FACTORIES THAT MAKE FACTORIES: I really loved (Untitled), even though I went in to the theater with a lot of skepticism. Basically, I expected the movie–no wait, I mean “film”–to beat up on experimental art from a fairly basic “my kindergartner could make that” perspective. Instead, I got a complicated, even humanist (not my favorite philosophical stance–I’m a personalist, not a humanist–but still) fable in which both commercial success and boundary-pushing were simultaneously celebrated and interrogated.

So here are three points/questions about the movie.

1) It’s so funny! I mean, I’d already seen the line, “Harmony is just a capitalist plot to sell pianos!” in ads for the flick (and using that line in ads is kind of adorably recursive); but there were so many other great lines and moments. I think the sex scene, in which the classic “How does a bra come off?” puzzle was made vastly more complex by the lady’s baroque clothing, might have been my favorite.

And I note that many of the satirized characters are also humanized. Not all–the Damien Hirst caricature, for example, doesn’t get more than a comeuppance, and ditto the easily-snowed male collector. But this movie is more a debate or dialogue than a treatise: Lots of perspectives get their say, and get to be human.

2) I love how the movie draws out the bluntly literal bent of so much avant-garde art. This isn’t art you experience, or even art you endure; it’s art you solve. Possibly the most blatant expression of this fact comes early in the movie, when the hot haute collectrix says that the rattling of a bucket on the end of a chain signifies “the unchaining of desire,” or some such. I will always stand up for abstraction and stylization as a way of representing a truth behind “realist,” Naturalistic human experience; but this movie showcased the ways that abstraction can become childish, an alphabetic relation of image to concept in which the image adds nothing to the concept.

I think that’s one reason that the movie manages to show so much terrific avant-garde art, and contrast it with the art being mocked. I mean, I personally didn’t care for the shimmery-glasses music of the Avant God at the end–I thought it was pretty and twee. But I did nonetheless get that it was attempting to be music, something nonliteral, something unspeakable, something more lovely and complex than a chain falling into a bucket to represent the unchaining of desire.

3) Freddie’s old post about Damien Hirst made me think about one question. I mean, I think Freddie is wrong on at least five different levels!, lol (what is actually wrong with fifty beautiful pictures of water lilies?), but the thing I most want to question right now is the idea that art has been emptied of meaning.

I think the responsibility of the modern artist is to recognize the inability of symbols to signify.

Look. In the modern era, wherever you’d care to place that, there was a crisis of representation. (I should say that this next bit isn’t mine alone but rather is boilerplate undergrad art history. It’s still true.) Everywhere, traditional structures of certainty and meaning were being subverted. Religion, science, government, civic society were all facing new and frightening challenges. Into this maelstrom came the popularization and eventual universality of the camera and the photograph, a direct and insurmountable challenge to the preeminence of the artistic image as the primary mode of representation. In the face of this challenge, the response of many artists has been to abandon the notion of representation at all. Just as literature in the modern era was the literature of exhaustion, art in the modern era was the art of a tradition that had, in a small but significant way, admitted defeat. Art itself fails, in the modern era.

–Freddie

Because I agree with Freddie that “beauty” isn’t the only aim of art. And (Untitled), I think, does as well: It gives the stellar line, “When did beauty become so [redacted] ugly?!” to a pretentious painter of pretty corporate sunbursts. (One of the movie’s many triumphs is that my self-confessed Philistine friend said, afterward, “You know–I really liked his paintings!” They’re likable! They’re pretty and pleasant, and I actually don’t mean that with any degree of contempt; I would think well of a hotel or office which had these lovely, balanced abstractions on its walls. Anyway, point is, I get that art can go beyond beauty; I just want it to go beyond beauty into sublimity.

But even that isn’t the fight I want to pick right now. The thing I’m curious about is… why some media and not others? Why are painting and “orchestral” or non-pop music so incredibly conflicted and self-doubting, so willing to accept narratives about the death or dearth of meaning… while novelists continue to churn out adultery stories, and movies continue to do more or less everything, and even comics seem to be recovering from a late-’90s period in which they were swallowed up into the maelstrom of their own navel? Seriously… if the Weakerthans are doing something new-enough; if The Wire did something new enough; where does anyone get off saying that painters, sculptors, and non-pop musicians have exhausted the possibilities of meaning?

Maybe “fine artists” are living in the world of The Last Unicorn–where most unicorns have been captured, it’s true; but every time they see a real unicorn, they think it’s merely a strange white mare.