Juror Insights "When Kevin Salatino (Curator of Prints and Drawings at LACMA) asked me to be on the Into The Pixel jury for the 2005 competition, I thought he had lost his aesthetic mind, and I said as much in a slightly-less polite way. It's an odd thing to judge static images that were, for the most part, taken from video games. (Some of the images turned out to be preparatory studies). And then the other problem; it is art? I decided not to be pedantic and take the images at face value and judge them from my perspective as a curator. I look at composition, color, and line, as well as the disposition of characters - not to mention a bunch of other issues. What I found were images that were sometimes poetic, sometimes nostalgic, and sometimes downright brilliant." -- Louis Marchesano, Getty Research Institute "Each year the games industry continues to attract incredible artistic talent from around the globe. Yet much of the work created by these artists goes into the pre-produiction process and is rarely seen in its original form by the art-loving public. That's why Into The Pixel is an exciting opportunity. It allows the artistic work to be seen and judged by the artistic merits of the creators and not by the commercial success that is all too often mistaken for quality in our mass market medium. To gain the attention and support of the museum community brings recognition and acknowledgement to those exceptional individuals who continue to foster inspiration within the games industry each day." -- Lorne Lanning, Oddworld Inhabitants "The variety was extraordinary, and I was impressed with how the digital medium allows such varied pictorial effects. Some works seemed to evoke more traditional paints or drawings, while some effects were more sculptural or digital. The artists' imaginative and inventive range of subjects was amazing, and not at all formulaic." -- Cynthia Burlingham, Hammer Museum |
