I ran across two intriguing quotes over the past couple of days that have absolutely nothing in common and have no right to be rubbing up against each other like this. But here they are anyway, and make of them what you will.

First, Philip Kennicott, reviewing (well, eviscerating) “The Art of Video Games” exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum for the Washington Post, wrote:

What must a game do to become art? And when will the medium itself begin to look more like the art world than the entertainment industry?

I’d propose some of the following: We’ll know it’s art when old games are as interesting to people as new ones; when particular games play a role in changing the actual world, just as novels such as The Sorrows of Young Werther, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle altered ideas of identity and politics; when the best games are richly self-referential to an accepted canon of classic games; and when the contemplation after playing a game is more pleasing than the game itself.

Which to me says more about the fact that the Post should have sent someone else to review the exhibition than it does about the exhibition itself.

Meanwhile, the current issue of The Paris Review prints an interview with Terry Southern that has gone unpublished for decades because the magazine allows its subject to have a final edit, and since Southern never got around to tweaking his words, the transcript is only seeing print after having been rediscovered long after his death.

Lots of meat in the interview, but what tickled me was Southern’s statement that:

I don’t know why, but I always feel a kind of necessity to write things that are beyond acceptance, that are too offensive or something. For people to read them and say, Ha-ha-ha, very funny. No, we can’t print that.

Not a goal I’d recommend following for those who wish to get published, but the world is a much more interesting place due to those who think so.