"She
made a lot of good points with really bad examples," was the
review a friend, Alex Eckman-Lawn, made about Camille Paglia's book
Glittering Images. It was on offend remark, in fact it may
have been no more than a comment he posted on that ubiquitous social
network. In truth, I don't think Alex actually read her book. I know
that I didn't. But his comment resonated with me, just as I
hope it resonates with you. Of all the spectacles Hollywood has
churned out for us to slather over with mixed enthusiasm, surely
Revenge of the Sith was not "the the most powerful work
of art in any genre in the past 30 years — including literature."
Her
review of Star Wars III left me with only one conclusion: that
Camille Paglia, despite her encyclopedic knowledge of our shared
visual history and heavy involvement in scholarly pursuits, has not
consumed, herself, enough pop entertainment to properly write in the
defense of its merits.
Either
that or she was trying to lay a snide insult against contemporary
art.
This
opening is a digression, because I don't want to write about Paglia.
I have nodded my hat to her, broken that ice. This essay is not an
effort to disagree with her. Now watch as I move on and present my
own thoughts. Besides, I absolutely agree with the spirit of her
pronouncement. My problem is that contemporary art begs for harsher
ridicule, and pop culture needs more familiar praise. I had been
stewing over the idea for a long time before reading about (about,
because I did not actually read the thing itself) her book,
and have been giving it much thought since then. Art has changed, and
though many might agree with that banal statement, I am urged to
define its changes. So I find myself grappling with that which I
detest to the point of doing shoddy research (notice above).
Simultaneously I don't feel that I possess a scholarly demeanor, yet
I press on.
In
pre-industrial times art was much more difficult to produce. An
obvious point. But let's get down to the nitty-gritty of just how
much more difficult it was.
There
were no art supply stores. The Renaissance men did not buy their
paints at Dick Blick. Artists had to know what pigments were best,
they had to find the pigments (buy them, gather them, stumble upon
them as they pulled weeds from their gardens, who knows) and they
needed to know how to produce a medium that would deliver that color
to a surface. Tempera is an old reliable delivery system; a fast
drying egg based paint that has an exceptionally long life, in terms
of conservation. A lot of those medieval paintings and Renaissance
works were done with egg tempera, before linseed oil became
ubiquitous. Manufacturing tempera is relatively easy, if you have
some eggs, but acquiring the ground compounds to use as pigments is
above the knowledge base of most modern artists. Some of those 'olden
times' artists even became just as famous for their ability to
produce vibrant colors as for their skill at painting, like Titian,
who became known for 'Titian Blue'. His skies surpassed what others
could mimic, his recipe somehow different than what his
contemporaries could manage.
And once
these magic recipes for color were expensively gathered, the fast
drying medium of tempera allowed for few mistakes. Now, let's be
clear, I am not lauding the 'old ways'. I am not calling for our
generation to move back to tempera. Heck, there are even artists who
still use it today. The point I want to make is that the value of
pigment has fallen, and the price of mistakes is no longer ruinous.
And by mistake, I mean mishaps in craft.
If
you're concerned about the cost of the color cartridge on your
printer, juts imagine what the budget for the Sistine chapel.
How did
we move away from the preciousness of paint? Two inventions (more
than two probably, but two stand out in my mind) helped. One was the
collapsible metal tube. That's the thing you get toothpaste in, or
oil paint. It will store your goop, and you can squeeze some out when
you need it, whether its tooth cleaner or a viscous oily pigment.
This item started seeing use in the eighteen hundreds (industrial
revolution). It's what allowed artists like Monet to go out in a
field all day and paint the gradually changing light that illuminated
his haystacks. It became really easy for artists to shed their studio
for the outdoors, since mixing and maintaining their mediums was
suddenly not a prerequisite for production. It also allowed for the
thick impasto style of van Gogh, whose paintings sometimes look like
they were actually squeezed from the end of a tube of paint. After
all where would that aesthetic come from, without a tube? And before
manufactured paints who would want to waste their carefully ground
and mixed material so flippantly and carelessly? And secondly, who
could have afforded to?
The
second invention that really shook things up was, of course,
photography. Traditional skills started to become moot. Translating
what you saw flawlessly onto the canvas, creating a facsimile that
looked 'real' was no longer the singular domain of the human mind and
hand. Chemically treated paper could capture the world quickly and
accurately in surpassing detail (not to mention what its accomplished
in the digital age, with infinite copies all over the internet). As
such, observational work started to change. Futurism and cubism and
surrealism and the list goes on; artists started to invent knew ways
to see, almost in rebellion against that which science had conquered.
As our
opinions on observation changed, so too changed the domain of art.
