ajuuiomml
6d ago
Blockbuster movies make half their money or more in the foreign market. They are designed to be easily digestible and offend not the sensibilities of the foreign market. That only leaves room for action sequences for some reason. It’s just dollars at the end of the day.
The take on “modern art” isn’t great. The impressionists were the first to engage with photography, and everyone loves those haystacks, water lilies, and ballerinas. In its day, the work was criticized for being sloppy, unprofessional , vulgar in technique with visible strokes, not much mixing of color, chaotic, lacking craft, etc, which may as well be Luke’s objections to “modern art”. Photography itself would take a while to be accepted as fine art. All the while the two continued to influence each other. Consider that photorealism was a post war counter movement to abstract art, but that it wouldn’t exist without either the embrace of abstraction or the widespread diffusion of photography and its idioms in society. Or think about Andy Warhol reproducing the objects of mass production in the setting of fine art. Such work only makes sense in a society that can print at will. This is Art having a conversation with the consequences of mass printing and the quotidian. Consider the work of Roy Lichtenstein, who appropriated the techniques used by comic books, but blew them up and put the ben-day dots in the foreground, as if they are the subject. They are striking in person.
I seriously wonder if the author, or the people who levy these criticisms in general, have ever been to a museum. Liechtenstein’s pieces are big and experiencing them is different in person. Clifford Still made huge, abstract, minimal pieces that can only be appreciated in person (20’ wide). Pollock’s paintings are 10’ wide. Reproduction on a phone screen loses something as a medium. It’s not just the form factor, a work taking up your entire field of view, the setting, the loss of texture, etc, but our relationship to our phones themselves. In a museum, when forced to confront a work of art, you have an actual thing in front of you - it obviously took effort and other people value it and think you should value it too. They chose to show it to you and you implicitly accepted a contract when you entered to attempt to engage with it. A phone is just the opposite. Every image on a phone is disposable and ephemeral, and asks nothing of us.
Phones serve us pablum or turn everything else into it. So anyway, go to a museum. As your parents might say, eat your broccoli, you may like it.
How does it work elsewhere in the world - say Japan, Korea, or Vietnam?
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