Occupied Territories

criterioncorner:

I See What You Did There, Film Comment.

(apologies for the eye-strain, click to enlarge)

Film Comment’s Laura Kern finds a clever way to cut her workload in half, doubling her vitriol for 2 new films in the process.

for what it’s worth, your humble host doesn’t think that either of these films deserve such scorn, but… ya know… i see what you did there.

I usually recoil at the very concept of being “professional,” but this just strikes me as unprofessional in all the worst ways. I imagine people high-fiving the reviewer while exclaiming, “Nailed it!” And this of course conjures up a queasy feeling of self-satisfied superiority toward art. This is something that’s been on my mind a lot lately, as I increasingly feel like we live in a culture that’s very condescending toward art (what it is, what it’s not, and what it does and doesn’t do). What disturbs me the most is how stunts like this convey attitudes that could seamlessly intermingle with some of the most explicit anti-art attitudes circulating today.

The world’s rocking from a succession of very real traumas, and everyone has more problems than they can count. Even though art is incapable of changing a whole lot of that, I feel that if we don’t defend it, we might as well just be done with civilization altogether. The attitude cleverly dismissing these two films, irregardless of their worth, is the attitude of power looking down at anything it considers useless and ineffectual (e.g. the Occupiers). It’s the dominant attitude of 21st century capitalism, which recognizes something as valuable only if it’s useful and, in the case of art, successful (either “well-done,” an utterly vapid pronouncement, or able to garner prestige and make money). These reviews only serve to lend force to anyone’s argument that art is worthy of being dismissed altogether.