Poker Art is something that poker fans may enjoy collecting, and the industry is large enough. Anything from Super Mario chip art to stylish monochrome photographs with titles such as Gunslinger and No Chance, are being produced. With no nuance to entice the eye of a connoisseur it is primarily commercial products.
What the serious poker player - with an eye for the game's complex aesthetics - may have a general interest in whenever he is not busy challenging a worthy rival is poker in art: but does good art exist which is significantly related to poker?
Worthwhile references to the game in art are rare, despite its immense popularity, and some admirers cherish them with the elite pride of the devotees of some wonderful esoteric practice. Mainly in modern compositions poker in music is featured, but for its expression in sound there does not seem to be much possibility. Video usually accompanies the more successful efforts, and these are restricted to MTV clips. Poker is referenced in many songs, but mostly a half-hearted solace is offered. Usually well meaning fans or poker pros that are not necessarily great with words or music are the composers of such songs.
The Card Party: Ballet in Three Deals, is the most significant poker-inspired artwork in music in which I am familiar. Music and visuals are ideally fused by its nature and was first danced by Balanchine's American Ballet Ensemble. It is one of the rarer curiosities poker admirers might want to see, with music by Stravinsky, who enjoyed poker as a pastime. It is more fanciful than accurate in representing the process of playing cards.
Dogs Playing Poker by Cassius Coolidge is one of the most obvious examples in painting form. There was an order for nineteen commercially oriented paintings using anthropomorphized dogs and these were only part of the order. Nowadays, the general concept of cigar-smoking canines around a table in a dim-lit club that is more iconic than the original paintings.
In fact, many works of art tend to stylize poker and card games in general, blending them with fantastic themes. The most obvious example would be Alice in Wonderland. One of Alexander Pushkin's most popular stories is The Queen of Spades which concerns a player desperate to learn a card trick he had heard about from a friend. The story begins as realism and culminates as a sort of card-game horror: the man is so desperate to learn the secret from the old widow guarding it that he threatens her with a pistol (unloaded), unintentionally causing her to die of fear. At the funeral, her corpse opens its eyes and glares at him; then her ghost visits him at his house and discloses the secret. In his first game afterwards the man doubles his possessions. He plays another, but though he knows he was holding an ace, somehow, he appears to have played a queen and lost everything. He is then committed to room 17 of an asylum, raving: Three, seven, ace! Three, seven, queen!. For the film buffs, there is a BAFTA-nominated 1949 British adaptation fantasy-horror adaptation of the story by Thorold Dickinson.
Poker tends to be criminally realistic in film (though not necessarily more accurate), from Cincinnati Kid to Rounders with Matt Damon and Edward Norton. Rounders has become a cult film precisely because of its decent depiction of the playing process and did moderate in the box office.
What the serious poker player - with an eye for the game's complex aesthetics - may have a general interest in whenever he is not busy challenging a worthy rival is poker in art: but does good art exist which is significantly related to poker?
Worthwhile references to the game in art are rare, despite its immense popularity, and some admirers cherish them with the elite pride of the devotees of some wonderful esoteric practice. Mainly in modern compositions poker in music is featured, but for its expression in sound there does not seem to be much possibility. Video usually accompanies the more successful efforts, and these are restricted to MTV clips. Poker is referenced in many songs, but mostly a half-hearted solace is offered. Usually well meaning fans or poker pros that are not necessarily great with words or music are the composers of such songs.
The Card Party: Ballet in Three Deals, is the most significant poker-inspired artwork in music in which I am familiar. Music and visuals are ideally fused by its nature and was first danced by Balanchine's American Ballet Ensemble. It is one of the rarer curiosities poker admirers might want to see, with music by Stravinsky, who enjoyed poker as a pastime. It is more fanciful than accurate in representing the process of playing cards.
Dogs Playing Poker by Cassius Coolidge is one of the most obvious examples in painting form. There was an order for nineteen commercially oriented paintings using anthropomorphized dogs and these were only part of the order. Nowadays, the general concept of cigar-smoking canines around a table in a dim-lit club that is more iconic than the original paintings.
In fact, many works of art tend to stylize poker and card games in general, blending them with fantastic themes. The most obvious example would be Alice in Wonderland. One of Alexander Pushkin's most popular stories is The Queen of Spades which concerns a player desperate to learn a card trick he had heard about from a friend. The story begins as realism and culminates as a sort of card-game horror: the man is so desperate to learn the secret from the old widow guarding it that he threatens her with a pistol (unloaded), unintentionally causing her to die of fear. At the funeral, her corpse opens its eyes and glares at him; then her ghost visits him at his house and discloses the secret. In his first game afterwards the man doubles his possessions. He plays another, but though he knows he was holding an ace, somehow, he appears to have played a queen and lost everything. He is then committed to room 17 of an asylum, raving: Three, seven, ace! Three, seven, queen!. For the film buffs, there is a BAFTA-nominated 1949 British adaptation fantasy-horror adaptation of the story by Thorold Dickinson.
Poker tends to be criminally realistic in film (though not necessarily more accurate), from Cincinnati Kid to Rounders with Matt Damon and Edward Norton. Rounders has become a cult film precisely because of its decent depiction of the playing process and did moderate in the box office.
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