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Yes, the question of ‘why’ is often a satisfying one, but it is just as often immaterial. And while there are many reasons for this, just one should suffice: that people, being quite curious, will apply their curiosity towards questions that are insoluble, wrongly assuming that, since the cosmos offers up some answers, it can provide all of them. It simply won’t, however, since the questions we have learned to ask are not questions we have adapted to. In some cases, this is easily solved by letting go, by recognizing appropriate human limits. In others, however, it is more so that the relevant terms have never been defined, out of ignorance, out of inability, or both.

Art falls somewhere between these two realities, partly because it is more a question of ‘how’ rather than ‘why’ to begin with. Take, for instance, the issue of artistic trajectory: the inevitable arcs that all artists seem to go through, and, despite thousands of years of examples, these same artists’ failure to recognize them, much less avoid them. In short, it is true that most great artists will eventually start to repeat themselves in rather pallid ways; most great artists will forget how their art came about in the first place, content, as they are, to merely re-capture the spirit of youth; most great artists will, for lack of a better term, dull, dull, dull, and many (if not most) will never notice this in others or in themselves. Indeed, it is as if their decline somehow forces the world — or at least their conception of it — to acclimate to such, wherein nothing seems to move, nothing seems ‘wrong’. Sure, it is easy for people to see a boxer as washed-up, or smile at a fat, aging baseball player with the knowledge of what they had once accomplished. But this doesn’t seem to apply to the arts, for while every animal has a functional body, the human mind is somehow thought to be unique. It does not age. It doesn’t go. And this conception does not die, or else it is assumed that there was not much there to begin with.

Yet as limiting as this view of art and the artist is, connoisseurs can be quite rabid, which is sometimes a good thing. Recently, this has been the case with Woody Allen’s Irrational Man (2015), a mediocre film that (as with other films he has done over the past decade) borrows heavily from earlier masterpieces. Yes, this is a common plaint, but the deeper point is that he’s borrowing things with little understanding of how those elements worked so well in the original films: the real sin, in fact, since a borrowing that leads to artistic greatness is no sin at all. Thus, I find myself in agreement with not only the consensus surrounding the film (42% on RottenTomatoes, which is about the same score that Woody’s 2007 classic, Cassandra’s Dream, received), but also some … Continue reading →