While in Vancouver for the Congress, I went to the Vancouver Art Gallery to see the show Krazy! The Delirious World Of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art which brought together in one exhibit significant works from Anime, Comics, Graphic Novels, Manga, Video Games, Animation and Art. The show was better than I had expected reading the article in the Globe and Mail. For each section they got curators with a background in the field. For example, Will Wright (of SIMs fame) did the video game section.
The challenge of such an exhibit is how to show stuff like comics that are meant to be consumed in another form. The video game section was particularly problematic – they had inkjet printouts of Spore (upcoming game by Wright) screens and characters (that weren’t much better than a good screen), but it wasn’t like the comic section where they had original art and sketches. To exhibit in an art gallery the types of work that are consumed in other contexts was more an exercise in legitimation – telling us these should be thought of as art. The selection of what was important was what was really being exhibited – a “best of” list of lists with commentary on the walls.