I've been looking through the websites and web portfolios of countless digital artists this year. I pore through them looking for inspiration and ideas on how to render my own subjects and imaginations in digital media such as Photoshop and Painter. There's a short list of links to sites like these on this Weblog page, so you can see what I'm talking about if you want to. These artists' work doesn't always go into print. Nor does it grace the walls of galleries and museums. They work for what is generally known as the "entertainment industry," meaning films, videos, commercials, theme parks, and especially video games.

After months of admiring this art, and knowing just how much work goes into it, I mentally stepped back and wondered to myself. I had never conceived how much of this material there was. I never knew how many artists, many of them spectacularly good, worked in this medium and industry all over the world, from China and Korea all the way through Eastern and Western Europe, and all over North America, including many immigrant artists who have come over to the USA to find their fortune.

And then I wondered why all this effort, all this talent, all the toil of thousands and thousands of international artists with amazing technology in their hands, was spent in the name of ….entertainment. Mere entertainment: video games, comic-book and fantasy movies, science fiction and fantasy illustrations, role-playing games, anime and manga cartoons, much of which will be obsolete in a few months. So much work, so little ….substance.

I was raised in a world of cultural Puritanism. In the "modernist" world of high art and classical music, I was instilled with an Augustinian revulsion for "entertainment." Art was for serious purposes. It was either for religious worship, as with Bach's great choral works, or it was nationalistic, such as the music of Dvorak or Verdi, situating the listeners in a proud cultural heritage. Or, in more modern times, art and music were instruments of forcible enlightenment, shocking the listeners and viewers into what should be a higher moral and spiritual state, whether political or personal. It was anything but entertainment.

Entertainment has the connotation of frivolity. You go to the movies not to be given moral and spiritual uplift, but to be swept away for a few hours into the world of Tolkien or Star Wars or Fred Astaire. You don't learn how to be a better human being by playing "Grand Theft Auto 4." A cultural puritan wants art to somehow mold the listener or viewer or reader into a better person. This is not (generally) what entertainment does.

In ages past, it was the Churches that hired the artists to convey morality and splendor. That was where the money was. And now, of course, entertainment is where the money is, which is why there are thousands of these artists striving to get the bucks working there. The default job for "serious" artists is not working for a game company (horrors!) but teaching in a university, college, or even a high school, where there is still a sense of didactic moralism in academic art. (For instance, the heavy-handed social messages in many of the "installations" that populate modern galleries.) In my younger days I remember musicians looking down at even famous American composers like Copland and Bernstein, because they dared to write music for movies or Broadway. That is, popular entertainment. And yet, some of Prokofiev's greatest works were written for films, such as Alexander Nevsky. Is that piece redeemed by the wartime nationalism that helped the Russians resist the German invasion?

The times, obviously, are very different now. There are far more cultural "niches" (borrowing from the language of ecology) for artists nowadays. Postmodernists will say that the old divisions of high moralist art versus low entertainment art no longer exist. And yet it still haunts someone like me, old enough to have grown up under the shadow of the Puritan regime.

Posted at 3:26 am | link