Let's settle this once and for all: Is grilled brie and some fresh basil leaves art?

EDIT: I'll try to introduce this topic more thoroughly because as Elmlea has rightfully pointed out, the whole thing didn't make too much sense in the first place. I'm sorry if any bad impression has come across as this wasn't the point so I'll start again:

My intend with this post is to try to show that the problems often discussed regarding video games and the art attribute could be resolved rather easily and that this isn’t a problem of the games industry in particular but a problem that has slowly evolved roughly since the middle ages and I'm afraid one we will not get rid of too soon.

There is a structurally enforced misconception of the term art that has been held in place for a couple of hundred years. Every now and then someone (usually an artist because noone else really cares that much) tries to clarify and gets either ignored or highly praised within the art community which is essentially part of the problem.

The really sad thing about it is that the ENTIRE problem is that of a simple definition:

The common believe is that art is a quality of a certain thing; That one can, given he/she is qualified, look at a thing and deduct wether or not it is art.

This is wrong. We have known that for a hundred years now.

Why is that a misconception? Because it ignores the relation of the viewer towards a thing in favour of an inherent quality of the thing itself – To put it in other words:

Wether or not something is art is not an attribute of a thing (a painting, music, game, etc.) but an attribute of your perception.

Say you look at a Rembrandt painting. If you see a painting that depicts a certain thing, see the colours, the mood etc. then it is NOT art in that it is NOT ART TO YOU because your perception of it doesn’t do anything unusual. It may still be masterfully done and a joy to look at but that’s it.

If you look at the same painting and suddenly start to feel something you dind’t expect, if the relationship between you and that painting exceeds your preconception (of the relationship of course) then it is art – but only to you.

We all know that this is true intuitively because we’d all say that art is something personal, that it cannot be defined (not even explained most of the time).

However it is defined. It has been defined by galleries, museums and collectors since the tryptichon arose in the middle-ages.

Why?

Because this leads to a lot of uncomfortable problems for a lot of rather wealthy people.

Because it means there is no artist. Nobody could claim to make art since anything can become art at any given time for any given person.

Because otherwise you can’t sell it.

This literally is the entire problem art has in the history of man (at least in the history of the post greek western european tradition) because any other problem art could have is completely pointless once the definition of art is not derived from this hollow foundation of profitability.

And there were people who tried to fight this:

You see what happened at the turn of the 19th century was that a certain french artists started to get the feeling that EXACTLY this is what’s wrong with the art field in general. He knew that he couldn’t just tell people (Because frankly the art field is dominated by wealthy galleries and museums who have build a rather fool proof network of defining, evaluating and selling art) so he tried something very clever:

He took completely random objects, signed them with an alias and submitted them to the Society of Independent Artists in New York in which he himself was a member and tried to declare them as art.

This man was Marcel Duchamp and his pieces were called the Ready-Mades which are now on par with the most praised and valuable pieces of art known to man.

He clearly failed miserably. And he knew he did. At the end of his „career“ (He’d certainly put that in quotation marks) he used to say that he’d rather shoot someone or be shot than ever make art again.

I’m really losing hope here. This problem has been elaborated in every detail for countless times but the ignorance it encounters every single time is so overwhelmingly structured and elaborated there seems to be no way to resolve it. With video games it is essentially the same thing.

Everybody keeps debating about wether or not the medium is even suited to be art but the entire question is so glaringly pointless I’m getting a headache from thinking about it’s implications.

So here’s the thing: We will not resolve this. As long as there are galleries, as long as there is an art market, video games will be tolerated at best (As are motion pictures). There’s no winning in this unless we get to the core of the problem.