Today, our visual art columnist Kyle Chayka takes a look at Minecraft through the world of the landscape painters of the Hudson River School and the Dutch Baroque:

Minecraft is a revelatory genre of landscape art, with its interactivity and wide-open canvas of possibilities. But the concepts of nature and landscape in the game are hardly new to art. The landscapes that players create in Minecraft look effortlessly beautiful, almost organic, upon completion. In reality, they require an extreme degree of control and planning, an active sculpting of the “natural” world. Landscape painting involves much the same process, from the Hudson River School to the seascapes of the Dutch Baroque.

Read more here.