can transcend it's own beginnings, using the 'gamey aspects' of itself as a means to an end.

Agreed - great article.

At this point I believe video games aren't Art because the genre isn't old enough yet to have titles that have stuck around past their time of release. Between the number of different platforms games have been released on (many now obsolete) and the speed at which titles are played and discarded, it'll probably be a while before a title sticks around long enough to be considered Art.

Uh, how many years after release does it take if a game is still considered to have merit at that point?

Serious question, because major releases have been going on for at least a good three decades now and some games from that era are still considered brilliant for their mechanics. Say, the ghost mechanics from Pacman to pick a well-known example: They are not the most straightforward way to add challenge but instead act to give "character" to four rough pixel blobs and allow the player to assign more personality to them than to a state-of-the-art high-polygon enemy in the latest Call of Duty installment.

I read that article and the feeling I got was Ebert was trying to say games can't be art because people who are insufficiently snobby might pick the wrong dialog choice.   The irony is when I saw it that way I agreed with him.

Robyn Miller (half of the brothers who made Cyan) stopped making games after Riven because he wanted to tell stories, and it was difficult to do so when the player could get within two steps of the climax and then wander off to play with toys, or sit and look at the clouds for half an hour, or go back and explore some random unopened door from earlier. You didn't have to write and pace one story, you had to write and pace some absurdist branching conglomeration of stories, most of which were practically guaranteed to suck.

I don't think that means games can't be art. All art is a collaborative effort between artist and audience. What I think it means is that it's orders of magnitude more difficult to produce a game that's great art than to produce a (appeasing Ebert) film that is. Worse yet, games have a higher barrier to entry than films do. The audience must have a computer that can handle it, plus an often impressive amount of manual dexterity, situational awareness, and puzzle solving skill. The audience is expected to do.

So Ebert was probably right de facto (at least within his lifetime) even if he's wrong de jure. Great art may one day be possible in the medium of computer games, just not yet and not for everyone.

That's how I always saw art until I took art appreciation in college so many years ago.   From my admittedly limited interest in the concept the picture I got was the real definition involves a great deal more snobbery and a whole lot less collaboration.   So basically what I'm saying is it's semantics.   What Ebert is saying and what we think he's saying are completely different.   Using his meanings for those words I think he is in fact probably correct instead of being just some old fogey.

He's rooted in film art. I'd be shocked if there was ever a video game whose cinematics or story fit into what he considers "Art" in film. After all, by his own admission, very few films do!

It'd be rather surprising for a video game to be as good a movie as a movie is.

There's a lot of handwaving, and a lot of people with their own judgements as to what art is and isn't (many, if not most, rooted in different styles of art -- movies, paintings, photography, literature) trying to view video games through a bad lens. You can't apply art critiques designed for paintings to music, it just doesn't work.

I do agree with the link that says most games are going to be kitcsh, which is still a form of art -- mass-market art, but art nonetheless. But I think the sticking point, the part that Ebert is looking for -- that part where artist and patron communicate -- is built into video games already.

You can see it's beginnings in every "cool" moment in a video game, whether it was scripted action or some emergent behavior or quirk. Whenever a player, somehow, manages to do something that he or she finds memorable.

Whether it's doing clever and innovative things with incendiary rounds and blaster bombs in X-Com, pulling off a clever and unexpected use of Portals in Portal or managing to pull a win out of your ass versus an opponent in SC2 -- that's the potential for that sort of "high art", where the game has led you to a conclusion, an act, or a concept you wouldn't have otherwise encountered.

If anything the critic has less opportunity to mediate between audience and artist where games are concerned. Because the medium is explicitly interactive, the artist can foresee questions the audience might have, alternatives they might explore, and nuances they might like to realize... and provide alll of that before the game is even released. The conversation is still pre-packed, but it's more obviously a conversation. The work doesn't need critics pointing out deeper meanings. In fact, doing so might be seen as spoiling potential replay value.

The definition of "Art" will always come down to what people who disagree with a given definition of what constitutes a Work of Art (and many who agree with said definition) call 'snobbery'.

The best definitions of what makes great works of Art all boil down to the emotional response of the viewer/listener. And for great works of Art, say the Mona Lisa or Beethoven's Fifth, the works elicit an emotive response from people across a wide array of social and historical backgrounds.

Video games are an artistic medium, sure. But because of the interactive nature of video games which require some familiarity with the medium to even get to the point of experiencing the emotive portions, it will have problems getting widespread artistic credibility simply because it is not something that the uninitiated can look at like a painting or film, or hear like music and instinctively "get" that "something" from.

I think one of the big reasons people who make and play video games are trying to classify them as art is to protect them from laws that can restrict them in any way.  Once something has been determined to be "art", then it becomes a lot harder for governments and regulatory bodies to censor or place restrictions on them.

I'm going to have to assume you mean "by the general populace" here, because there's a hell of a lot of games that are stuck firmly in the minds of gaming culture. Pac-Man, Mario Brothers, Zork, King's Quest, Ultima just to name but a handfull.

The largest problem is that the platforms are retired and newer gamers (and the general populace) don't play with old tech to appreciate them.  It's one hurdle that will never go away, I believe.  2-bit, 4-bit, games aren't played now in favor of Hi-Def and those will be discarded for 3-D, Holograms, interactive AI, or whatever else is in the future.

Traditional art, on the other hand, doesn't have this problem.  The senses haven't advanced since man started painting on walls, so there's no additional effort required to appreciate "the old stuff."

That seems strange to me, given that I've heard basically the same criticism levelled against paintings and music.  Joe sixpack doesn't dig Mozart, doesn't cry upon seeing the Mona Lisa.  They don't have any emotional weight because he doesn't get what's so special about them.

Moreover, show him something like modern art, something abstract or otherwise non-mainstream, and he'll be even further out to sea.  Mozart is something refined and dignified, many car insurance commercials have told me so.  But three quarters of the stuff on this page (http://www.google.ca/search?q=modern+art&hl=en&prmd=ivnsb&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=bBvGTfi4F4XPgAeP2pDLBA&ved=0CE8QsAQ&biw=1366&bih=620) I have no idea what it's supposed to mean or why people would care or what.  You need special training to see these paintings as anything other than "my kid could do that" scribbles and blobs.   It's the basis for the whole "I may not know art, but I know what I like" saying.  I would guess that FAR more people "get" Call of Duty than "get" the average work of modern art.

I thought the article was pretty terrible, really, because it keeps talking about games in a mechanical sense and completely ignores them as a narrative medium.

This was my point - PacMan might be 30 years old, but the general populace aren't exactly playing the original game any more. If I were to Google I'm sure I'd find a small dedicated PacMan playing group (and I'm not going to Google, because I don't want to be disappointed in humanity yet again), but if the game is to be Art I'd have to assume that it was being played by the general populace. And they aren't - they are buying Black Ops, playing it for a week and returning it for store credit.

Mario is in a different place because Nintendo refresh him for every console generation, but for a game to be Art the game needs to stand, not the character. Plus as games have hit the mainstream the knowledge of those games aren't exactly passed on either - Ultima is better known now for UO than any of the preceding games, Zork would be near-unheard of by most and King's Quest alledgedly didn't even make it into the 1001 Games You Must Play Before You Die book, which was allegedly vetted by 'experts' (according to one Amazon review of that title, no Sierra Quest games made that list).

In a lot of ways video games are closer to sports - what is happening right now is a lot more important than last season. Sure, there will be a few classic games people talk about, but even those look outdated and only key points are highlighted. Culturally significant films, or paintings, are viewed in their entirity, so that "Citizen Kane" is still watched today for not only its techniques but also its viewpoints / narrative.

By contrast, most video games are outdated 3 years post release.

There are lots of pieces of art that were art in their time that people don't look up, or interact with. So that whole line of reasoning is completely erroneous (bullshit) I'm afraid.

The traditional meaning of 'art' is something that is created by an artisian of some form (an art form), games have this covered, http://artofgamedesign.com. Then you have the term 'art' in the modern sense, which basically boils down to something that evokes an emotional response from the viewer, with the help of aesthetics. Games have both covered so they are art, end of story. High brow art they are not, but does it matter how artsy they are in order for us to prove their merit as pieces of art? Is a street painter not creating art despite the fact he willl probably never host an exhibition in the Tate gallery? Some games provoke such an emotional response that players get completely immersed in what they are seeing, that's art.

If you are seeking a game that is an artistic piece in it's own merit, look no further than Fallout it's pretty much a pop art piece.

Yeah, I think the folks saying that video games aren't good art because their stories never rise above a certain level are missing the boat.  Novels and movies are both storytelling mediums, but compared to novels, movies tend to suck at really long stories or at representing anything other than a limited third person viewpoint, while novels have to work a lot harder to convey visual and aural impressions than movies do.  And there are other mediums like paintings and music that don't usually tell stories at all (or when they do the stories are very simple), but we don't consider them lesser art forms for that.

A video game doesn't need to tell a story in order to be artistic, although I would argue that games as a storytelling medium can accomplish things that movies can't, by involving and interacting with the player in ways that a movie never could.  Sure the story might be simple, but feeling like you were there and it was you that did those things is something that other storytelling mediums are hard pressed to match.

