{"id":915,"date":"2009-11-23T15:38:00","date_gmt":"2009-11-23T15:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/11\/915\/"},"modified":"2009-11-23T15:38:00","modified_gmt":"2009-11-23T15:38:00","slug":"915","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/11\/915.html","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

FACTORIES THAT MAKE FACTORIES<\/span>: I really loved (Untitled)<\/span>, even though I went in to the theater with a lot of skepticism. Basically, I expected the movie\u2013no wait, I mean \u201cfilm\u201d\u2013to beat up on experimental art from a fairly basic \u201cmy kindergartner could make that\u201d perspective. Instead, I got a complicated, even humanist (not my favorite philosophical stance\u2013I\u2019m a personalist, not a humanist\u2013but still) fable in which both commercial success and boundary-pushing were simultaneously celebrated and interrogated.<\/p>\n

So here are three points\/questions about the movie.<\/p>\n

1) It\u2019s so funny! I mean, I\u2019d already seen the line, \u201cHarmony is just a capitalist plot to sell pianos!\u201d in ads for the flick (and using that<\/span> 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 \u201cHow does a bra come off?\u201d puzzle was made vastly more complex by the lady\u2019s baroque clothing, might have been my favorite.<\/p>\n

And I note that many of the satirized characters are also humanized. Not all\u2013the Damien Hirst caricature, for example, doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

2) I love how the movie draws out the bluntly literal<\/span> bent of so much avant-garde art. This isn\u2019t art you experience, or even art you endure; it\u2019s art you solve<\/span>. 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 \u201cthe unchaining of desire,\u201d or some such. I will always stand up for abstraction and stylization as a way of representing a truth behind \u201crealist,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

I think that\u2019s 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\u2019t care for the shimmery-glasses music of the Avant God at the end\u2013I 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.<\/p>\n

3) Freddie\u2019s old post about Damien Hirst<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

I think the responsibility of the modern artist is to recognize the inability of symbols to signify.<\/p>\n

Look. In the modern era, wherever you\u2019d care to place that, there was a crisis of representation. (I should say that this next bit isn\u2019t mine alone but rather is boilerplate undergrad art history. It\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2013Freddie<\/p>\n

Because I agree with Freddie that \u201cbeauty\u201d isn\u2019t the only aim of art. And (Untitled)<\/span>, I think, does as well: It gives the stellar line, \u201cWhen did beauty become so [redacted] ugly?!\u201d to a pretentious painter of pretty corporate sunbursts. (One of the movie\u2019s many triumphs is that my self-confessed Philistine friend said, afterward, \u201cYou know\u2013I really liked<\/span> his paintings!\u201d They\u2019re likable! They\u2019re pretty and pleasant, and I actually don\u2019t 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<\/span>. <\/p>\n

But even that isn\u2019t the fight I want to pick right now. The thing I\u2019m curious about is\u2026 why some media and not others? Why are painting and \u201corchestral\u201d or non-pop music so incredibly conflicted and self-doubting, so willing to accept narratives about the death or dearth of meaning\u2026 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-\u201990s period in which they were swallowed up into the maelstrom of their own navel? Seriously\u2026 if the Weakerthans are doing something new-enough; if The Wire<\/span> did something new enough; where does anyone get off saying that painters, sculptors, and non-pop musicians have exhausted the possibilities of meaning?<\/p>\n

Maybe \u201cfine artists\u201d are living in the world of The Last Unicorn<\/span>\u2013where most unicorns have been captured, it\u2019s true; but every time they see a real unicorn, they think it\u2019s merely a strange white mare.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2013no wait, I mean \u201cfilm\u201d\u2013to beat up on experimental art from a fairly basic \u201cmy kindergartner could make that\u201d perspective. Instead, I got a complicated, even humanist (not my favorite […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nEve Tushnet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"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\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/11\/915.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"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\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/11\/915.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Eve Tushnet\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-11-23T15:38:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Eve Tushnet\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Eve Tushnet\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/11\/915.html\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/11\/915.html\",\"name\":\"\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2009-11-23T15:38:00+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2009-11-23T15:38:00+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#\/schema\/person\/ca04686b93c92257f019070302a23415\"},\"description\":\"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\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/11\/915.html\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/\",\"name\":\"Eve Tushnet\",\"description\":\"Conservatism reborn in twisted sisterhood\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#\/schema\/person\/ca04686b93c92257f019070302a23415\",\"name\":\"Eve Tushnet\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/be87ff28da150cb07788911c22e42ae2?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/be87ff28da150cb07788911c22e42ae2?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Eve Tushnet\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/author\/evetushnet\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Eve Tushnet","description":"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","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/11\/915.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_description":"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","og_url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/11\/915.html","og_site_name":"Eve Tushnet","article_published_time":"2009-11-23T15:38:00+00:00","author":"Eve Tushnet","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Eve Tushnet","Est. reading time":"5 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/11\/915.html","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/11\/915.html","name":"","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#website"},"datePublished":"2009-11-23T15:38:00+00:00","dateModified":"2009-11-23T15:38:00+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#\/schema\/person\/ca04686b93c92257f019070302a23415"},"description":"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","inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/11\/915.html"]}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/","name":"Eve Tushnet","description":"Conservatism reborn in twisted sisterhood","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#\/schema\/person\/ca04686b93c92257f019070302a23415","name":"Eve Tushnet","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/be87ff28da150cb07788911c22e42ae2?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/be87ff28da150cb07788911c22e42ae2?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Eve Tushnet"},"url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/author\/evetushnet"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1071"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}