> The operative but missing adjective was `traditional', as in
> traditional visual arts, i.e. painting, drawing, printmaking, etc.
It's complicated, because the global periphery is so saturated with visual commodities of all kinds -- T-shirts, logos, LCD screens, Coke cans, etc. I was just thinking about this problem, actually, while watching a Satyajit Ray movie from the early 1960s. All these very traditional Indian forms -- processions, temples, visual motifs, and those exquisite sound-tracks -- get mobilized on behalf of a progressive cultural nationalism, which is still rooted in living folk traditions. That's not something which is possible in the same way today, with the partial exception of Fourth World cultures.
> theater where as video and video games in particular seem to fall into
> something like printmaking and maybe illuminated manuscripts as a
> category, that is predominately for a restricted form of ownership,
> possession, distribution----fellow acolytes.
The big change in the videogame culture since the 1990s is that the restrictions have broken down. The 1980s videogames were very exclusive, tied to a narrow group of white, male, mostly US-based professional-class programmers/techies (one critic, I can't remember who, called them "Trekkies with trigger fingers", which is actually pretty accurate). Since the mid-1990s, though, both audience and form have gone multinational. The cost of writing the code for a 3D videogame is somewhere around 1/10th or 1/20th the cost of an average film, I think.
-- DRR