The old hierarchy and standards crumbled. The past hundred years have
seen the definition of 'art' get pushed, abstracted and rewritten
until the playing field was beaten into its current state. The
territory is endless. It would not be hyperbole to say that almost
any activity can be given the mantle, with the proper argument and
proper context.
What
does this have to do with Revenge of the Sith,
you might ask? I'm trying to draw some lines in the sand. I'm trying
to stake out some boundaries. I'm trying underscore the idiocy of
comparing modern movie magic to paintings.
In 2010
Brown v. Entertainment Merchants
Association
ruled that video games are protected under the first amendment as
free speech, giving them legal protection as creative works. I'm
positive that movies and television are afforded similar (if not even
better) protection, though I neglected to do the research (what can I
say, I'm a millennial). The debate about whether or not video games
are 'Art' with a capital A is ongoing. Its the sort of conversation
that I tend to avoid. It is, after all, a slippery slope towards
another
conversation: what is Art? And that's not a question I want to get
mired in.
Yet I press on.
We
can be sure of one thing. Its all made up. Giving Art a definition is
not like identifying a rhinoceros. Some things are definitively a
rhinoceros, and some are definitively not.
We cannot expand the definition of a rhinoceros without doing some
damage to the practice of zoology. Art on the other hand is our baby,
our creation, both of the actual objects and of the practice at
large. We can kill it, nurture it, and pervert it to our hearts
content.
Identifying what Art Is can be like, well, like a lot of things.
There are metaphors I could quote. Metaphors like "trying to
herd cats" (which is not very accurate), or "like trying to
catch moonbeams in a jar" (which is substantially better). When
you've caught the moonbeams, maybe they'll tell you. I'm not the guy
to do it. After over a century of beating the poor word senseless,
and moving it from common usage to stranger usage, one can't help but
to try and steer clear.
For the sake of brevity, let's just settle on art being a form of
entertainment, and weight it on those merits. This is not meant to
undervalue Art, or paint it as less. Entertainment is not, in my
mind, a synonym for shallow. All I really want is to make it easier
to measure art against these new forms of expression, games, movies
and shows.
How does art entertain? It can move you, dazzle you, interest your
eye, and even arrest your heart. It can reach into the slimy muck of
your mind and shine light on your humanity. It can do these things.
Revenge of the Sith does not (for me, I'm open for rebuttal).
Does
art even exist? Is music art or is music music? Is Harry
Potter
Art? What if the movie was Art, but the book was just literature? We
are entering into the the realm of the unreal. We tread on ground
that is not. Let's pull back, veer left, no your other left! Let us
not descend into the pit of madness, but ascend to specifics.
Movies, shows and games are the the most contemporary form of
expression, as different from the painted canvas as they are from the
first Greek performance of Oedipus. They are the product of
surpassing craft, which is an element that contemporary Art is often
accused to be lacking, especially by those who have not been
indoctrinated by its formal study (I have a Bachelors in Fine Art, in
case you were curious. And by 'indoctrinated' I don't mean
'educated'. I used a synonym for brainwashed on purpose).
Most animated films display more visual production than the
collections of whole museums (I'm not going to cite that claim,
you're just going to have to swallow it like a big boy (or girl (or
gender neutral))). And then there's the concept art that never
reaches the screen.
Heck, logging into facebook you'll see more pictures than you find in most museums.
Live
action movies also have extensive production, and use both
expensively created props and endless digital effects. But like I
said, we need to ascend to specifics. I already said I have a BFA. I
majored in sculpture. Two of my old classmates were very interested
in prop making, and after graduating went to New York City, and began
working as fabricators. One of they're post graduation
accomplishments was making a prop for the show Homeland.
It was an extremely lifelike hand, complete with the proper skin
tone, hairs and even finger prints (more like finger textures, since
I don't think the prints match any real person). It contained a pouch
of fake blood in the palm, so that when it was stabbed onscreen, it
would bleed. Its craftsman, my old schoolmate, told me ruefully that
after over thirty hours of work, the prop was onscreen for maybe a
whole second.
If this much craft goes into one moment, what is the sum for a
feature? Is not the hand itself a work of art? How can we leave the
decadence of that spectacle? Do we ever feel the need to circle back
to the white room, the immaculate but visually sterile gallery space
with its collection of single static images? Can we really be touched
by something so untouchable, so inscrutable, and above all boring?
I guess where I'm going with this is I don't like how people use the
word art. We've been using it as a synonym for "creative project" for
a while now, and it has burned holes in our scholarship and our
thoughts that let people compare Revenge of the Sith to
everything in "the past thirty years including literature"
to art like Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road or the 2003 HBO
miniseries Angels in America, or (my personal favorite) Tekken
3, a video game for the PlayStation 1 (it also existed in an
arcade format, you know, eating quarters). Heck, even the 2005
installation in Central Park titled The Gates, by Christo was
better than Revenge of the Sith.
