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# Super Mario Bros is great but let’s not go overboard
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/super-mario-bros-great-lets-not-go-overboard/
- Published: 2012-12-14T15:40:20.000Z
- Updated: 2015-11-17T14:44:21.000Z
- Description: The Ideas Channel dude – you know, the gingerbearded Seth Cohen type who talks really fast about culture – had an idea about videogames. It is: Super Mario Brothers is the world’s greatest piece of surrealist art. To summarize, because the visual elements of the Mario universe are as weird and appa
- Author: Joseph Bernstein
- Tags: News, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-26 09:39

The Ideas Channel dude – you know, the gingerbearded Seth Cohen type who talks really fast about culture – had an idea about videogames. It is: *Super Mario Brothers* is the world’s greatest piece of surrealist art.

To summarize, because the visual elements of the *Mario* universe are as weird and apparently nonsensical as a Dali painting, *Super Mario Bros* is the greatest surrealist artwork of all time. Well, ok. As we’ve known since Duchamp’s urinal, context is everything when it comes to art. If it’s in a gallery, it’s art; if it’s on the street behind a dumpster, it’s trash. “But videogames are now in MOMA!” you cry. Fair enough. But it’s important to remember that surrealism was avant garde because it was a genuine shock to the people who saw it – it was a reaction to both the art that came before it and the political and social changes of the time.

*Mario*, though indisputably wonderful and strange, is hardly an unsettling of what came before it, and you’d be hard pressed to make an argument that it’s a response to the political and social changes of the 1980s. The better argument, as the Idea Channel dude gets to, is that the nonsense visual vocabulary of *Mario* may have helped condition our culture to accept more nonsense signs in mass media. Now that’s an idea.