Carney's Nightmare is Shared By Me

These are some of my favourite paragraphs from Ray Carney's wonderful essay on The Path of Artist in his website. Take it away, Ray:

I have a recurring dream about a world where the museums have been bought up by the superstores and are run the way they are. Decisions on acquiring paintings are no longer made by art curators and specialists, but are governed by the marketplace. Artists buy their way in by purchasing "wall space" for ten thousand dollars a square foot, just like Coca Cola or Dockers does to get into your local Wal-Mart. But since there is always more demand than space available, simply getting a painting into the store is not sufficient; a work has to bring people in to justify its existence, to keep the shelf space from being reassigned to something else.

The museum of the future keeps track of how many people look at each painting each day. The figures are published and studied by the heads of other museums to see which paintings attract the most viewers. Bidding wars ensue to get the hottest paintings. Paintings whose drawing power falls off after a few days or weeks are removed and replaced by others. Work that doesn't seem certain to attract viewers is not put up in the first place, even if it can pay the wall fee. Corporate entities grow up to evaluate the potential popularity of each painting and to invest in it (or withhold investment) according to the predictions. In order to attract viewers and boost attendance figures, the artists of the future work in concert with vast armies of publicists and press flacks, whose job is to attract an audience to their work.

The artists themselves do everything they can to stoke up interest, giving magazine and newspaper interviews, making the rounds of television talk shows, making outrageous claims for the importance of their work. Of course, there are no more landscapes and still lives. And no more portraits. In the museum of the future, paintings that require time and experience to understand were long ago shoved aside by works with flashy, dazzling effects. Individual works vie for attention with every gimmick imaginable–free baseball caps, t-shirts, light shows, neon-lighted frames, holographic posters, multimillion dollar television, radio, and newspaper ad campaigns. The hushed subtlety of classic art gives way to coarse obviousness; the quiet beckoning of the old fashioned museum is replaced by blatant hucksterism. The paintings of the future are full of violence and nudity and sensational allusions to contemporary issues. It is the end of art as we know it.

The reason the dream scares me is that when I wake up I realize that it is not a vision of some hellish nightmare future, but the world we actually live in. It’s only that what the dream symbolically represents as museums and paintings is our present movie theaters and the films that play in them.

I find this especially interesting as I know several intelligent, cultured people who are aware of this dichotomy between 'real art' and cinema, and yet do nothing to change it. They are the kind of people who will go to a museum to look at contemporary art, find a uniform Rothko wall of red impressive and important, and yet consider 'art' films to be boring and pretentious. Also the same people who'd never read a Stephen King or Tom Clancy book and yet consider Indiana Jones a great, GREAT film.

Why is this?

Why must cinema always be relegated to a second-tier of the arts? A sort of dirty mistress we go to when we need to sate our most base desires for adrenaline and lust but that cannot provide any sort of intellectual or spiritual satisfaction. If I went into Tate Modern tomorrow and threw a bucket of paint thinner on Picasso's The Three Dancers it would be a disaster. People would see it as a disaster and a crime against humanity. An irreparable loss. But if by contrast I destroyed all copies (and negative) of Tarkovsky's Andrey Rublev who would cry over them besides a small number of cinephiles? Would there be such a sense of loss? Would it make headlines?

Aren't we far enough from the early days when cinema was little more than a carnival gimmick? Isn't it time to consider it an art form like painting, sculpture, music? Not just in words and empty classifications, but truly to realise it and incorporate it in our view of the world of human expression. Of course, as Carney says above, it is cinema's own fault that this happens. We might be 100 years removed from the simple thrill of watching a train come our way (link) but looking at box office numbers shows that there has been little evolution. The thrills, fears and cheap emotions are now more complex, crammed as they are in a 90-minute package, but they remain pretty much the same. Going to a multiplex is the same as going to a rollercoaster, except it lasts longer and you can eat popcorn while doing it. Very sad but if we aren't the ones making and watching the films that go beyond this, who else is?