Isn't there another barrier in that games aren't universally accessible? Even leaving aside the platform/hardware issue, all but the simplest of video games require some familiarity with the skills of gaming. An interactive video game, no matter how profound the experience of playing it was, isn't instantly playable by anyone - would your grandmother be able to play Planescape: Torment for instance? Ever?

I'm not saying that I think that's a prerequisite for something to be considered art, but I do feel that the smaller the potential audience for something the less the chance it has to become part of the collective consciousness.

Mind you, I suppose you could argue that you have to learn how to see a lot of modern art, but I also feel that people who argue that are elitist arseholes....

Are you implying that everyone understands modern art on some instinctive level and people who claim they don't get it are lying, or that there's nothing there to understand?  And how is either of those positions elitist?

You don't have to be taught how to see it, but teaching how to appreciate it needs to happen for a lot of people.  If you've got kids old enough to visit an art museum, you learn this firsthand as they ask questions about why that funny white square sculpture is called "The ocean" and why it's art at all.

If you think that's a high barrier to entry, just imagine how accessible medieval literature was if you were an illiterate peasant.

Probably around the same time she'd be able to read, say, Cervantes in the original language.

Just like those arseholes who tell you there's a knack to sussing out cryptic crosswords after doing them for a long time ... how dare they try and mould our perceptions.

Good read, thanks

I'm not sure what learning how to interact with something has to do with art, there are lots of interactive art pieces.

The barrier to entry is much lower for games than modern art. We can never be sure that most modern art isn't just wank either.

There are a lot of things which want to be art, but are not.  This includes many media.

I thought modern art WAS wank. Either it's making fun of the art "scene" or you need to have detailed knowledge of it to understand.. influences and what it means. It's all self-referencing and referencing other pieces and what not.

Which is why I consider, in my barely educated option, Warhol to be the greatest modern artist.

So the part of that (great) post that stuck out for me was Ebert's reply: "Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control"

Art defined this way precludes games from ever being considered art. But it also precludes just about anything else from being considered art either.

To some, the only group capable of even seeing Art are those people specifically trained for it. That being the case, what results is an insular society of artists and critics talking an ever more alien language that narrows the scope of art explored because it then becomes about artists generating art for that that specific community and the resources it provides. This closed loop of creation and appreciation keeps outsiders out, but also creates opportunitioes for people to create new art for new critics which naturally upsets the establishment that mastered their closed loop.

So basically, games are not art because critics of established medium say they're not. That's bullshit.

I've heard it said that games need to be art so there can be a language of critique around them. Maybe. I'll leave that to smarter people. But to define games as art, you'd nee to come to some universally acceptable definition of game. And I don't see even that yet.

It pretty much is pure wankery.

Why modern art gets a "pass" is that it is an off-shoot of existing mediums which have, in the overall sense, already had works that fit the description of "Great works of Art" that I mentioned in my previous post.

Until video games have their "Citizen Kane" moment, you won't find large portions of society seeing games as anything other than another entertainment medium.

It is also important to note that film is a derivative art form and is similar in a way to "modern art" in that it pretty much gets a pass as being artistic simply because it is derived from live theatre which is an art form present in some fashion in all cultures going back to the pre-historic era.

exactly.  It's all about $.  Which is partly why I was hoping the collective WE would not be worrying about games as "Art".  They are and they will be classified along side other narratives easily enough one day.  But for now I would hope we could be more innovative and not worry about classifying and comparing certain games along side other cultural innovations or reflections.  Why? Because it just ends up dulling the novelty and innovation of games to existing (and often stale) comparisons.

And it's good to remember 100 years ago film as "Art" certainly did not exist. This situation is all about certain personalities putting themselves up first as arbiters of taste in order to steer the medium the way they want.  

And on that note from today, http://www.lostgarden.com/2011/05/blunt-critique-of-game-criticism.html

Oh, we're using "Modern" to mean "current" rather than addressing the movement. I see.  You're looking for "contemporary art."

Carry on then.

Performance art confuses me (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIN8Cm5rYXY#t=5m36s) [NSFW]

 :uhrr:

Then it would be EverQuest.

I'm not clicking this but I will guess it is the spaghetti-o pussy.

Art: http://thestoutgames.com/:dinnerdate



After reading that article it seems like he's done a fine job defining what Art is to him. And maybe that's missing the point, that Art is to each person what they need it to be. Most things he considers Art do not stir me one bit, so what value does the term Art have to me if I don't see it?

No, it's some Bosnian thing. It's more surreal than anything else, but features more flesh than is usually SFW. No gore or anything like that.