After Art

Cross-posted from Jelly-Town!

A couple of issues ago in The New Yorker (I'm always at least a couple issues behind on New Yorkers) art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote a review of an exhibition at the New Museum called "After Nature." Schjeldahl makes some strong statements in the article, which you'd expect from a person whose last name sounds like Thor's spare hammer, but I've never thought of him as especially prone to hyperbole in the past. So it's especially noticeable when he uses damning phrases like "silly froth" and "[p]olitically, the new art is benumbed" as he longs for the emergence of a genuinely transformative artist such as Pollock or Warhol and ultimately concludes "that absence of such an artist "will help us adjust to the happenstance that, once and finally, our particular civilization is spent."

This especially struck me because it served as a (more eloquent, admittedly) mirror of a conversation firthofforth and I had after seeing Woody Allen's new film. She noted that, at 72-years-old, Woody Allen probably won't be delivering that many more films (although, he's prolific enough that who knows). This led to an impromptu mental survey of all the notable directors who are probably much closer to their expiration dates than their bright debuts. Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and the two dark Davids are all in their sixties (as are Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola if you remain stubbornly convinced that they're worthy of attention). Even the rascally Coen brothers and the two lyrical Lees are all in their fifties. Who are the directors that will make up the next wave? The ones who will shift cinema with the audaciousness of their craft?

I'm mostly framing this around film because that's the medium I'm most comfortable with when it comes to flaunting my opinions, but I suppose similar questions can be asked across different forms and formats. As I seek out the next Scorsese and Schjeldahl hunts the next Pollock, others are after the next Roth or Pynchon, or the next Pixies or Velvet Underground. I do wonder if the surfeit of critical voices in the Internet age is going to slow down the process of recognizing the truly great work. So many new contributions to the media piranha pool are greeted with a turbo-boosted merry-go-round of praise, backlash and backlash-against-the-backlash. It quickly reaches the point where the din of the debate completely drowns out any reasonable attempts to honestly consider the value of the work in question.

There's also a part of me that wonders if Schjeldahl's dire conclusion isn't correct. Perhaps we're reaching a point where art will begin to completely cave in on itself and those of us who crave something deeper, something more will be like those women in The Descent, worriedly shimmying on our bellies through a narrow passageway as the heavy rock above us shifts under the weight of Michael Bay movies and Sharon Osbourne and David Hasselhoff evaluating "talent." If so we can at least divert whatever remaining artistic energy there is into really important things, like inventive bike racks and cocktail-flavored gum (available for enjoyment in both ironic and non-ironic forms).

Free of all that wearying pressure to keep evaluating new work for admission to the canon, we follow the lead of my ancestral homeland and begin honoring the real heroes. We can replace all of our competitions with Lego reconstructions that are more likely to reach the top of the daily Digg list anyway. Just think of all the thinking we'll be able to avoid.

This post is what happens when the slate of movies in the Entertainment Weekly "Fall Movie Preview" issue (now with comically inaccurate cover!) is underwhelming.