Video Games and Art

In the article on gaming, one interesting idea that people are being threatened by forms that threaten to supercede their own. Video games are emerging with increasingly sophisticated graphics, and online role-playing games have created a vibrant community across the world.
Henry Jenkins makes a very interesting point in the interview about ways of engaging with art form in meaningful and non-meaningful ways. His claim that video game players can either engage in meaningful or non-meaningful ways, an mode of interaction that he claims is present in engaging with all forms of art. This is a very interesting claim, but could be problematic. Does the content have an impact on the level of meaning in an engagement? Does a romance novel promote a less meaningful interaction than Tolstoy? If someone is going through a museum and breezing past most paintings, but spending an extended period of time getting to know one specific painting the example that Jenkins is looking for?
It seems very difficult to establish levels of meaning, and to declare someone else's interaction non-meaningful runs the risk of revealing snobbery.

Artist Blogs and Websites

The model for selling and showing art had been firmly in place for at least 100 years, but it is currently undergoing rapid changes. Alternative spaces to display and sell art have existed for a long time, but other incarnations of alternative spaces were mostly visited by those already familiar with the contemporary art world. Now, art can be displayed and sold by the artists themselves, frequently to people who have never seen the work. The idea of purchasing work that a buyer had never seen in person would have been totally anathema 10 years ago, but websites like www.20x200.com have made this practice common.
But has it diminished the power of the gallery? Now that any artist can set up a website and display his or her images, is the importance of showing in galleries diminished? More images than ever are available now, and the proliferation of these images might mean that viewers are immune to them and look without really looking.
This development has certainly opened up the art world. Viewers are no longer constrained by gallery schedules, and the plethora of images available may also mean that viewers can hone their visual abilities by looking on the internet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq6b9bMBXpg&feature=email
(Sorry, youtube doesn't allow embedding!)

With the advent of YouTube, performance art events that once would only have been seen by those in attendance can be preserved and circulated without limits. Prior to YouTube, performance art pieces might have been recorded via film or by photograph, but the experience of attending the piece was lost. While a video recording of a performance piece does not truly capture the experience, the video of the "spontaneous dance" also allows the YouTube viewers to see the reactions of those in attendance at the rail station and perhaps imagine themselves in the scene.
This video went viral fairly quickly, and the mechanisms that now exist for wide distribution totally change the way that people see performance art. This video is particularly great for its whimiscal nature, and its popularity shows the lighter side of art.