I was a vocal defender of the idea behind Smithsonian’s The Art of Video Games exhibit when the dates for it were announced last spring, and I continue to think that an excellent, comprehensive exhibit of video game art is a good idea. But despite some intelligent framing and good curation ideas, The Art of Video Games feels too defensive to be that show.

Perhaps the biggest problem with The Art of Video Games is how much space it feels compelled to devote to testimonials insisting that video games are, in fact, art and worthy of an exhibit of this magnitude. Judging by the massive crowds at the show, that might have been a necessary case to make to donors and curators, but audiences didn’t need to be convinced. One of the joys of attending the show was seeing how excited visitors were to it to see the popular art that’s been important in their lives treated as if it’s worthy of professional assessment and attention. And curating the show more confidently without stopping to justify it would have both eliminated waste space and given little ground to those who doubt the need for The Art of Video Games at all.

Waste space is a problem: the exhibit feels alternately stuffed and and under-full. It’s a three-room show, which doesn’t seem like very much space for an exhibit that’s meant to be comprehensive. The first has concept art, packaging for old games, video interviews with game creators, and a multi-media explanation of the evolution of graphics. But the show’s almost entirely uncaptioned, so it’s hard to tell why these artifacts and not others made it into the show, or what stages of game development they’re meant to represent. The second room has consoles set up that let visitors play classic games on large-scale screens. But once again, they’re captioned with basic summaries of the game rather than any framing that would provide clear context for their inclusion or the advances they represent, and it means that the middle of the exhibit is slowed down by lines of people waiting for their shot at a controller.

The final room is the most interesting, but it still illustrates the show’s weaknesses. The display takes viewers through key games for each major console, with walkthroughs of gameplay to illustrate what console improvements let designers do with everything from character design, to cut scenes, to incentives. It’s a fascinating way to present information, but it also means that viewers are fighting for space at the relatively small screens where the walkthroughs are projected. The audio for each walkthrough’s piped through a single phone at each screen, which means that, even though the narration is captioned on the screen, people end up close to the screen, blocking them. There’s basically no way for any attendee to access all the information in the exhibit.

It’s too bad, because—though I’ll leave it to experts like Harold Goldberg to critique what the voting system that got games into the exhibit included and what it ended up leaving out—there’s a lot of terrific information in the show, whether you’re a long-time gamer or an interested novice. I hadn’t known, for example, that Metal Gear Solid can be played all the way through without killing an enemy. And while it’s not very interesting to hear generic defenses of video games as art, listening to creator Jenova Chen talk about the games he’s designed, like Flow and Flower, which absorb viewers in the natural world, provides a fascinating look at how gaming might answer the demands of a new generation of gamers and a the creative aspirations of a new generation of game designers and developers. It would also have been fascinating—and a good defense of the idea that games are a minor commercial product rather than art—to see games in the context of other media. I really enjoyed seeing the similarities between how Rez, Hackers, and The Matrix visualized the internet in its early days.

But fan enthusiasm and justifying an exhibit don’t a coherent narrative make. There are stories to be told about the development of video games in the past, and where they’re going in the future. And there are stories to be told about the artists, who appear here only in testimonials, rather than accompanied by relevant biographical representation (the show is careful to represent both female gamers and game producers, but it doesn’t discuss institutional sexism in the industry much, or how it affects its output). We’re getting terrific fiction out of the role that video games play in our lives and our economy, like Ready Player One and Reamde. Maybe, if we can finally get a Bioshock, Halo, or Mass Effect movie adaptation off the ground, we’ll have movies to match. And The Art of Video Games won’t be the only museum exhibit we’ll get about this art, this industry. Hopefully, this will lay a foundation for a show that has confidence in itself, and a story to tell about these gorgeous alternate universes.

Reading through President Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal 2013, with a few exceptions, it looks to be a decent year for government support for the arts:

-The administration plans to achieve $25 million in savings by consolidating the Education Department’s arts education programs under a larger umbrella.

-A slight increase in the funding request for the National Endowment for the Arts. For fiscal year 2012, President Obama had asked for $146 million for the NEA, down from $168 in fiscal 2011. This year, he’s requesting $154 million for fiscal 2013, a small increase.

-A similar increase for the National Endowment for the Humanities, from $146 million in fiscal 2012 to a $154 million request for fiscal 2013.

-A $24 million increase in the funding request for the Smithsonian Institution, from $636 million for fiscal 2012 to $660 million for fiscal 2013.

-Continued funding in the amount of $85 million for the construction of the National Museum of African American History and Culture as part of a $186 appropriation for facilities planning, construction, and revitalization of Smithsonian Institution facilities.

