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Critic Cites Revenge of the Sith As "Generation's Greatest Work of Art
eldavojohn writes "Art critic and University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia Camille Paglia has written a book that not only claims George Lucas is the 'World's Greatest Living Artist' but also that 'Revenge of the Sith' is our generation's greatest work of art. That's right: Titian, Bernini, Monet, Picasso, Jackson Pollock and ... George Lucas. If you thought you understood art but you hated Episode III, it might be difficult to understand how her book 'Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars' ends with 'Revenge of the Sith.' There is a possibility that the art world remembers this generation by examining that movie."
And I thought my opinion of art critics couldn't get any lower.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
That or she's into some nasty nose candy.
Okay, I get it. Art is subjective. Sometimes someone's "best movie ever" is another's pukeorama. I know this.
But, no.
Just no.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Slashdot trolled by feminist academic.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
There's the problem, none of them really "our generation".
Nonsense ! YouTube Charts tells me that Psy, Justin Bieber and Jennifer Lopez are the greatest artists !
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
If art critics and movie critics would just blindly follow the popular opinions, there would not be much point in having them around.
We can check what's in the IMDB Top 250 without needing their help.
Same with Picasso... I'd much rather look at a peaceful picture of mountains than his morbid creations. It takes a critic to like it.
From History of the World, Part I:
"Even in most primitive man, the need to create was part of his nature. This need, this talent clearly separated early man from animals, who would never know this gift. And here, in a cave about 2 million years ago, the first artist was born. [a drawing of a buffalo is shown, and a proud artist] And, of course, with the birth of the artist, came the inevitable afterbirth... the critic. [the critic urinates on the drawing]"
I am officially gone from
The Jar Jar Binks, The?
Entire Star Wars section added solely to gain publicity for the rest of the work.
Mission accomplished.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
Srsly, how do I troll?
You post a long, superficially well reasoned argument that she's right.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I submit Shigeru Miyamoto as the greatest living artist. His creations are at least as iconic and influential.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Paglia has been trolling the feminist establishment for for years. Now she has broadened her trolling to sell more books. It's boring and this post is troll bait.
Jar jar is the character that defined a generation of Americans, not my generation mind you, but a generation. I suppose that Bella defines the current youth.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I never expected to agree with TFA. I mean, come on; if Revenge of the Sith is truly the greatest work of art produced in the last thirty years, then the artistic state of humanity has fallen far indeed. But then I went and read the thing, only to find that the critic is pretty much saying exactly this: that it is the greatest work of art produced in the last thirty years, because the artistic state of humanity has fallen so far.
No one who speaks german could possibly be evil!
To be fair, there are a couple really good scenes in Revenge of the Sith. As a whole the movie is indeed pretty lacking, but if the whole movie had more scenes like the following, it could have been something truly grand:
The best is the scene (sans dialog!) where (eh, am I really going to spoiler this?) there is one character looking across the city toward where another character is doing something atrocious. That is a brilliant scene, where there is actually a glimpse of emotion, conveyed not by dialog or effects, but simple imagery and the score.
It's too bad, really, that the rest of the movie is so full of cliche and noise.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
He comes out with some nonsense, but I quite like - and agree with - a lot of what Sewell says. A lot of people in the art world are so puffed up and do need puncturing, I don't see why Brian should have less right to do that than anyone else. I don't think the accusations of hypocrisy are fair - for example he's not just an art critic, he's an artist himself, and when asked why he didn't have any exhibitions he said something like "why would anyone want to see what I've done?". He probably wishes other artists had the same respect for others.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
My definition of how "arty" something is, to counteract all the shite that I see pushed as art, is thus:
"The amount of skill needed to reproduce the piece given the same time, materials and techniques."
So a square of splatty paint on a bit of canvas that the artist pondered over for a decade isn't very arty at all. 5-year-olds could copy it. Michaelangelo's David? That's a serious piece of art that's incredibly difficult to make. Sure, you could mould it or 3D print it or laser-scan it and then even CNC it, but it would take an artist (a proper one!) to make it using only the same methods / materials as it was originally produced with.
Similarly, splatting a bit of moondust or graphite sheets on a canvas and calling it art is stretching it because GIVEN those materials, the arrangement of them isn't anything fabulous. They *can* be highly-skilled art, but there the art is in the skill, not the materials, and the higher-skill, the harder to reproduce given those materials, no matter how rare they are.
This (to me) helpfully eradicates all of the shite that pretends to be art (especially the "interpretive" art where you're supposed to appreciate the message more than the delivery - pretty much everything since Picasso) while keeping all the classics, the masters and the geniuses firmly in their age-old deserved places.
