Here's a presentation by a small Indie Art studio called Tale of Tales (They made The Path, The endless forest and the new iPhone... distraction... Vanitas)
It talks about their intentions and their ideas and their motivations in the way they create their art and how the potential for the technology that we have is incredible and that games aren't using it because they've found their comfort zone. There is a danger that games will become like comic books. They got stuck in the whole capes and tights thing for too long, and have been left with that reputation ever since, no matter how much innovation is done in the medium.
Warren Spector said a similar thing, games have to be careful not to just sit where they are in their comfort zone.
I think this presentation has a lot of interesting things to say about it.
It is half an hour long though, so really only people who are actually interested to that degree will have the patience to sit through it all, but I found it satisfying.
http://tale-of-tales.com/tales/OverGames.html