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Exploring Poker in Fine Art
Poker fans may enjoy collecting Poker Art, and there is a large enough industry churning out anything from Super Mario chip art to stylish monochrome photographs with titles such as Gunslinger and No Chance. Most of it, however, is primarily commercial products, with little or no nuance to entice the eye of a connoisseur.
With an eye fro the game's complex aesthetics, the serious poker player may have a general interest in is poker in art when he is not challenging a worthy rival. Is there an existence of good art which is significantly related to poker?
Worthwhile references to the game in art are rare despite its immense popularity. With the elite pride of the devotees of some wonderful esoteric practice, they are cherished by some admirers. To my knowledge, poker in music features mainly in modern compositions, 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. References to poker in songs can be found although these being composed by well meaning fans or even by poker pros that are not that great with words or music, are offered with mostly half-heated solace.
The most significant poker-inspired artwork in music I am familiar with, and one which by its nature ideally fuses music with visuals, is The Card Party: Ballet in Three Deals, first danced by Balanchine's American Ballet Ensemble. Music by Stravinsky, who enjoyed poker as pastime, it is one of the rarer curiosities poker admirers might want to see, though 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.
Though not necessarily more accurate, poker tends to be criminally realistic in film, from Cincinnati Kid to Rounders with Edward Norton and Matt Damon. Rounders did moderately in the box office but because of its decent depiction of the playing process it has become a cult film. Martin Scorsese gave us a memorable sequence in Casino, three years earlier, where by means of a hammer and De Niro's poker-face threats a young pair of con poker players are expertly detected and deprived to cheat in any near future.
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