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Newsletter #553
The Crack of Dawn
What is art? Here is one view:
“Art, at its most significant, . . . [is] a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.” —Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media, 1964
A friend asked me recently, “When you watch a movie, you do see all of the filmmaking going on?” I said, “Yes.” He replied, “That’s too bad. I feel sorry for you. I just see the film.”
To me that’s akin to visiting the Museum of Modern Art with a university professor of art and asking, “When you look at a painting do you see the brushstrokes and know the history of the artist, as well as the artistic movement in which they were involved?” The professor says, “Yes,” and you respond, “That’s too bad. I feel sorry for you. I just see the painting.”
It’s as though we’ve come to a point where the common belief is that knowledge hinders enjoyment. Furthermore, one ought to feel lucky and grateful that they’re ignorant because it brings them a purity of wonderment – just like a young child. Ah, the purity of wonderment of a young child. What could be more powerful? An Apache helicopter with both machineguns and hellfire missiles, that’s what.
Heaven forfend, but I’m of the same Baby Boomer generation as Steven Spielberg (who is 12 years older than me) and George Lucas (who is 14 years older), and we all grew up going to the theater and watching the same movies. When those guys became the shit in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, neither of them would shut the fuck up about their inner child, and the wonderment and awe they’d experienced as kids watching Disney movies. I can all too easily recall Spielberg, wearing that shit-eating grin, saliva foam in the corners of his mouth, waxing rhapsodically about Dumbo. I wanted to gag. Sure, Dumbo was good (the blackbirds sing, “I seen a horse fly/I seen a house fly/But I never seen an elephant fly”), but it was for kids! As soon as it was humanly possible, I stopped watching kid’s movies, moved up to adult fare, and never looked back. My inner child became my outer adult.
Even though there were many talented filmmakers working throughout the ‘70s, making a vast panoply of intelligent movies, by the ‘80s the Spielberg/Lucas inner child bullshit became the predominant force, which is indeed still with us. So, one by one the mature filmmakers making mature films were discarded. Plus, kid’s movies are much easier to quantify. First of all, if the movie is for kids then it’s supposed to be dumb. Therefore, thinking about the script too much is obviously a mistake. And, if all of the largest-grossing films each had between 1000 and 2000 digital effects shots in them (or whatever), then if you too have a similar amount of FX shots, and a dumb script, you’re already well on your way toward success.
If the good old days are exemplified by watching Disney movies, I missed the good old days. In any case, here we are. And I started this missive with that provocative Marshall McLuhan quote about art being an early warning system. If this is indeed so, what do the present day arts tell us?
Art is now simply a commodity – a useful thing, an article of trade, a product.
I was questioned recently by an intelligent person as to what was my definition of art? I felt reasonably secure, if not original, in saying, “The mastery of a craft executed to the point of beauty.” His response was unhesitating, “Oh, come on, you’re kidding, right?” I wasn’t. He said, “What about Andy Warhol, who was probably the greatest artist of the 20th century?”
Whoa! Andy Warhol (“like holes”) was the greatest artist of the 20th century? I have nothing against Andy Warhol, and I’m amused by some of his late-‘50s, early-‘60s period, but mostly he made Xerox copies of shit. I didn’t have a clever rejoinder at the time, but how about Pablo Picasso?
Picasso didn’t just have an influence on his generation; he influenced several generations. And how about Norman Rockwell, whose style finally fell into disfavor, but he was insanely popular much longer than Andy Warhol. Rockwell magazine covers and calendars were ubiquitous from the 1910s through the 1950s.
But if indeed Andy Warhol was the most popular artist of let’s say the second half of the 20th century, what does that say about us as a people?
His Campbell’s Soup I is amusing, and a novelty, but is it saying more than possibly, “We’re consumers”? Or “Art is mundane”? Or perhaps it’s, “You don’t have to talented to be an artist anymore. Look at the bullshit for which art collectors will pay vast fortunes.”
I think it’s the third one. Warhol is making a statement about society, and I don’t think he’s wrong. If you can Xerox Marilyn Monroe’s face four times, then sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars, the art market has transformed into the bullshit market. I don’t blame him for taking advantage of it.
Next, I suppose, comes someone like Jean-Michel Basquiat, a kid who enjoyed spray painting graffiti on walls. Here’s an example of one of Mr. Basquiat’s more mature works.
If indeed art is an “early warning system,” as Marshall McLuhan asserted, of what is it presently trying to warn us?