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re: The Darker the Art.........
[7268] by "0magus" (adsl-63-196-7-146.dsl.snfc21.pac)   on Fri 16 Nov 2001 01:28:25     [ reply ]
i have to put in my 2 cents and disagree. i said this a while ago, and i will say it again. we need to be LESS cautious about using the word art. i go with scott mccloud on this one, as i feel he has reasoned it out very well. if you want to, but his book called "understanding comics", becuase its a great art theory book as well as a wonderfully well-written treatsy on the comic book industry today.

art, as he (and i) hold, is just about anything that isnt directly related to your immediate survival and/or reproduction. art should never have to be grand, or amazing, or powerfull.

now, before you go beating me down for that, not that i said HAVE to be beautiful. i think we should be more free with the word art, but also much faster to say bad art. GOOD art will likely be grand, amazing and powerfull all at once. just because something is poorly done dosnet mean it isnt art. when a 4 year old sits down and draws some crude picture, its art. its not a great work of art, but its art. just becuase the grafeti (however you spell that) on the subway is ugly and lacking in any kind of redeaming social quality (or maybe it isnt, there was that one guy whos name i forgot who did some serious art as subway grafeti) dosent mean it isnt art. its just bad art.

we all feel a bit aloof if we toss about "good" and "bad" like we have the right to judge, but we do! art is and only is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder has the right to judge anything he sees. we, as a whole, may feel he is a dumbass for feeling one way or another, but thats our problem, not his.

i agree that the abstract of money twisting in the wind is somewhat lame sounding. i never saw the film. it sounds like one of those common ploys directors use to tell us something. another one of these ploys is to show the statue of liberty fucked up somehow.
the problem, as i see it, is that there are a lot of crappy directors out there. they are trying to force storytelling in a medium that should be used to suplemant storytelling. direct storys are told through words, and images help those words. more abstract things (like all that film school wierd stuff that i kinda like) are using the dynamic image to great effect, letting it do its own thing which may or may not be assisted by storytellng. when film drives a film, it comes out interesting. blockbusters like The Matrix or StarWars are not terribly deep stories. hell, The Matix is basicly the Heros Journy architype given some flesh. but they work, perhaps not as stories of great merrit but as FILMS of great merrit. bullet time in The Matix was very cool, becuase it was something different being used to SHOW (not tell) us what happened. same thing in star wars: new technology and filmmaking approaches makes a movie that stands better as a film than as a story.

what do you think?

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