Topics Art

Question Roger Ebert said some time ago that there are no video games that can compare with the great works of art in other mediums, such as poetry or literature or film. What kind of comparison is he talking about? Looking at more established art forms, it seems clearly nonsense to compare something like Beethoven's Ninth to Shakespeare's Hamlet, being so radically different mediums - yet we don't say that no play has yet matched any of the great musical compositions of our culture, or that no poem can compare with the great sculptures of the past. On what level, then, are two works from different mediums (like the Ninth Symphony and Hamlet) comparable? Is it just in there overall quality, and if so, how does one judge the overall quality of a work of art, independent from those features that set it apart from other art forms? It doesn't seem fair to say that Hamlet has more psychological depth than the Ninth, or that the Ninth is more harmonious and evocative than Hamlet. Is it, rather, a question of comparable contexts, comparable status and recognition, comparable influence?

Accepted:
April 14, 2011

Comments

It's not clear to me that when Ebert said that there are no video games that compare with great works of art in other media, he meant to imply that works in different media are comparable, as if there were some metric by which one could directly compare instances of different types of art. Ebert's point seems to be that although in media such as literature, music, film, etc., there are certain works that are recognized by all suitably placed judges as great--although of course the relative greatness of the works in any given art is a matter of considerable dispute--there are no video games that could be seen as great in the same way as works of music, film, literature, etc., are great. This may reflect a judgment on Ebert's part that video games are not a medium that can support work that could even conceivably qualify as great in the way that works of music, film, literature, etc., can; it may also reflect Ebert's judgment that no video game that has been created to date counts as a great piece of art, although it is possible that such a work might someday be produced.

The question of whether it is possible to compare works from different media, which underlies your initial question, is fascinating. Surely, as you point out, one cannot directly compare works from different media, since the respects in which a work of visual art are great are quite different from the respects in which a piece of literature are great. Although I myself tend to refrain from making comparisons across media--because I'm inclined to think that one respect in which a work of art manifests its greatness is in the way in which it makes use of the medium of the particular art of which it is an instance--it doesn't seem to me to be incoherent to ask, for example, whether Michelangelo is a greater artist than Mozart, or whether Pollock is a greater American artist than Fitzgerald, or whether some artist or work in one particular medium is greater with respect to that particular medium, than some artist or work from another medium. Now in order to compare artists who work in different media, or artworks from different media, one would of course have to abstract from what was particular to the media, and consider more general features of the arts in question that could be shared by them. So instead of asking whether Hamlet has more psychological depth than Beethoven's Ninth Symphony--since it seems to me at least that the difference in the media makes it the case that the Ninth cannot explore psychology to so great an extent as Hamlet--one might instead ask whether Hamlet is a more moving or affecting work than the Ninth. There is, however, a deep question--at least in my mind--as to whether in ascending to this level of generality, one wouldn't be leaving behind what makes a work of art the distinctive work that it is: namely, the medium of that art. And this raises another question: to what extent is the medium of a work of art essential, from an aesthetic point of view, to the assessment of a work of art? That, I think, is a deep and complicated question indeed...