Withered Fields ...

I started this blog to talk about art ... philosophy of art, and aesthetics.
Except for some parallel arguments about humor, this just does not seem to happen often enough.

mia culpa

Withered Fields: means what it says
... the artworld as wasteland

Some years ago a good friend of mine, in speaking about "Saving Private Ryan", said that it made him feel impotent as an artist because there sat growing men, crying, at a pretty simple idea ... while he could not get any reaction from most people at all.
On implication of such a movie, that it can make conservative older men cry, is that more art should be like that.
I found myself initially thinking along this line, anyway.
But i eventually, within a few weeks, actually, came to have problems with the notion.

In a phrase ... Tone Painting.

Tone Painting, as a form of music, generates its force simply by mimicing the sound it wants to use to evoke sympathy ... the violin cries or the sound is calm and pastoral.
Movie soundtracks badly overuse this same technique ... to make a seen scary they simply dump loud dire music over it, rather than write a scene that is actually scary.

Movies makers now know exactly how to trigger the triggers in our brains. They produce a certain kind of realism. "Saving Private Ryan" is one of the best examples of this kind of work. But the emotional response invoked by the movie has nothing to do with art and everything to do with psychology and emotional triggers, and knowing how to set them off. If is advertising, but for tears rather than purchases.

This same friend has discussed with me how the introduction of the photograph made painters rethink art, rethink the role of images within art.
I call for the same re-evaluation in the light of cinema and modern sound systems. Much great art in the past has used psychological triggers, but art should not be reduced to such triggers. Great art has never been merely such triggering.

Shall we just burn the whole facade to the ground ... again?