"An Apology For Roger Ebert"

The title of a talk (transcript here) by Brian Moriarty, delivered 4 March 2011 at the 25th Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, an intelligent defense of Ebert's remark that "video games can never be art."
Among other things, I found this interesting:

Back in 1900, the trustees of the Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned a beautiful new auditorium.

Around the edge of the gold proscenium they mounted a series of nine flat plaques, three on the left, three on the right and three overhead.

The plan was to inscribe these plaques with the names of the world's nine greatest composers.

We can imagine the names that were being thrown around. Bach, Handel and Haydn, Mozart, Brahms.

But when it came time to actually sit down and determine which composers would be honored, the trustees couldn't make up their minds.

And so, for the past 111 years, visitors to Boston Symphony Hall sit before a gold proscenium with eight empty plaques. Only one, at the very top, contains a name, the only one the trustees could all agree on: Beethoven.

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