Artists are uncommon people. But can uncommon people accurately reflect the interests of the common people let alone mould them?
Armand: Do you know how few vampires have the stamina for immortality? How quickly they perish of their own will? The world changes, we do not. Therein lies the irony that finally kills us. I need you to make contact with this age.
Louis: Me? Don’t you see? I’m not the spirit of any age. I’m at odds with everything. I always have been.
Armand: Louis, that is the very spirit of your age. The heart of it. Your fall from grace has been the fall of a century.
— Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice.
When Monet was making his vast canvases as an artistic tombeau for WWI he was painting in an Impressionist style after Picasso and Braque had already moved past Fauvism to pioneer Cubism. But Monet’s Impressionism still worked, and indeed the larger his canvases grew, the more they veered towards abstraction as a serenity filled them. The 1870s images of train stations had been replaced by 1910s water lilies in a pond. Except that momentum had not been displaced, merely transformed. Trains and steam were motion that was obvious, but the ever changing play of light and shadow observed and captured again and again on the same narrow stretch of water and vegetation, always repeating but never the same, were an eternal motion. Which captured the Zeitgeist?
Whole oceans of ink were spilled valorising David Bowie’s surfing of the zeitgeist in the 1970s. The idea that he discovered scenes and then as soon as everyone else caught up to them was off to be in the vanguard somewhere else. Look for him in Los Angeles, he’s already in Berlin. But as he hit middle age it seemed that he felt like he had to do this: getting the Pet Shop Boys to rework ‘Hallo Spaceboy’, trying to hijack drum and bass on the Earthling album. These seemed increasingly desperate attempts to embody the zeitgeist. It is little surprise that in the 2000s Bowie only released four albums, and they did not attempt to surf the zeitgeist. Instead he simply let Bowie be Bowie.
Some of this zeitgeist trap must be the fault of critics. Simply put there is no story in sustained excellence. Finding your metier, like Mondrian, and then perfecting it and obsessively exploring all of its possibilities, until eventually that leads you slowly to subtle modulations into something new. It is a better story for there to be a rise and fall, or a dramatic change of direction, or something – anything – dramatic. Look at theatre critic Michael Billington’s vendetta against Tom Stoppard until The Real Thing, and the alleged injection of ‘heart’ to go along with the undisputed cleverness. But Stoppard was simply being Stoppard, and this play was being used as an excuse by people who’d been too critical of him to change their tune while pretending they were responding to the fact that he had changed his tune.
“You’re right. About all of it. I did work for the government, and I did get betrayed. But if that work taught me anything, it’s that how you do matters as much as what you do, and by that metric you’re all just terrorists. And I kill terrorists.” – Shaw to Collier, PersonofInterest.
Andrei Molodkin claims he is holding great art hostage in a Swiss vault until his demands are met. If those demands are not met then he will murder the hostages. Hmmm. Molodkin advances a familiar trope of furious righteousness, the false binary: alleging that “destroying the life of people means nothing but destroying art is a huge taboo in the world”. Nobody thinks that. And yet by putting the works of Warhol, Picasso and Rembrandt in a vault with a mechanism out of a Saw movie to destroy them it is Molodkin that is making this false equivalence of art: a life for a life. Even if you think Julian Assange is a secular saint this tactic must give pause, for good reason. There is a particular kind of person who takes relish in destroying something beautiful. And, whether they’re Nazis burning books, Protestants destroying sculptures, Taliban exploding Buddha heads, Counter-Reformation Popes painting over nudes, or juvenile delinquents throwing soup in art galleries, they are invariably psychotically self-righteous as well as often just psychotic. A point unintentionally made when in defending their attack on the Velasquez Venus in the National Gallery in London the vandals pointed out that it had previously been slashed by a suffragette. Yes, the damage is still visible a century later, and that suffragette, Mary Richardson, as Jonathan Jones has noted, went on to enthusiastically join the British Union of Fascists.
Jon Stewart has the last laugh
Well, now. I was completely baffled at the chorus of disapproval that erupted from some media outlets at the news that Jon Stewart was returning to TheDailyShow as host, in a late stage Johnny Carson God-like capacity of once a week. I thought it was unexpected and great news. And, it seems, so did nearly everyone else outside of that narrow media echo chamber. Not only did the much anticipated return of Jon Stewart drag the ratings of the show up for himself, to levels unseen this decade, but there was a spillover effect of a ratings boost for the nights he wasn’t hosting. Comedy Central here is even running adverts urging us to tune in at 11pm on Tuesdays to see Jon Stewart, the captain of this dying medium, where he lives, rather than in extended YouTube clips on our phones. I can’t recall similar adverts trumpeting TheDailyShow in quite some time… Not that any of the naysayers will feel any need to sheepishly mutter that maybe perhaps they just slightly misjudged the public mood.
