Collecting Poker Art may be something that poker fans enjoy, and the industry is large enough churning out anything from Super Mario chip art to stylish monochrome photographs with titles such as No Chance and Gunslinger. However, most of it is primarily commercial products, with barely a chance to entice a connoisseur’s eye.
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?
Despite its immense popularity, worthwhile references to the game in art are rare and some admirers cherish them with the elite pride of the devotees of some wonderful esoteric practice. Poker in music, to my knowledge, features mainly in modern compositions, but there does not seem to be much possibility for its expression in sound. The more successful efforts are usually accompanied by video, and these are restricted to MTV clips. There are many songs which reference poker, but these offer mostly a half-hearted solace, composed by well meaning fans or even by poker pros that are not necessarily great with words or music.
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.
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 1949 British adaptation fantasy-horror 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.
The author is a successful limit cash game player. He plays poker online and receives Carbon Rakeback as well as Absolute Rakeback.
categories: poker,poker art,gambling,games,entertainment,recreation