-A slight downward tick in funding for the operations of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, from $23,200,000 in fiscal 2012 to $22,379,000 in fiscal 2013.

-A $6 million increase for the National Galleries of Art, from $114 million to $120 million.

Now, just because Obama is asking doesn’t mean he shall receive—that certainly hasn’t been the case in the past. But it’s nice to see the President treat long-term investment in the arts as a worthwhile cause. It’d be a real shame in particular if we lost the chance to get the National Museum of African American History and Culture during the first term of the first African-American president.

The bridge is yours.

-Horse-racing fans, rejoice. You get another season of Luck.

-The best review I’ve read of Lana Del Ray’s album.

-The Smithsonian adds the Mexican Museum in San Francisco to its network.

-Great prints of classic pop-culture real estate.

-A first glimpse at Skyfall, the next James Bond movie.

-Sarah Palin accent fans, your fix is here:

Virginia Rep. Jim Moran’s still hammering away at his proposal for a Museum of the American People on the National Mall with the idea that it would focus on the role of immigration and migration have played in American history. It’s an absolutely critical theme, but I’m concerned about any museum that’s built more on a swell of interest group support than on curatorial imperatives about what will make a strong, cohesive ongoing set of exhibits. If you look at the groups that Moran has signed up to support the museum, almost none of the organizations are primarily concerned with historical preservation and curation. There are a few exceptions, including the Chinese Historical Society of America, the NSU Creole Heritage Center, the Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the German-American Heritage Foundation of the USA, the American Irish Historical Society, the Swedish-American Historical Society, and the Great Plains Welsh Heritage Project (which I now kind of have an overwhelming desire to check out). I’m sympathetic to demands for representation on the Mall. But I don’t know that the German-American Citizens League of Greater Cincinnati is necessarily well-equipped to do more than demand representation.

It’s worth considering two examples of representational museums, one of which I think works fairly well, one of which I think is a considerable failure. The Holocaust Museum has an incredibly narrow mandate, which I think serves it well. And it serves that mandate by devoting most of the gallery space to a single permanent exhibition, so there’s less pressure to fill rotating gallery space with weaker narratives or exhibitions. There is rotating space, though, and when I was there, it was filled by an excellent exhibit on the route out of Germany through Asia some Jews were able to take due to accommodating customs officials. It was a part of the story I haven’t known anything about, and it was a good narrative exhibit.

By contrast, I’ve always been amazed by how weak the Museum of the American Indian is. Part of it is that the architecture doesn’t actually create a lot of gallery space, but I’ve never been exceptionally impressed by how that space has been used. One of the problems with creating a museum out of a sense of representational obligation is that you run the risk of ending up with fairly milquetoast exhibits in an effort not to anger any of your stakeholder. While it’s nice that there’s a Museum of the American Indian, and the cafeteria food is good, I’ve always wondered if Native Americans might be better served by much stronger integration of Native American history and culture into existing Smithsonian museums. A National History Museum exhibit about the Founding Fathers’ experiences on the western frontiers of colonial America and their later failures on Indian policy might reach a lot more people, and be a lot tougher and more informative.

It’s not that I don’t think that there’s a curatorial mandate for a museum about immigration and migration and how both forces shaped America. There are a lot of stories there to tell. But I want to hear the case from curators and historians. It would be a failure to get the Museum of the American People only to have it be accountable to too many groups with competing agendas to actually produce compelling exhibits.

Apparently, in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, visits to the National Navy UDT-SEAL Museum in Florida are up. You have to think the Smithsonian kind of kicks itself on occasions like this that it doesn’t have a military museum on the Mall: can you imagine the cafeteria and gift shop revenue from this? Maybe it’s worth considering converting the Air and Space Museum on the mall while keeping the annex near Dulles, given the space program’s diminishing role in American culture and public policy? Since I can’t imagine heading to Florida given how hot it’s been in Washington this week, maybe I’ll use this as an excuse to finally hit up the National Museum of American Jewish Military History, one of the charming oddities of the city I’ve been meaning to visit since I moved here five years ago.

Not to say that there shouldn’t be a National Museum of Jewish Military History, or a Navy SEALs museum, but it sure puts the quibbles over a National Museum of the American Latino in perspective, doesn’t it? I think there’s something to be said for a curatorial argument that organizing museums along ethnic lines would limit exhibitions—though there’s an equally strong argument to be made that without that racial or ethnic framework, it would be hard to put stories like the Civil Rights movement in their most important context. But it all goes to show that you never know when there’s going to be a sudden spike of interest in a museum or historical site for minor topics. Surely there’s a case to be made for museums on broader subjects, even after the Mall’s filled up.