By that definition, given a budget as large as the movie had, given the computer technology and everything else that was there, how hard would it be to generate something like that movie (or so similar as to be indistinguishable)? I don't think it would be as tricky as George Lucas would like to make out. Maybe *I* couldn't do it, but certainly any director of merit probably could pull it off quite easily.
The best artists I see today are putting work online for free, scrabbling for space on street corners, and selling things that must take them FOREVER to make for a few pounds on etsy or from their back yard or similar.
The best artist I've seen lately was some old guy I found living in a house in the Highlands (a turning in Erogie, near Inverness, Scotland, marked as "Art Gallery" on a scrap of paper by the side of the road, you can't miss it - there are about four houses in the town, and after you've driven 2 miles following those signs off-road through fields, over bridges, past farms, etc. and there's NOTHING else but those signs until you end up in front of his ramshackle house with a yappy little dog excited to see ANYONE, that's the guy!), who sells some beautiful "classic" paintings of things like stags and deer for a pittance out of his back bedroom.
Out of the thousands of "galleries" around that area, his was the only one that wasn't mass-produced, didn't have 10,000 prints of an actual nice painting (being the only thing really worth the money in most places, in my opinion), and had things that you actually had to whistle in disbelief when you saw the skill and time that had gone into it.
I can't believe people will spend an hour in some posh art gallery down the road, spending thousands while looking at the millionth print of a photograph someone took of the local scenery (it's really NOT that hard to take a photograph of nice scenery in that area, and then print it out) and the crudely Photoshopped to remove the huge electricity pylons that were in it, rather than go look at the old guy at work (hell, just his conversation is worth the price of the paintings).
It's not how many people copy it, it's not how long it took you to make, it's not what name it has on the bottom, it's not even how much it cost. It's how hard it would be to reproduce using the same material, techniques and time as the original creator did.
And by that definition, the "first" episode of the Star Wars trilogy (chronologically) is probably more arty than all the newer prequels put together. But where they come on the same scale as everything else is probably floating around the same rating as The Blair Witch Project.
My ex and I used to argue over this point constantly. She was a "fine arts" major. What you and I call art, she claimed we confused with craftmanship. If it "evoked a feeling or response", it was art in her book.
Some of the junk she thought was art, created a "feeling" in me. I "felt" it was crap.
Surely they can't be talking about our gen-gen-generation?
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
George Lucas blows Shakespeare out of the water in a couple of ways. He engages the imagination in a way that Shakespeare just doesn't. Imaginative panoramas, gadgets, events, forces to the universe, and all that is the cluttered sci-fi visuals of his movies. He doesn't have Shakespeare's wit, nor his ability to tell a tale of someone else's sound and fury in a way that makes it personal, etc. But, now I think we're comparing one type of artist to another. People are comparing Lucas to writers and to painters, which is a shame. I wouldn't even compare him to most other directors, because his achievement, and it is one, is not related to most of that.
Another comment suggested that only 5 year olds and those that think like them would appreciate Lucas. Are we not supposed to retain a childlike portion of our identity growing up into adulthood? Isn't there a reason for this? Shakespeare most often pleases the adult in me, but very few have engaged the child in me and its sense of wonder in any close to the degree of Lucas, and I do not think it was an easy feat.
Lucas is a phenomenal artist, but not in the way that we laud most artists. And, not in some obscure academic way either. He created an intriguing universe where I want to spin my own stories.
Z
George Lucas isn't "my generation" - he's my dad's generation. Might actually explain the awkward sense of humour..
Don't tar "art critics" with the brush you use on Camille Paglia. I've been ignoring her as a bit of a sociological nutcase since the 1990s. She styles herself as kind of feminist libertarian, but as Gloria Steinem put it, "Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying they're not anti-Semitic."
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For the older farts among us, Akira Kurosawa and Stanley Kubrick are still relevant. Both of them WAY greater artists than George Lucas.
Even if you strictly limit the comparison to living artists, I'd rate Ridley Scott a bit higher. Sure he made some weak films too, but his better ones beat Star Wars IMHO.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Your generation is just fine. The generation before you is annoyed by you, you'll be annoyed by the generation after you, and so it goes. Change becomes more difficult to accommodate with age, I can honestly report.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
By that metric, the greatest artist of all time was Adolf Hitler.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Hitler got into politics because his art was rejected. At least near the end he saw his reign in terms of art - namely, a classic tragedy. The culture of Nazi Germany was largely based on artistic choices and has ever since been an inexhaustible well for other artists. In fact, the very Star Wars itself draws a major source of inspiration from there, from the very concept of an evil empire worshipping the Dark Side to the aesthetics of space battles.
Hitler had a far greater effect on the art world than Lucas could ever even dream of. And with the generation that actually went through World War II, you just know he's on his way to become this.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.