After all of the discussion around yesterday’s post, I realize that should come clean about some things. Those somethings are my personal aesthetic predilections, which I think often lead me to be impatient with some of the complaints that I see people lodge against cultural products. It may be better for everyone if I just state this stuff up front:
I don’t really care about continuity, internal consistency or resolution in works of art.
Some of my favorite books: Dhalgren by Samuel Delany, Great Expectations by Kathy Acker, Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, The Castle by Kafka, The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carrol and Martin Gardener.
My favorite theater: Richard Foreman and The Wooster Group.
Some of my favorite films: Flaming Creatures by Jack Smith, Tsui Hark’s Kung Fu films, Nashville by Robert Altman, The Man who Fell To Earth.
Most of these are shaggy, baggy types of works, where attention wanders, things come in and out of focus and are not consistent. There are multiple voices, fragments, differing points of view.
This is the sort of art that makes me happy. It’s the kind of space I feel like I can wander around in and notice things, the sort of thing I can return to because there are so many ways to enter it.
Narrative drive and closer tend to bore me. I enjoy the sensation of not knowing what will happen next, or even what is happening right now. Ambiguity entices me more than definition does. I demand experiences, not answers.
I’m not immune to the charms of continuity, but when I love Love and Rockets, it’s for the rich, surprising way each story is told, not for the ability to place each element on a time line.
I don’t think that people who hold internal logic and explanations to be paramount to be wrong in applying that yardstick to their art and entertainment. But I do value different sorts of things in art. That’s probably why I find it hard to be roused to indignation by flaws in internal logic, which so often are the basis for people’s complaints about work.
Maybe laying that out will clarify in part why I got so cranky yesterday.
Tags: aesthetics, art, daily photo, fandom