“This is art,” Sony producer Rusty Buchert told me in Los Angeles last month as he showed me what looked and played like an interactive real-time cut-scene on the PlayStation 3. He was showing me “Linger In Shadows,” the product of a handful of Polish programmers and artists who have created an artistically ambiguous and technically ambitious nine-minute controlled flight through a digital dreamscape.

“Linger In Shadows” is partially personal, though I can’t yet interpret what the flying dog may represent, nor the floating mask and tendrils. It’s partially a programming tour-de-force, something that Buchert said is ” making the hardware stand up and beg.” (Advanced oil-painting effects; procedural fur; other things that are said to wow tech people within Sony, etc. — see some of it here.) It’s all art.

So… how do you sell art on the PS3? Buchert had a neat idea.

I had suggested to Buchert that “Linger In Shadows” boot up with the Sony logo screen bordered in a picture frame. That would be a visual indication that “Linger In Shadows” is art and not exactly a game (not that the two are mutually exclusive, of course!). It would imply that this thing is suitable for framing.

Buchert did me one better. He told me that, if the PlayStation 3’s virtual hang-out space Home would have been out by the summer release of “Linger In Shadows,” he would have liked to showcase the art in there. His idea was for “Linger In Shadows” and future interactive art pieces for the PS3 to appear as framed wall-hangings in Home. Looking at them with your Home avatar would boot the project up.

Currently the way you find art and know that it is art for the PlayStation 3 is to search the system’s online PlayStation Network store. In the games section, there’s a genre breakdown. And in the breakdown is a category called “unique.” Within that is “Aquatopia“, a $2 virtual fish tank classified as “interactive art.”

There doesn’t appear to be any technical reason preventing Sony from launching a bona fide “art” category on the PSN store. The Home idea still seems possible too. But will PS3 owners seek out interactive art? How much will they pay for it? And how will Sony present it, pitching the idea that that game console you bought isn’t just good for “Metal Gear Solid“s and Blu-Ray movies but as 21st century coffee table book or virtual museum — a means with which to find and appreciate art?