S and I were having a conversation the other night about art after watching the movie Blue Valentine, the substance of which was basically whether a work of art's quality was somehow enhanced by it being sad. Generic term, that. However, S's point is that I tend to be drawn to pieces of art that conclude on a down note. I tend to think that they have something more authentic about them, and that movies that rely on cliched structures to end happily are not in fact art, but mere entertainment. I'm using the term mere entertainment in the snobbiest way possible. This is not to say that I don't often enjoy entertainment myself, but rather, that I find it's charms to be seductive and rarely redemptive. What I'm saying is that they are often easy, but easy in a way that leaves me actually feeling a little bit empty. A piece of art on the other hand, sad or not, tends to make me feel a little more united with the rest of humanity. Note: I should give S credit here as she identified this difference during our conversation pointing out exactly that, something along the lines of, "When I see a movie that has an unhappy ending, or is generally depressing, it actually makes me feel depressed. I think that it actually leaves you feeling as though you are closer to other people."
I have some further quotes to support my side of the argument, but it's probably time to supplement the writing with visual media. What we were talking about in regards to Blue Valentine was actually a matter of taste. Later I'll argue that it also has something to do with storytelling and integrity, but for the time being we'll drop it. Anyhow, the video below about a honey badger is precisely a matter of taste type thing. Ie, if you have a really strong distaste for curse words, you probably won't like it. I feel as though this aversion to cursing is a bit generational, as I don't use them myself very frequently, but I don't find the use of them, unless it's gratuitous, to be particularly troubling. And in fact, I often find it enhances the humor, as in this video, when used properly. I'm sure S would disagree. Anyhow, other than some minor use of curse words, mainly you're just listening to this guy describe all of the wonderful attributes of a honey badger. It's hilarious. But I suppose that's a matter of taste. Watch and judge.
But then don't we wind up needing some arbiters of taste when it comes to things like art? It could be your opinion that a modern piece of art that involves a lamp glued to a toilet seat is a fine piece of art, and I might be inclined to argue that perhaps Michelangelo's David or Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait would seem to be greater contributions. Can we both be right? Maybe, but probably not. I'd be forced to deploy all sorts of intellectual arguments about what art means in the context of different cultures, and really, I'd just have to know a lot more about art to make a decent argument. The only argument I could make would be something akin to the general revelation of nature that Patrick allegedly used with the Irish. Deployed here, it would sound something like this, "look at the David. Look deeply. Are you not moved to a bit of wonder to think that a man created this thing? And here, I'd say, referring to the piece of art involving a toilet and lamp. Here is just where we put shit."
The discussion that S and I wound up having was a bit more complete than that as I argued that in the case of Blue Valentine, the ending was internally consistent with the character we were shown in the movie. To end it any differently would have actually been a piece of shoddy directing, and relatedly, what made the movie more like art than entertainment were the depth that was given to the characters throughout, and especially the recognizable elements of hard work in a long term relationship. Either way though, to end a movie an upbeat note because it feels better to end on an upbeat note is not consistent with my experience of what it means to be a human being. Rather, it is filled with a myriad of little joys, sometimes great joys,evening conversation, mind numbing boredom coupled with a thousand mini defeats, humiliations and disappointments. In the short time span of the movie we were able to see both the joys and disappointments in the relationship of these two people. It felt authentic.
In general we tend to attach too much meaning to endings. In my experience of life the only true ending for everyone is death. Everything else is just the dance steps in between. Thus, I try, and often fail as we are narrative loving creatures, to not attach all too much meaning to endings. Or at the very least I try and figure out if the ending and the movie, novel, whatever, has an internal integrity that has been kept.
Okay, in the end I haven't been able to give much in the way that a person might go about determining the difference between art and entertainment. Note: The whole argument of how that distinction is blurred in modern times is probably best left elsewhere, and I'm just assuming for the sake of the argument that the reader is interested in determining the difference between art and entertainment. Or at the very least interested in the possibility that art can be redemptive. The argument I've given, loosely, is depth and a certain internal integrity. Though, what I'm ultimately going to say is that I've had to train myself in literature, far less so in film, to recognize what art looks like. Looks is probably the wrong word. Rather, I mean something like how it feels on my nerve endings. Does it make me think or feel deeply or re-imagine my place in the world and it's relation either cosmically or to the person sitting next to me on the bus. Or does it just titillate me a little, uncomfortable word, does it just stave off the mind numbing boredom that occasionally comes with being me. If it's the latter, it's probably not art. Art then, for me, is a bit like that old definition of pornography. I recognize it when I see it. Thus, concludes my brief, and largely unhelpful, argument about art as well as the submission of Blue Valentine as a movie that you should watch and the honey badger video as something that is probably worth the brief break from mind numbing tedium.
