The Art of Video Games

Smithsonian American Art Museum Washington, D.C.

Through Sept. 30

It all began with a small white square “ponging back and forth” across a plain black screen, said Liesl Bradner in the Los Angeles Times. Only a few decades later, video games have been invited into the Smithsonian, raising the question: Does video-game art belong in a museum? This “sanitized, uncontroversial, and rigorously unprovocative” exhibition is determined not to answer, said Seth Schiesel in The New York Times. The curators have instead mounted a “meek” survey of the games that have been created during the industry’s 40-year history, giving all the big manufacturers their due, but pretending that such benchmark creations as Rockstar Games’ violent Grand Theft Auto III never existed. “Museums will one day bring the same intellectual attention to the substantive meaning of video-game exhibitions as they do for, say, painting exhibitions.” For now, fans of the medium must be content to simply have gotten in the door.

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The show raises its most interesting questions almost inadvertently, said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. Video interviews with various gamemakers reveal the industry to be burdened by “a good deal of groupthink.” Without exception, they see the history of video games as a straight-line progression toward achieving greater narrative interest and cinematic realism, when it’s not clear to an observer that aping movies is the best use of the medium. No one in the show so much as asks if the typical game fails as a depiction of reality because individual players wield far too much control. “At the very least, one would like an exhibition that makes critical distinctions, that tells us which games are better than others, and why.” The Smithsonian hasn’t even done that.