This is Not a Blog Post

Art, it can be said, represents an individual’s unique perspective of the world we share: a creative synthesis of the novel and the familiar. Meanwhile, art movements comprise artists whose perspectives of the same cultural moment form a cohesive style by exploring common themes. They may be bound by aesthetics, ideology, or a combination therein.

When it comes down to it, there really are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who think that life used to be better, while others believe that things could be better still. This is the fundamental ideological divide that separates us. Conservatives want to conserve the mythology of a golden age that never really existed, while progressives want to progress toward something that may very well be too idealistic to ever fully come into fruition. Our politics is the conflict of these factions, and art itself can be thought of as political if the artist intends to affect the way that the audience thinks. And of course they do.

Art movements in the western world have been marked by this same back-and-forth conflict, as European and North American artists since the Renaissance have oscillated between realism and stylization in their work. One generation said “This is a tree,” while the next said, “But more importantly, this is how I see the tree.” The next generation of artists then said, “Actually, this is a tree,” and so on. The Renaissance gave way to Neoclassicism, which gave way to Romanticism, which led to Naturalism, which led to Modern Art, and so it goes, a pendulum swing between subjective and objective perspectives of an ever-changing reality. One generation says “This is what art is supposed to be,” while the next generation of artists says, “Perhaps, but this is what it could be…” In any artistic medium, once the conventions of content or form become too familiar, they are replaced with new conventions, which will eventually grow stale as well and are then replaced. Sometimes people look forward for new ideas, and sometimes they look back to see what may have worked in the past.

Consider popular films from the past seventy years. In the fifties and early sixties, cinema was bigger than life and brought to you in vivid technicolor (Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, Rebel Without a Cause) or it was in black and white (most of Hitchcock's work, for example), despite the fact that color film had already been around for quite some time. Audiences in the fifties weren't meant to forget that they were watching a movie. Stylization was the norm. Then in the sixties and seventies, we saw more of a shift toward gritty realism as directors turned their lenses on social issues (Coppola, Scorsese, etc.). After that, audiences witnessed the rise of the blockbuster business model, which has demonstrated a clear preference for spectacle over realism. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone blew a lot of stuff up. Then in the nineties, independent filmmakers like Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith pissed all over the Hollywood sign by offering stylized realism in contrast to spectacle and artifice. Pulp Fiction, for example, is about the scenes between the action -- the stuff we weren't used to seeing in action movies. The industry responded by making films that appeared more realistic through the use of CGI (Saving Private Ryan is generally credited with starting that trend). Then New York City was attacked by terrorists, and today audiences are inundated with superhero movies and fantasy films.

Wash, rinse, repeat.