Gaming as Art...Literally

This summer, I had the opportunity to attend the opening night of the I Am 8-bit art gallery in LA. Being the gamer that I am, I was excited about attending. Here was an art show dedicated to exploring the cultural significance of video games. Sadly, the actual event was a complete intellectual disappointment.

Let me just say, that I was in no way disappointed with the actual aesthetic nature of most of the artwork. If I had $600 burning a hole in my pocket, I would've bought this Zelda painting immediately. My problem was with the messages the art was trying to convey. Specifically, it was the lack of messages the art was conveying that made the show unsatisfying.

I Am 8-bit was nothing more than a pop art show. That is not to say that pop art in general is some type of vile entity that should be avoided like the plague. But, was it too much to ask that the art says something more than, "Hey remember Earthworm Jim? Well check out this painting!"


The art seemed to say nothing about gaming culture at all. It would've been nice to have seen art that made the audience think about how we game, or challenge the way we think about video games. Instead, all it did was take the viewer on an expedition of nostalgia without ever exploring what made the games so memorable or thought provoking in the first place.

Perhaps the worst part of the gallery was how some art reeked of what I'd like to call, "we're mature now!" art. CAUTION: The next few pictures are slightly NSFW. Don't look at these at work if you like your job.
The only thing this piece says to me is, "Hey we're so mature we're going to make a painting of a topless Princess Peach with tattoos. That's what mature art is, right?" It just feels like the artists being displayed were trying too hard to show that gaming was another form of artistic expression. The problem was that most of the artists failed to capture what exactly made gaming such a unique medium in the first place.

I'm not even going to justify this one with a critique.

Of course there was at least one piece that did appear to say something about gaming:


It's a simple piece. A faceless woman with a game of Tetris being played inside her mind. Compared to most of the other artwork, this piece said a lot about how gaming relates to our everyday life. We constantly try to make meaning of life and organize our experiences much in the same way as we organize tetrominoes in Tetris. However, there's always a risk at overfilling our minds with too much information. Needless to say, at least this painting got me thinking.

There was also a DJ at the event doing live synthesizing with a game boy that I thought was a nice touch. I'll go over that whenever I decide to write about music and gaming.

Despite the fact that I came away from the event disenchanted, I don't regret attending. If anything, I think the I Am 8-bit exhibit is a decent starting point for presenting the importance of video games. However, in order for that to happen, the people who submit art to the exhibit need to focus more on what gaming means for them as opposed to nostalgic pop art. If we want gaming to be considered as a true art form, then the art that is derived from it needs to actually say something about gaming. There's just something wrong with an art exhibit when the free Mega Man 9 box art posters say more about gaming than the actual art on display.