Before Artlessness

before fearfulness

Ride

Standing apart is wearing a mask to be safe. Social opposition is cautious practice. Wearing a mask to be safe is punk! It’s goth!

Rage for the machine. Punk is not being things that are not currently preferred. Being Goth is being for Current Thing. It’s what you’re not, and what you don’t do. Similarly, great filmmaking is compliance and appropriateness, as an enjoyably dyspeptic essay in Tablet notes this week:

A new era of cringe is upon us, and the critics have only themselves to blame. “The power of She Said lies in its moments of potent moral clarity, which arrive in revelatory set pieces,” explained The Washington Post. But moral clarity doesn’t produce art; it produces agitprop, including one of the schlockiest scenes of 2022 (singled out for praise in the NYT). These scenes are everywhere, the dialogue so leaden, the “message” so clear, you wonder why they didn’t save millions in production costs and write New York Times op-eds instead.

This mutually parasitic marriage of art and criticism has led to worse art and worse criticism. A healthy critical culture would have at least some layer of unpredictability—a capacity for both wonder and disgust. Instead, the overwhelming urge is to play it safe, to flatten disagreement into fake consensus.

Art delivers correct cultural and political views, in clear and explicit forms, for earnest instruction. It’s like driver’s ed, but for being human. Great film requires that you keep your hands at sociopolitical 10:00 and 2:00, citizen.

We saw a restored amusement park over the weekend, of all things, and it left me excited and sad: excited for the thing, sad for the moment. Luna Luna was built in Hamburg in 1987, in the western part of still-divided Cold War Germany, a fun zone for families to play that was carefully placed on the site where Jews had been concentrated for shipment out of the city. It was Coney Island as a gallery, a reclamation from darkness, with rides and attractions designed by artists: mirrored geodesic funhouse by Salvador Dalí, Keith Haring carousel. Jean-Michel Basquiat made the Ferris wheel:

It was, what archaic word am I looking for, fun. In 1987 and in 2024. In its original form, costumed characters mixed with the crowd and joined families on the attractions; the moon, with a big glittery moon head, sat next you on the swing ride. (In current form, art from dead Keith Haring and dead Jean-Michel Basquiat is much too valuable for the insurance company to let you put your butt on it.)

Luna Luna lasted for a few rainy weeks, and then — condensing the story quite a bit — it went into shipping containers to travel to San Diego. It didn’t get there, and the shipping containers sat in a warehouse in Texas for a few decades before Drake heard about it and invested $100 million in its rescue, restoration, and display. Yes, Drake. Yes, $100 million. Read that whole story here, or here to get around the paywall.

In Los Angeles this week, I stared at Arik Brauer’s carousel for a long time, causing substantial annoyance to Miss Teenager, who left to go figure out where mom had gotten to.

Ironies abounded. A hands-on installation of norm-busting art by a good number of militantly gay and explicitly Marxist artists was a family-friendly fun zone; social deconstruction appeared as a creative act of building, with beauty and light and elegant form.

André Heller’s wedding chapel, over there to the right of the Ferris wheel, allowed fairgoers to marry “whomever or whatever they wanted,” breaking down stupid bourgeois norms, and so lots of moms and dads had fun getting play-married so their children could watch. The ironies are still echoing, by the way.

It turns out, I thought, walking around Luna Luna after a few decades of time-stopping warehouse maturation, that the fearless and joyful deconstruction of bourgeois social norms is less fun when bourgeois social norms have no weight and family connections are collapsing; it becomes art that mocks and undermines the substance of a sick thing that doesn’t have much substance, although real married people getting fake-married in the deconstructionist wedding chapel twists the whole thing around on its head in ways that resemble the plot structure of a Christopher Nolan movie. This might explain some of the current art scene: What does art attack when the thing that art attacks is already attacking itself with such grim determination that its politicized trajectory is straight toward the grave?

And then there was the remarkable experience of watching joyful and fearless artistic expression being consumed by heavily tattooed Los Angeles hipster art connoisseurs walking in herds in their N95 masks.

Taking the cultural forms of the 1980s and dropping them into 2024 is so disconcerting that it plays as an out-of-body experience. Urgent message to 1987: IT WORKS, BUT THEN IT DOESN’T GO THE WAY YOU THINK.