A Final Word
[Exclusive to the THERE’S NO ART IN HELL blog]
This morning I read an essay by Frank Rich at the NY Times bemoaning the gullibility of the American people over the past decade. I like Rich’s writing. It’s often tough and direct. He’s a guy who obviously tries to get it right and do the right thing. Too bad in today’s article he writes, “If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled.” He goes on to talk about the Tiger Woods train wreck, the story’s point of origination, and the media’s complicity in the sham. “What’s equally striking, if not shocking, is that the American establishment and news media — all of it, not just golf writers or celebrity tabloids — fell for the Woods myth as hard as any fan and actively helped sustain and enhance it.” This is all bullshit, of course. Trillions are spent to mold and shape the American free speech arena today. It’s ridiculous to assign culpability to the citizenry for their susceptibility to propaganda, a/k/a marketing, “push,” or whatever you want to call mind control, or psy-ops on a national scale. The deck is stacked. The message machine is no longer effectively restricted by a corrupt government. Not surprisingly, the corporations and their agents/agencies, like the ones who own the Times, over the past decade tend to get just about anything they want, even when it’s in direct conflict with American interests or the will of the American people. I’m not surprised that Rich doesn’t ‘fess up here - just a bit disappointed; another opportunity for one important guy, a big-time commentator to tell the truth, to blow the whistle, lost. Americans have to be asking, and are - I hear it a lot - what’s our recourse. I’ve heard more ordinary people talk about getting guns and engaging in general rebellion, than at any other time in my life. It may come to that. It usually does, when the tyrants face a citizenry that is not yet completely dismantled. I hope it doesn’t, because art doesn’t usually fare well during civil war, or any other kind. But without freedom, there is no worthwhile art.
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As for Salon. Towards the end of THERE’S NO ART IN HELL, I mentioned that Salon had launched a new feature, Film Salon, and that Film Salon was publishing “best of the decade” mini-essays. One of these was written about the largely forgettable, visually well designed Adam Sandler vehicle/Paul Thomas Anderson date movie “Punch Drunk Love.”
About PDL, Karina Longworth writes:
“Punch-Drunk Love” is a film, but it is also something else: It creates for itself a new space to exist, in between cinema and painting. It is literally a moving painting, because of Jeremy Blake’s color-field interludes and also because of the way these interventions into the film space seem to haunt the non-painted imagery. But it is also in the same class as a Rothko or Newman or Kandinsky, in that it visualizes the invisible and the intangible, in a way that transcends narrative and forces us to engage with its space and its presence within our space. It is a moving painting — it’s a painting that moves the viewer.
This is also bullshit. Film is not painting, period. Saying it is does not legitimize film. Directors trying to make films that are paintings make films that don’t fully realize as cinema - which is cool as it could be, without having to pretend to be art (i.e., painting or sculpture). “Artists” installing films in painting or sculpture galleries generally make crap movies and force everyone around them to redefine art, depending on how much collectors have invested in the work. As a dimensional artist who works in all kinds of contemporary media, I suggest building new architecture for moving image experiences that don’t require an audience/viewers to sit still for hours, rather than co-opting space needed for painting and sculpture, which is exceedingly limited at this point, and therefore exceedingly valuable. Full disclosure: I have presented moving images in many formats in galleries and will do so again - AS A PROOF OF WHAT I WROTE ABOVE, and to suggest the complementary value of multimedia arrays - based on content. On the other hand: Just because SONY wants everyone to believe that one of its pictures is a supreme artistic vehicle, and will do anything to monopolize market share, doesn’t mean we have to accept that. An article like Longworth’s is nothing but pro-consumer portable “art” propaganda.
Fuck off Salon.
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Why does this matter? If you’ve read THERE’S NO ART IN HELL, you’ll know why.
If you wanna stick your head in the sand or up your ass, that’s your prerogative, like the consumer portable song says. If not - well, if we take a minute away from Tiger’s mistresses to peek at health care system reform - this is it. Plus more war, torture, infrastructure disintegration, family dissolution, for-profit penal industry expansion and educational failure. Hurrah the Super Class. Everyone else: welcome to serfdom. It’s not coming. It’s already here. This is not meant as a warning. This is a wake up call.
