A lot of both everyday society and high class society have views of art and what we deem to be high art, though it's a system that doesn't function on creativity, practicality or variety, but more of it's traditional status. Books are seen as more intellectual than comics, plays more high-class than films and films more important than videogames when in reality it should all be reversed. Drawings are seen as the most traditional form of art, when you think art, your mind instantly thinks of an image on a canvas that someone made with a pencil or a brush (to simplify it) and books are normally seen as the preferred form of telling a narrative, it can be as long as it wants to be, can go into insane amounts of detail and create ideas and stories like nothing else. So when you combine the highest form of visual art and the highest form of story art, you get comic books and this is a...lower form of art? Now obviously combining the two doesn't instantly have the benefits of both forms, a painting for example usually doesn't have a story to it, thus the images presented are up to your own interpretation, and while we can get that for comic books, it's usually more from a narrative aspect than a visual aspect. But apart from that, they still have the variety of styles you can get in a painting, they can be detailed, creative and beautiful images, except they can also tell a story, they can have social themes, complex characters and imaginative stories that they want to tell, stories like Watchmen or Persepolis or Batman. While there is some loss in the combining of the two, they're not as vague as paintings and they're not as detailed as books, yet they still retain 90% of the qualities of both forms, so why is it seen as the lower form of art?
The same can be said comparing movies to videogames, while films have a longer history of being complex and engaging, videogames, especially in the 21st century have become more artistically stimulating, have deeper characters and themes and can tell a story just as well as movies. I would infact take it a step further and say videogames can do it better, and i've discussed it before, the element of control. Videogames give you control of characters, they give you control over the story, the narrative becomes much more personal when you make the choices and the emotional connection that much stronger. People forget that when films were first born, they were nothing but mindless entertainment, something to distract the masses for a little while, the gimmick of seeing moving pictures was enough to keep people coming back, but eventually the charm wore off and if they wanted the form to survive, they had to make it stronger. The same with videogames, they didn't care about stories, they were just blown away by the fact that we had control over what was on screen, again, the same thing, the charm was going to wear down so if they wanted to survive, they had to try harder.
Even films are looked down upon as a lower form of art in comparison to theatre, yet from every technical aspect, theatre is the inferior form. Theatre is always a live performance, which means you only have one take, if you screw up or you don't get it right, that's it, that's the best you can do, film allows you to redo a performance as much as you want to get it perfect, but even then, the performances always have to be exaggerated on the stage, actors have to compromise the integrity of a performance, just to make sure the people in the back can hear them, meaning the dialogue may not always be delivered in the appropriate manner. Not to mention, it's a lot harder to get sucked into a play when you're always aware you're watching performers, you're looking at a set, you're surrounded by other people, you never fully believe you're in this world. Especially from a visual aspect, theatre doesn't have that much to offer in comparison, a film can tell an entire story or create emotions just through visuals alone, what the artist chooses to show you and how they choose to show it, an effect that is much harder to recreate on the stage and rarely done as much.
So why are the highest forms of art, considered the highest forms of art? Well, the main reason being tradition. Books came before Comic Books, Theatre came before Film, Film came before Videogames, the world is often unkind to new talent, new creations (Yes that's from Ratatouille). People are more comfortable accepting films as higher art than videogames because they've already proven to them that they can be, they prefer seeing books as better than comics because that's what they were. When these things were first created and introduced to the world, they were nothing more than fun play things and ways to kill time, the problem is, while the art form has grown, the people at the top haven't, they haven't accepted that new material and new ideas can do things not only differently, for better. Yes a lot of it does come down to personal taste and there are always going to be advantages and disadvantages from each art form to another, but in the end, the greatest form of art isn't what's old or what's new, but what's changing, what adapts to make the art form more capable of expressing great ideas by great artists.
-Danny
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