After I'd had this conversation with S I stumbled across a couple of interesting pieces of journalism that discuss this very thing. The first is an interview with David Foster Wallace given by a Russian guy over the phone in 2006. Text below.
OK – Can we tell art from entertainment? For example, a program on TV with just entertainment value, can we call it art, if it's really very good? Like your Entertainment, is it art or just entertainment?
DFW – You’re asking me a basic question of what’s called in English “esthetics”. The question of what is art, – your own Tolstoy wrote an entire book about this. This is a very, very complicated question. Personally I believe that there’s a difference between art and entertainment. But it’s not a sharp dark line dividing the two, it’s more like – do you know what the word “continuum” is?
OK – Yes, I have mathematical education.
DFW – We have here much more like continuum here than any kind of a strict demarcation. One reason why the question is very interesting now is that America has gotten very, very, very good in producing entertainment. Vivid spectacular engrossing colorful sophisticated entertainment. And many American scholars and estheticians wonder how serious art will survive in a culture that becomes more and more about entertainment and amusement and escape.
OK – The Entertainment in your book – do you consider it art or…
DFW – The movie? The movie in that book is probably equivalent of Viktor Pelevin’s briefcase with the money. Probably – I did this book a long time ago – my guess is that really, really effective entertainment is usually commercial, meaning it’s primary goal is to get the audience to spend money. There’s a basic economic phenomena that’s named elasticity of demand. And what you want is inelasticity of demand, where the ideal piece of entertainment would something that people would want to see over and over and over again and pay for each time. The analogy for me is much more something like narcotics or addictive drugs than it is some kind of art. But probably the movie in that book is meant to be a sort parody, like exaggeration of entertainment the same kind as the subsidized time is kind of parody of corporate domination in culture.
OK – But, nevertheless, is it art?
DFW – Here’s the problem: you and I can sit down with a pot of coffee and many cigarettes and we could have a whole argument about this. The problem is that any definition one gives of art or any way that one tries in a sentence or two distinguish art from entertainment can be blown full of holes by counterexamples. I have two very simplistic believes: one is that the basic defining feature of an entertainment is that it provides some sort of relief or escape from real human life and the way we also feel inside all the time in the real life. Whereas art provokes more of an engagement or confrontation with that probably. It’s one reason why art requires more work both intellectually and sort of emotionally to observe than it does entertainment. That’s for me one difference. The other is that the entertainment’s goals, I usually think, in America are primarily economic, primarily commercial objects. And their true agenda is to get the consumer to spend money on them. Whereas art, including bad art, usually has much more complicated agendas that has to do at least partly with trying to give some sort of gift or have some kind of meaningful communication with the audience. Not that it’s necessarily succeeds or isn’t some times very bad. But at least deep down in it has the agenda.
Those are my two ways, sort of in my stomach or intuitively distinguish the two but of cause either of us can think of hundreds counterexamples that would make those differences very difficult to maintain in an argument.
The later argument comes from an essay by Vince Passaro about the movies of Martin Scorsese. Specifically it submits that Scorsese is our greatest director because he embraces the basic tragedy of human existence.
Quoting now from Passaro:
Tragedy is inherently, necessarily, uncompromising. And it makes much of the audience, and those who market to it, squirm, with its painful and paradoxical insistence that our lives are ruled by both individual agency and the iron dictates of society, family, and fate.
Tragedy is so far off our cultural radar that Scorsese has rarely been accused of it. He has, of course, been accused of many other aesthetic crimes, most commonly that he celebrates violence. This is like saying that Dante celebrates sin, or that Proust celebrates snobbery. Scorsese is not celebrating our condition, he is recognizing it: recognizing what becomes of men who are separated from God, men who are lost. Don DeLillo, who grew up in a world much like Scorsese's, once described the lingering effects of Catholicism this way: "For a Catholic , nothing is too important to discuss or think about, because he's raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and that if he doesn't live his life in a certain way this death is simply an introduction to an eternity of pain. This removes a hesitation that a writer might otherwise feel when he's approaching important subjects, eternal subjects."
These are the stakes for Scorsese. These are his protagonists men who will suffer and who cannot face down the eternity of pain. Aristotle, our primary architect of tragedy, understood, (as did the authors of the Gospels) that to see and feel deeply the suffering of others helps us to endure our own. This is the redemption that art can offer- Vince Passaro
art is impressionism-manet,monet,etc
ReplyDeletewe each share in the joy and sorrow that
life brings us