There are many Philistines in the world, but only one Goliath: that’s me. I think abstract art is a con game. I think free verse stinks. I think atonal music should be outlawed and experimental novels burned. Whenever an artist declares he’s going to break through the restrictions of his form, I feel he should be treated the same as a chess player who declares he’s going to ignore the rules of his game—like an idiot, a harmless eccentric at best. The rules are the game, the restrictions are the form. Indeed, much of the excitement of art comes from watching the spatial confines of the sonnet, say, or the canvas or the movie screen, give way into emotional infinity.
Ah, yes. One of the "my three-year-old can paint better than Jackson Pollock" people. He then confirms this by setting the reader a test, in which the Mona Lisa and the Jackson Pollock painting "Convergence" (not that Libertas has the academic honesty to actually identify the painting), are placed side by side. If the reader identifies the first -- but not the second -- as art, then they are deemed to have sufficient aethestic sensibilities to be allowed to proceed to read his movie review.
There's a certain amount of irony at this level of hauteur being exercised over a movie review. For much of the cinema's history, movies -- especially popular movies -- have not been taken seriously as works of art. That nothwithstanding, let's look at his presumptions, shall we? Just what sort of world would we live in, if Libertas were minister of art?
No James Joyce, of course. Or Franz Kafka. No e.e. cummings, or William Carlos Williams. No Arnold Schoenberg or Philip Glass. Little visual art -- save photography -- past 1920. No Picasso, Bracque, Warhol, Johns. No Brancusi.
No Stravinksy. Both "Rites of Spring" and "The Firebird" caused riots when they debuted -- they were too revolutionary. Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" would in no way be acceptable for concert halls.
Auden would be okay; some, but not all, Eliot. Eugene O'Neill would probably be okay, but Samuel Beckett would be right out.
If you accept that movies are art -- which Libertas seems to -- then without people breaking the constraints of form there would be no Snow White, or any of her progeny from Disney. No Intolerance, no Rashomon, no La Dolce Vita. More recently, no Memento. The brilliant Charlie Kauffman would be out of a job: Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would all be beyond the pale.
And what of theater? I have spoken of Beckett, and O'Neill. What of musical theater? If movies can be considered art, then surely musicals can be as well. Without Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II breaking through what were then the conventions of the form, we would have shows where the stories were merely excuses for trotting out the latest tunes from Tin Pan Alley. And if we accept that the new paradigm is set by the story show as created by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and as practiced by Lerner and Lowe, and Kander and Ebb, and Jerry Herman, and so on .... then the constraints of that form, in both song structure and in subject matter, have been broken through -- and brilliantly -- by Stephen Sondheim.
But let's go back further.... the ultimate experimental modern novel is Don Quixote, which was so experimental many consider it to have created the genre. And let's not forget Tristram Shandy, shall we? A masterpiece of English literature, Laurence Sterne's eighteenth century novel is so unique Hollywood couldn't touch it -- at least until Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story, which isn't a film of the novel but a film about how hard it would be to make a film of the novel.
If one tossed out painters who broke with the conventions on the form, that would eliminate, oh... Manet, Goya (have you ever seen the "Black Goyas"? reeaaally creepy), Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Toulouse-Latrec, Klimt, and countless others. Oh, and there's Whistler, of whose "Nocture in Black and Gold" Ruskin wrote "I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." In fact, let's just go back to iconography, shall we?
Art is like life: Sturgeon's Law applies here as much as anywhere else. Whenever you have anyone break the conventions of the form and time in which they are working, most often, you'll get self-indulgent garbage. Whenever you have anyone stay within the conventions of the form in which they are working, a fair amount of the time you will get pretentious, self-important twaddle.
Goliath can keep his safe, well-ordered, rule-bound world.
For myself, a world without the fragile delicacy of "somewhere i have never traveled" by cummings, or the devastating anguish of Picasso's "Guernica," or, on a less exalted level, perhaps, without the demonic glee of Sweeney Todd, would be much poorer indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment