I Want To Be An Old Artist, But Movies Are The Art Of Our Times.

Bill Cunningham New York (2011); Between The Folds (2008)

I saw the Bill Cunningham documentary the night before last, and last night watched a documentary about origami a friend suggested. In Cunningham I saw what I have wanted for myself since I made the decision in my teens to become a studio artist I wanted to be an old artist; to someday be able to look back on a long life of making art. In the origami artists, I was reminded that there are many art worlds, each with their own theories, markets, aesthetic battles, etc. That I chose to move to New York, not because I believed it was the only art world, or even the only art world that matters, but that it was the art world that seemed to offer a place for me and my particular personal aspirations. I am well aware that for an artist to say that movies are the art of our time is counter-intuitive, but at stake is what is great and why.

I have made my case explaining why I believe movies are the art of our time, and my friend, the painter Michelle Vaughan, has made hers, as well as rebutted mine on her blog. Vaughan complains that my reasoning is confusing and overly complex – that the introduction of architecture was a “smoke and mirrors” attempt to change the subject. The heart of our disagreement is that Vaughan believes that “Without an Artist, There is No Art.” That movie making is art by committee, that the only intention is mass entertainment and profit and therefore movie-makers cannot explore personal idiosyncratic visions that characterize “quality art.” That greatness in art can only be achieved if the intention is unrestrained personal expression.

Caddyshack (1980); 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

In immediate response to Vaughan, Daren Fowler posted a defense of film as art on Hyperalergic’s Lab page. Fowler listed challenging art films, like Luis Bunuel and Salvidor Dali's Un Chien Andalou (1929); and undeniably great film like Julian Schnable’ The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Fowler shares Vaughan’s conventional view on artistic greatness. I do not. The other criticism my idea has received seem to come from simular perspectives on art. The artist Bill Powhida quipped on Twitter “Let's go watch Arthur and then re-read John's essay "the kinds that foster new ideas." explaining that he was not criticizing the idea that art could be made in groups, but instead, "using example of how moribund, derivative and useless movies can be, like painting, not matter how big the crew.”  In a simular vien J.D. Hasting teased "Hive mind 4 life, suckas"

When I was thinking about what I meant about "art of out times" I began to think about other art forms that seem to capture the aspirations of their times and place. The importance of cathedral building and alter piece painting to Medieval Europe. The massive canvases of 18th century history paintings and 19th century Hudson school. the quasi-scientific studies of clouds by the Impressionists, the efforts by early abstract artists to pierce the viel of vision and see the universal orders that underlie our world. Mid-Century American Modernists desire to make visible the emotional turbulence of freedom. I began by thinking about the shape of our times and art's place within that moment. New York is central to a global art world, but that art world is just a small corner of the enormous flows of creative production taking place right now.

Opening Day Art Basel (2010); Star Wars exhibition in Philidelphia

Powhida joked (I think he was joking), that "You're clearly right movies are the art form of our time if I'm making them." That is the only argument I can see that Vaughan has made for contemporary art. It is a solipsistic logic; that art must be made by an artist. Taken further it means, just as Powhida suggests,  that anything an artist makes is art (a joke I like making when serving sandwiches, or leaving the wash room to some poor soul who has the misfortune of waiting to go in after me). Individual genius is not the halmark of our time, it is a hold over. Additionally it is a damaging hold over. As a lens for looking for value, it is blinding. Within the antique frame of artistic greatness those who would justify a list of "great post war art" can, legitimately (within the logic of greatness), claim that great post war art is an almost entirely white male enterprise. Art is not a mater of individual geniuses and a small elite of taste makers. It is the one of the ways we project our our values to the world, as artists, as collectors, but also as nations and, increasingly, as a developing global society.

2011 marks the year the population of the world reaches 7 billion. That is double the number of people alive the day I was born. For the first time in history mor of those people live in cities than live in rural settlements. In 25 years the worlds population is expected to peak somewhere around 9 billion and by then 75% of us will live in cities. This is the deciding condition of our time. This is why I chose to place movies within a continuum, with contemporary art on one end and architecture at the other. With art we experience intimately, as a one on one interaction with an object in space (this is how we look at contemporary paintings too), vs the totally public domain of of our day today interactions architecture.

Georg Simmel; George Lucas


Alan Mitchell, emailed to tell me about the German sociologist Georg Simmel's 1903 essay, The Metropolis and Mental Life. In it Simmel wrote about the experience of modern city life in the most perfect of cinematographic terms, "“the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions.” If I were a better writer that is exactly how I would have describe the unique experience of watching movies in the theater. That it stands in the center of a continuum, where intimacy and publicness are constantly mixing. We are alone in the dark, but we are with a crowd. We are viewing faces at extreme close ups from hundreds of feet away at the center of a crowded theater. That we are doing this together is a key part of the experience, and while Vaughan caracterizes theater audiences as "captive," that couldn't be further the truth.

We have all kinds of opportunities to watch movies however we want - on our TVs with our families, alone in bed with a lap top, on the subway with a iPhone or Game Boy, we choose to crowd together at theaters, and that choice is the most important aspect of the experience. In her book, Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacob takes special aim at the modernist desire to make private pleasure public:

"Togetherness" is a fittingly nauseating term for an old ideal in planning theory. This idea is that if anything is shared among people, much should be shared. "Togetherness," apparently a spiritual resource of the new suburbs, works destructively in cities. The requirement that much shall be shared drive city people apart. 

When the choice becomes one of forced togetherness, people either become "exceedingly choosy as to who their neighbors are" or, Jacobs observed, "settle for lack of contact." Movie theaters are places we choose to go to To anonymously watch among equally anonymous strangers. We don't care who we are sitting next to as long as they don't have a child, BO, or a conversation on their phone (I talk at the movies, as does my sister and father, so I rarely take aim at those who need to whisper about what just happened). But we clearly like the unique mix of publicness and annonimity. (If we didn't we would have stopped going as soon as we had TVs, or VCRs, or Cable, or HDTV, or 3DHD...)

Rem Koolhaas totally gets it; Zaha Hadis doesn't


There is nothing apperently high-minded about why we go to the movies, but that is not to say that movies are constructed and consumed for only the most apparent and base reasons Vaughan and others focus on. In Delirious New York Rem Koolhaas writes about the architecture of entertainment that proceeded film, and "the self-defeating laws that govern entertainment: it can only skirt the surface of myth, only hint at the anxieties accumulated in the collective unconscious." Which is to say any individual structure. He was writing about amusement parks, movie theaters, in contrast, renew themselves every few days with a never ending stream of new releases each skirting myth and playing on anxieties in new ways. Koolhaas writes of the intent of the architects of the fantastic, that "it is the explicit ambition of devises to turn provincialism of the masses into cosmopolitanism."

The key, as I tried to make clear in my original argument, is not innovation. If individual films are innovative they are, like all art, innovative within strange and contradictory feedback loops. Between audiences, Movie-makers, taste-makers, moral watch-dogs, government censors... on and on, The "technologies of the fantastic" (Koolhaas' term) test our desires for myth and our willingness to look out our anxieties. All art forms have outer limits, that they work within, push against and break with. No artist no matter how radical works without restraint. Vaughan argues that entertainment is the sole intention of movie makers, but as Koolhaas makes clear, that is anything but a straightforward and simple intention. Entertainment is less puritanical than enlightenment, but just as convoluted. To again update Koolhaas' observations on the architecture of amusement, in a world "obsessed by Progress" movies attack "the problem of Pleasure, often with the same technological means."

Revenge of the Sith (2005): Spiral Jetty (1970)

The premise of this blog and the project behind it (an artist commentary for the original 1977 Star Wars movie), is that there is no need to accept that George Lucas is a great artist to see that Star Wars as great art. The group that made Star Wars with Lucas were shaped by art schools, Unions, marriages, politics and history. The millions of people that went to see that movie that year, and continue to watch that film around the world, were doing something more than expressing an aggregate of individual tastes, they were sharing something of value. What we are looking for is an aggrigate of values expressed. Acknowledging that is not an endorsement of the "hive mind" or a surrendering of judgement to the "wisdom of the crowd." To paraphrase Steven Johnson, this is not a hunt for the wisdom of the crowd, it is a discussion of the wisdom of someone in the crowd. An effort to see the value of an artform, without ever needing to name a single instance of greatness. After all, the Spiral Jetty is undoubtably one of the greatest works of art of the twentieth century (and a personal favorite), but where does that get us? Of all the modern art forms I can think of from movies to origami, earth art is arguably the least consequential to life in today's world. (But that's a totally different bar bet.)

