The Art of the Gamer

Is the Gamecube the new white cube? New York's Pace Wildenstein Gallery wants to know. Their show, Breaking and Entering: Art and the Video Game, experiments with what can happen when you turn an art gallery into an inhabitable gamespace. 'Products of a generation whose cultural habits and memory have been very much formed by interactive experience, [the artists] construct their own reality out of the detritus of imagination,' writes curator Patricia Hughes. The show celebrates the creative versatility of digital media, while simultaneously delving into the very nature of play: Brody Condon’s 'DeResFX.Kill,' sees a cultural icon (Elvis) deployed as the artist’s amenable object; Eddo Stern’s 'Deathstar' offers an interpretation of video gaming as an expression of international aggression; and JODI’s life-size quad screen installation examines gaming as an index of the creative process itself. B&E runs through January 28. Break into it. - Peggy MacKinnon