Barack Obama is back in the bush

So noted.

I guess I include in my pessimism and critical misanthropy the very thing you cite above as a positive (and is mentioned later by Hermes).

Movies like 'John Wick' get graded on a curve at one end of the movie making/criticism axis, and indies/foreign films get graded at the other.

In both cases my sense is a sort critical grade inflation across the entire business.

But I'm old, and I compare the relativism of movie criticism now with criticism in the great age of Kael, when it felt like there were absolutes. (There weren't, of course, but the idea of a coherent, linear, historical aesthetic in film-making divorced from commerce was very appealing to me.)

 

I guess I'd add here that one of the real scourges of the movie business the last 40 years is the public fascination with "box office."

 

Roger Ebert basically admitted to this as the foundation of his criticism. His baseline question was: What is this movie trying to accomplish and did it do so?

 

That was a component of his criticism. Ebert was not above impugning motives or correctly noting a money grab.

But I do think authorial intent should matter, and I also think great art has authorial intent that’s reasonably accessible and/or straightforward. It’s when artists try to leverage irony and “iconoclasm” in sloppy ways that I get skeptical.

In the food world, it’s this: “I could have made this with chicken, but I made it with yuckfish, and the fact that it doesn’t taste like complete shit is a sign of its excellence.”

 

Mona Lisa! Is she fat? Why isn't she smiling?
Granted I only took one art history class in college, (and before thought though Leroy Neiman's sports paintings were as good as it got) but the class did make me understand that art is very subjective and you really need to try to "get" why the artist presents something the way they do. And also to understand why something creates whatever reaction you have to it.

 

What makes false authorial/artist intent so hard to assert in movies is it’s either on the screen or it isn’t. Like “This character secretly loves to sneak food in the middle of the night” is only valid if it’s depicted or spoken of.

In fine art, there’s no other way to say it...artists build narratives, especially when the art is more conceptual than not, because the narrative is part of how the art gets sold. The artist has to convince you that they’re worth getting, and, look - they’re not above off the wall artistic narratives that make the art worth getting.

In poetry, it was narrative poetry. Regular sentences - often not very good ones - broken up in odd places, spaced about a page in interesting arrangements, and then called poetry. No, it’s prose. And often not very good prose. It’s just made to look like a poem.

And instead of the critical world calling it for the BS it is...it went along with it. Because so-and-so artist or poet had a MFA and had a show here or a poem published there. Because universities are more than happy to take people’s money and validate their art in the process. IMO, without higher ed, we’d have better art, because there wouldn’t be taxpayer-funded institutions protecting mediocre art for the sake of preserving the jobs of folks who protect it.

 

I've tried to read the art and poetry critiques in The New Yorker - they continue to baffle me.

 

Speaking of poetry, I was watching some TV commercial the other day and it included a clip of someone reading from Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night," and it occurred to me that he and maybe Allen Ginsberg were the last poets whose work can be recognized or recited by even a sliver of Western Civilization. You can make the claim that Bob Dylan is a poet -- and thus part of why he was honored with the Nobel -- but that's poetry put to music, which is different.

 

Thanks Rodney.

 

Frost better known than Thomas.
Frost’s work probably better known that Ginsberg’s, who’s probably known more as a celebrity than for his work.

 

We don't teach poetry the way we used to. Rote memorization of some narrow band of canonical Western classics is no longer part of the curriculum.

Lots of reasons for that, some good, some bad, but there's more poetry of more kinds available to more people than at any time in human history.

"Poetry" has never been more popular.

Google "Rupi Kaur" and you'll see what I mean.

Poetry and music and the oral tradition go back to Homer - "Sing muse, of the man of many turns" - so I don't necessarily exclude rap or Dylan or pop. It's all poetry of a kind.

 

I kind of think of our writings here at SJ as poetry.