The indie game arena is where the argument actually gets interesting, I think the most recent contender was some game where you could choose one of several "little red riding hoods" and you simply explored the forest on the way to grandmother's house and decided whether or not to leave the path (I may be remembering this incorrectly). In the end, though, no one in the outside world really gives a fuck one way or the other in regards to a few incredibly obscure exceptions, so it's a fun debate but amounts to nothing.
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Originally Posted by Dimnos
Couldnt some mainstream games full under this description? Obviously not with museums in mind but instead retailers or game conventions or maybe even a magazine or website?
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No, the key point is that games are utilitarian. As are illustrations, but illustrations can be considered fine art if, and only if, they stand alone as masterworks
outside of their original intention and context. And even THAT can be disagreed on. Gustav Dore was and
still is,
after his death in 1883,the western world's single greatest and most prolific illustrator (though he used plates and woodcuts, he still counts as an illustrator). He also was skilled with watercolors.
His watercolors were completely ignored (or ridiculed) in his native France, but their gallery run in Britain was a
titanic success. To the rest of the world, the watercolors were proof positive that Gustav Dore was a true master. The French thought that they were just more illustrations done in watercolor (and inferior to the genuine grand-mastery of his normal plates) and in no way comparable to "real" fine art like Michelangelo or Raphael (I can't remember who his fine art contemporaries were, we need an art history major to jump in here). And that's in an arena where the difference between applied art and fine art actually IS blurred.