Re: opionated

Brendan McKennedy (suburbantourist@hotmail.com)
Sat, 02 May 1998 22:20:55 -0700 (PDT)

>	When Schubert opens the Trout quintet with those two superconfident 
>	chords & arpeggios, he's simply saying: `There.  THAT'S the way it 
>	is....'  Which is what Cezanne is also saying when he starts laying 
>	in those heart-stopping tiles of colour that make the shape of the 
>	mountain.  And when Ernest sends Fred Henry walking away from 
>	the hospital in the rain.  
>
>	And when Holden first fixes you with his baleful eye & begins 
>	telling you what happened.


That's it, I think:  the ability to judge art upon its merits and not 
upon a moral standard.  While I don't believe it's possible to look at 
something *entirely* without the filter of personal ethics (that's 
subjectivism, isn't it?  and there's no escaping that while you're 
human), I think you must sort of transcend it and simply appreciate the 
craft. 

It's what terrifies me about the phenomenon of things like Pulp Fiction, 
the film.  It was, very simply, a brilliant piece of work.  If you begin 
to judge it ethically, though, things get dangerous.  Then comes words 
like Censorship and Banning.  Or, on the other end, which I find at 
least equally dangerous...Well, I just listen to people talk about the 
movie, some of them, and I'm frightened by the way that they take it as 
a sort of Green Light to violence, murder, and excessive abuse of very 
dangerous drugs.  Instead of watching the film as a pretty silly satire 
on very serious issues, they watch it as a dismissal of the seriousness 
of the issues.  And now they've got me judging the film on morality, 
which bothers me doubly.  

While I don't advocate the general tossing out of Morality, I think it's 
important to be able to look at art not for instruction, but because 
it's art.

Brendan

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