By Japhy Grant

A provocative new show opened this month at New York's Pace Wildenstein Gallery that takes a look at video games from an artistic standpoint. Rather than examining the artistry of commercial video games, "Breaking & Entering: Art and the Video Game" looks at seven artists who have appropriated video game imagery in their work. Noting that his travel expense quota doesn't roll over into the New Year, Dr. OXO bought a plane ticket to the Big Apple to check it out, and while the exhibit does little to answer the question of whether video games are a viable art form, it's worth checking it out for the bazooka-wielding Elvises alone.

Now, I'm not an art critic and this is a video game column, but this is not your regular wine-swilling turtleneck-wearing kind of art show either. Walking in, the first thing I notice is a series of paintings by Jon Haddock that look exactly like screenshots from The Sims, only instead of the characters making pasta or arguing in Simlish, they are recreating famous moments from history. There's a Rodney King Sim being beaten by Sim cops, a dead Nicole Sim-Simpson lying on the terrazzo of a Sim O.J. mansion and Sim Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire.

The casual way violence and video games intersect is a repeated theme of the exhibit. Two pieces, Cory Arcangel's Bomb Iraq and Eddo Stern's Deathstar, in which various acts of violence are committed against Osama Bin Laden, manage to address this is in a way which goes beyond the usual Joe Lieberman "video games are the bogeyman" argument. By focusing on the Iraq War, the pieces wind up being more than simple statements about how video games can be violent and instead show how any medium can become a conduit for hate.

The highlight of the exhibit however, is an installation from the group Paper Rad. Walking through a child size portal into a small multi-hued room, a girl projected on a video screen tells you she's going to show you what happens when you "press the F14 key". She hits it and the two screens light up with a moving collage of sprites from old video games. The 'Noid from Domino's Dots runs across the screen while Metroid looms overhead only to be lashed at by Guybush Threepwood from Monkey Island. It's goofy and nostalgic, but a lot of fun as well. It harkens back to the days when video games didn't take themselves so seriously, where every title didn't have to be steeped in sprawling mythos and super-realistic pathos. That this message is coming to you from an art gallery exhibit on video games is a tad ironic, though.

It's a new year and the video game industry is making its strongest push for legitimacy yet with new consoles and titles and features catering to a wider audience. This is a mixed blessing, for the more mainstream games get, the less idiosyncratic they will be. It seems the more we try to hang our video games up on the wall next to the Picasso, the less fun they will be. Give me Leisure Suit Larry any day.

"Breaking & Entering: Art and the Video Game" will be at Pace Wildenstein (32 East 57th St., New York, NY) through Jan. 28. For more information, see www.pacewildenstein.com.

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