Does Poker Exist in Fine Art?

• Author: Tom Kearns
• Filed under: Poker
• Date: Nov 25,2009

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.

A general interest for the serious poker player, with an eye for the game’s complex aesthetics, may be poker in when he is not busy challenging a worthy rival art. Does good art which is significantly related to poker exist?

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 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.

Poker and card games tend to be stylized by many works of art, blending them with fantastic themes. Alice in Wonderland would be the most obvious example. The Queen of Spades in Alexander Pushkin’s most popular story, concerns a player desperate to learn a card trick he or she had heard about from a friend. The story culminates into a sort of card-game horror though it began as realism: the man so desperate to learn the secret from the old woman guarding it that he threatens her with an unloaded pistol unintentionally causing her to die of fear. Her corpse opens her eyes to him at the funeral then her ghost visits him at his house discloses the secret. The man doubles his possessions in the first game afterwards. In another game he knows he is holding an ace but somehow plays a queen and loses everything. After being committed to an asylum he raves in room 17: Three, seven, ace! Three, seven, queen! There is a BAFTA-nominated’49 British adaptation fantasy-horror of the story by Thorold Dickinson.

In film, poker tends to be criminally realistic (though not necessarily more accurate), from Cincinnati Kid to Rounders, with Edward Norton and Matt Damon. The last did moderately in the box office but has become a cult film precisely because of its decent depiction of the playing process. Three years earlier Martin Scorsese gave us a memorable sequence in Casino where a pair of con poker players are expertly detected and deprived of the ability to cheat in any near future by means of a hammer and De Niro’s efficient poker-face threats.

The author of this article began playing poker seriously in 2000 and has played full time since early 2005. He currently makes the majority of his income from online poker and Ultimate Bet Rakeback.