It's not that I don’t value artistic individuality. When I was first invited to the Cunningham doc. I agreed because I got my wires crossed and thought I was agreeing to see a movie about the choreographer Merce Cunningham (an artist and artform I very much admire). I had never paid more than a passing attention to the NYT's Street Style section and had always actively avoided the Time's photo spreads of head of New York's well-to-do. I had no idea that they were the product of a singular, and truly peculiar imagination and personal ethic. I will now study those pages with hightened attention, trying to figure out what Bill is showing me and why.

Transformers 2 (2009); 2012 (2009) - Two very differnt disasters.

But I continue to study the wild-cat authorless worlds of commercial franchises with heightened attention when it comes to understanding the moment we live in. I know from my own experience that being a studio artist is, by definition to be at cross purposes with most of what everyone else is doing. Thinking about any art as good,bad, of quality and as great, leads down reductive rabbit holes that end is questions of personal taste, accidents of birth, and the fickleness of success. None of that tell us anything about the full shape of our times. I am not interested in accumulating the personal tastes of a generation in order to identify a zeitgeist. The mood of the times is just as arbitrary as any personal taste. It is an all but meaningless set of information (unless you are hunting for biases). I am very interested in what we love and why. But because Spiral Jetty is popular does not make it great, and to say that it is great puts a seal on its meaning – it is a conversation ender.

Both 2012 and Transformers 2 are both equally bad by every standard Vaughan sets. They are undeniably art by committee; carefully packaged commodity films constructed to appeal to the widest possible audience. That they were directed by an individual is almost moot, films at this scale are overwhelming industrial manufacturing projects. A director friend of mine who made a big budget scifi film told me that at one point during filming he realized that if he stopped greeting and thanking everyone who came to him with a problem that had to be resolved or decisions that had to be made, that by sheering off the niceties of speech he could gain an hour or two of work a day. That is a gruesome way to work and I don’t covet making that sort of choice. It points to the depersonalized nature of making movies, but it doesn’t mean they are not art.

2012 (2009); Repo Men (2010)

Instead of judging 2012 and Transformers 2, as good or bad (much less great), lets judge them in terms of their ethics. I watched both films with my 11 year old nephew. 2012 was a silly film that shows a fractured family’s struggling to escape a global catastrophe. Here is what I was struck by the film open and the characters are introduced and we learn that the father is a ner-do-well space case and that his youngest daughter who is six still wets the bed. The film goes forward, lots of things blow up, people die, melodramatic music plays, the loser dad proves himself to his alienated wife, and at the end the family has survived and come together to look out over a sun rise on a new world. It is truly trashy stuff.

But not all trash is equal. We are still talking about art., and even bad art can be judged. The very last line of the 2012 is the little girl’s. She confides with great pride that she no longer needs to wear diapers to bed. Through most of the film her role was the standard Spielbergian screaming child that adds immediacy to already unbearably tense situations. But there, at the very beginning and end, the movie-makers gave her a battle and a victory. Because of small intimate moments like those throughout his movies I trust Ronald Emmerich. I would happily return to see the next film he makes.

Santiago Sierra, 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People (2000); Michael Bay

Michael Bay, on the other hand, never passes up an opportunity to belittle or express contempt. His films are freighted with misogyny and racism. His imagination can only be described as septic his art as malignant. I equate him with the cruel and mean spirited views of those who would defend pouring trillions of dollars into a war misrepresented as a fight for freedom while simultaneously howling about billions spent to educate and care for the poor here in the richest country in the world. On a smaller scale I equate him with the malignant and septic imagination of the artist Santiago Sierra, who pays day labors to tattoo lines across their back, sodomize one another at art fairs and to live behind bricked up walls in galleries. (Shame on me for mentioning his name.)

I understand that both Emmerich and Bay are the eye of the needle, that around them are clouds of creative people working on an industrial scale to make the block-busters that bear their names, but that doesn’t mean that those movies aren’t art that can be judge on their merit. Movies can be and should be, and so should artforms. Lining up great works is a tired and futile exercise. (There is a "moribund, derivative and useless" industry if there ever was one.) I never would have bet Vaughen that movies are the greatest of all art forms, or that there are more great movies than there are great paintings, not because I would have lost, but because there would be no way to decide the bet, nothing to discuss.