I was watching a short clip on YouTube of Keanu Reeves being grilled by Drew Barrymore on the ethics of jumping a queue when it occurred to me that what made his responses so good were that they were slow – you could see him actually thinking about what he was saying and weighing the elements of the Socratic discussion as he went. You do want to give the benefit of the doubt to the line-jumper, but eventually, as he concluded, you have to hedge against the possibility that you’re just being played and then you respond brusquely. How rare it is to actually see someone think like that in public, as opposed to rapid fire answers that are so clearly coin operated that no thought at all can have gone into them. You just pull a lever and you get your prepared zinger. Think Ben Shapiro, Noam Chomsky, Andrew Tate. Brilliant way to win debates, but, after suffering thru Cameron and Johnson as British PMs, surely we can all agree that being able to win a debate does not necessarily equate to anything other than your ability to win a debate. I remember seeing Tate, who as the Atlantic has noted, somehow still echoes thru YouTube in excerpts posted by others, riffing, losing all interest in talking to the woman physically across the table from him, and getting more into the performance of his own persona, as he expounded on how on any given day as a man, because men have such a wide range, he might to have hold a baby and also kill a man. I couldn’t help but instantly think of Seth Rogen at the end of ‘Like a Boss’ muttering about what insanity Andy Samberg had outlined as being his average day.
Photo: John Paul Filo/CBS
The Root of All Charm
I have been watching reruns of both Jonathan Nolan shows this year and so was left musing over the question of why I lap up the know it all awesomeness of Root in Person of Interest but roll my eyes at the know it all invincibility of Maeve in Westworld. Perhaps it’s just that, invincibility. Root suffers. Hugely. Maeve complains endlessly about how she’s been misused, but she can’t die, she’s not human. And Root was never protected by plot armour the way that Maeve, especially as Westworld progressed, so painfully and aggravatingly was. When she was revealed as a superweapon by Bernard in season 4 I actually groaned that she was back – again. Of course she was. Invincible. But aside from that aspect of the writing, there’s something charmless about Maeve. I cannot imagine Thandie Newton saying ‘Ruh-Roh’ the way that Amy Acker did when she got worrying news from Michael Emerson in season 4. I had goodwill towards Acker from Angel and The Cabin in the Woods when I first saw her in Person of Interest, and afterwards I started watching The Gifted in part because she was in it. By contrast after four seasons of Westworld I watched Reminiscence praying that Lisa Joy wasn’t about to give me Maeve 2.0 with Newton’s hard bitten know it all ex-military PI. I think it is a question of charm. I’ve complained before about the decline in dialogue between Person of Interest and Westworld, and this probably hurts Newton’s chances of coming across as charming in any way, instead of just contemptuous and insufferable. Root by contrast has Shaw complain of her that she flirts at the worst possible moments, endlessly flummoxes poor Lionel, insults Mr Reese continually, and has a very interesting growing bond of mutual respect and affection with Mr Finch; which finally pushes him to let The Machine off the leash and be the righteously avenging God Root always thought she could be. She is a fully fleshed out character with a variety of dynamics with the other characters. Acker’s imposing height lends a weight to Root’s authority, and believability to her ninja assassin skills, but her knowing smile softens everything she says to an ironic game played by humans in the shadow of a machine god: hence in the endless iterations of a scenario the Machine replaces her dialogue with ‘Playful Greeting’, ‘Witty Sign Off’, and the like. Which is why a ruthless killer can come across as, well, charming.
“Problematic”
If you are thinking of catching up with the recent BBC documentary Picasso: The Beauty and the Beast let me warn you off this drinking game. Do not take a shot everytime Louisa Buck says ‘Problematic’. You will die. She says it so many times that it becomes self-parody. As far as I can see the “problem” with Picasso is that he had six major relationships over the course of his 91 years, and many of these women were unhappy afterwards. Uh. … … … So, what has that got to do with his art, exactly? If Walter Sickert really were Jack the Ripper, par Patricia Cornwell, would that invalidate his art? Caravaggio murdered a man, should we put his pictures in storage? Is the only way to avoid censorious judgement by Louisa Buck to leave no trace of your life, like the Sphinx of Delft himself, Vermeer? And why is it ipso facto morally bad for Picasso to have lived with six women over 91 years when Kate Winslet had married three men before 40? Nobody would call for Winslet to be cancelled. Quite the opposite in fact, there was a tremendous backlash against the tabloid columnist who opined that her three children by three different men wasn’t a good look on anyone. What standards of outrage are being applied here, exactly? If it’s nebulous power dynamics, Sam Mendes the Oscar winning film director certainly outranked Winslet. But Titanic star Winslet undoubtedly outranked her assistant director husband Jamie Threapleton, especially, per the Daily Mail, when she moved to New York, forcing him to cross the Atlantic to see his daughter. Picasso was older, richer, and more famous than all but one of the women he was with: unequal power dynamics therefore mean he’s abusive in all connexions he forms with women. Except of course Tinder et al furnish statistical data that shows women choose men who are older, taller, and richer than them. They are actively seeking out unequal power dynamics. So maybe ease up on the castigating of Pablo Picasso. And maybe focus on his Art. Please?
Talking Movies 