It’s not every day that a video-game critic opens a post with an image of an image of a brooding Morton Feldman, especially when the purpose is to “defend” a video game. The game in question is Portal (see half-life2.com). The defense is from Chris Dahlen‘s savetherobot.wordpress.com:
And the defense I tried to mount is that it should be judged the way we’d look at, say, a piece of contemporary music. … Take For Philip Guston, which lasts four hours. It’s slow, pensive, elegant, and non-repetitive. It’s utterly absorbing. You can throw it on as background music — I used to play it while I was working on programming assignments alone in my apartment — yet it’s always gripping part of your mind, a constantly evolving experience with a subliminal tension and a graceful 50-or-so-minute denoument. But I don’t know that it’s about anything, other than itself.
Technically, this quote of the week appeared a few weeks back. Dahlen’s post is dated March 2.