Can Great Art Be Created With A Great Budget? -- Stanek's Comment

Being something of a heretic, I’ll play Devil’s Advocate on this one. Since “art” can be a bit of a slippery concept, let me preface my comments by saying that I am not the quintessential pretentious snob: I don’t subscribe to the notion that if you’ve heard of it, it isn’t good. Quite the opposite, I’m a Philistine. I don’t know what makes a piece of music, or an oil painting, or a novel technically brilliant. Indeed, I doubt I could even describe objectively how to write a decent paper; I intuit mine (making me a terrible proofreader of other people’s). Thus, I experience art first and foremost on an emotional level.* I judge art in a singularly vulgar fashion: based primarily on how it makes me feel.

The world is a lonely place, never so much as when you’re immersed in a crowd of people. Begging your pardon, Mr. Donne, but every man is indeed an island. An island linked to others by a fragile network of ephemeral bridges but surrounded by black waters all the same. Art is one of the few exceptions to this. It affords us a comforting illusion, a pleasant semblance of commonality. When I read a novel or stand before a painting, I do so in isolation. The connection I make with the piece is unique and entirely mine. But it feels like I’ve tapped into something universal, some kind of Jungian collective unconscious that tells me I am indeed "a piece of the continent, a part of the main." Enjoying the fruits of another’s creativity is perhaps the only way to truly get inside the head of another person, if only because instead of telling you what someone else is experiencing it shows you by inspiring the same feeling in you (regardless of whether or not the artist himself ever actually felt anything remotely similar—your perception that he did is all that matters). With great art, the joys, the triumphs, the fears, the sadness, the hopes of another blend seamlessly with your own for a brief time, uniting you with not only the artist but with all those that came before who (you imagine) shared an experience of the same sort. And that's powerful.

Money can do plenty of things in this world but it can’t make you feel ("You’re a bastard in a basket!"). Bumping up a budget doesn’t make a work any more meaningful or important to its creator. Does anyone doubt that the Star Wars prequel—for all of its expensive CGI—lacks much of the heart the older trilogy had? Indeed, funding levels that make an artist too comfortable risk removing some of the great tensions that give a work its emotional import. Can an artist on whom status and wealth is lavished credibly emote on issues like the great social, political, and economic disparities that weigh on our society? I don’t know. Perhaps some can. There will undoubtedly be exceptions, as Teshale notes. But, in general, excess money—like any stimulus applied for too long—dulls the senses and clouds the mind. A class of overly well-fed artists may lose its ability to feign connections with the great mass of people, in which case the bell tolls for them and only them.


*I should also make it clear that I recognize that not all entertainment is art and not all art is great. But, in the words of porn-addict Justice Potter Stewart, I know it when I see it. Except that in actuality I probably do not.