Critic Cites Revenge of the Sith As "Generation's Greatest Work of Art 376
eldavojohn writes "Art critic and University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia Camille Paglia has written a book that not only claims George Lucas is the 'World's Greatest Living Artist' but also that 'Revenge of the Sith' is our generation's greatest work of art. That's right: Titian, Bernini, Monet, Picasso, Jackson Pollock and ... George Lucas. If you thought you understood art but you hated Episode III, it might be difficult to understand how her book 'Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars' ends with 'Revenge of the Sith.' There is a possibility that the art world remembers this generation by examining that movie."
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Titian, Bernini, Monet, Picasso, Jackson Pollock (Score:4, Insightful)
There's the problem, none of them really "our generation".
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George Lucas isn't "my generation" - he's my dad's generation. Might actually explain the awkward sense of humour..
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For the older farts among us, Akira Kurosawa and Stanley Kubrick are still relevant. Both of them WAY greater artists than George Lucas.
Even if you strictly limit the comparison to living artists, I'd rate Ridley Scott a bit higher. Sure he made some weak films too, but his better ones beat Star Wars IMHO.
George Lucas obviously greater - in impact (Score:3, Insightful)
Akira Kurosawa and Stanley Kubrick are still relevant. Both of them WAY greater artists than George Lucas.
Nope. You are thinking of the word "greater" in terms of quality, which is a pointless metric when talking about art because quality is entirely subjective.
In terms of impact on humanity, there's no question that Lucas has had far greater impact than Kubrick and Kurosawa combined. The reason is simple, it's because Lucas is getting to viewers at a much younger age, with a more widely distributed prod
Re:George Lucas obviously greater - in impact (Score:5, Insightful)
By that metric, the greatest artist of all time was Adolf Hitler.
Re:Not so (Score:4, Insightful)
Hitler got into politics because his art was rejected. At least near the end he saw his reign in terms of art - namely, a classic tragedy. The culture of Nazi Germany was largely based on artistic choices and has ever since been an inexhaustible well for other artists. In fact, the very Star Wars itself draws a major source of inspiration from there, from the very concept of an evil empire worshipping the Dark Side to the aesthetics of space battles.
Hitler had a far greater effect on the art world than Lucas could ever even dream of. And with the generation that actually went through World War II, you just know he's on his way to become this [purrsia.com].
Seagull logic 101 (Score:3)
So the calibration pinnacle on your scale of cultural importance is Dr Seuss, Bugs Bunny, Walt Disney, and Norman Rockwell? I'm pretty sure that Kubrick and Kurosawa were important influences on both Spielberg and Lucas. By your metric, it's surprising we remember Newton at all.
I've grown to hate just about any idea with an immediacy transform embedded inside, because its so much a
Re: Titian, Bernini, Monet, Picasso, Jackson Pollo (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Titian, Bernini, Monet, Picasso, Jackson Pollo (Score:4, Insightful)
Your generation is just fine. The generation before you is annoyed by you, you'll be annoyed by the generation after you, and so it goes. Change becomes more difficult to accommodate with age, I can honestly report.
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Let's first see if this 'expert' is getting US tax dollars from the endowment for the Arts...and cut her funding immediately, and retroactively....
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Jar jar is just misunderstood; he isn't a redundant and annoying racial stereotype. He's really a heart-wrenching commentary on contemporary sociatal angst, portrayed through counter-cultural metaphorical symbolism.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/451/
Amen! (Score:4, Interesting)
Jar jar is the character that defined a generation of Americans, not my generation mind you, but a generation. I suppose that Bella defines the current youth.
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Yeah that movie with Charlize Theron could have been really good if they had picked a live human to play the part of Snow White.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Jar jar is just misunderstood; he isn't a redundant and annoying racial stereotype. He's really a heart-wrenching commentary on contemporary sociatal angst, portrayed through counter-cultural metaphorical symbolism.
Messa agree. Messa represent moi moi post-modernist angst.
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He was visible in the Galactic Senate scene, too. Presumably as the representative for Naboo.
Pretty sure that was ROTS. My mind has blocked out large parts of that movie as being one of the worst I've ever seen in my life (and I include Plan 9 from Outer Space on that list).
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
I never understood why Naboo chose a clearly retarded representative. Oh, wait. I guess Star Wars is more realistic than I realized.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
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Anakin is Darth Vader.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Paglia's a crank (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't tar "art critics" with the brush you use on Camille Paglia. I've been ignoring her as a bit of a sociological nutcase since the 1990s. She styles herself as kind of feminist libertarian, but as Gloria Steinem put it, "Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying they're not anti-Semitic."
Re:Paglia's a crank (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
How much is Disney paying her? (Score:5, Funny)
That or she's into some nasty nose candy.
Re:How much is Disney paying her? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The scene from Kung Fu Panda where Grand Master Oogway ascends [youtube.com] is one of the prettiest things I've ever seen, and is quite moving too.
If she hasn't found good art in this generation, she's simply not looking hard enough.
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The scene from Kung Fu Panda where Grand Master Oogway ascends [youtube.com] is one of the prettiest things I've ever seen, and is quite moving too.
If she hasn't found good art in this generation, she's simply not looking hard enough.
If I turn on the Disney Channel and watch some random teenage sitcom it's greater fucking art than anything George Lucas ever made. And I hate Disney.
Re:How much is Disney paying her? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, the long finale of Revenge of the Sith has more inherent artistic value, emotional power, and global impact than anything by the artists you name. It's because the art world has flat-lined and become an echo chamber of received opinion and toxic over-praise. It's like the emperor's new clothes—people are too intimidated to admit what they secretly think or what they might think with their blinders off.
Interestingly, she says other arts, videogames specifically, are doing much better. So it's probably more a hyperbole to shock the art world into, I don't know, getting better, than something she actually thinks is true.
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Incidentally, it's perfectly fucking obvious why videogames are doing much better artistically: it's because the previous generation's masterpieces were things like Tetris and Pacman, which are fun games but with limited artistic depth.
Re:How much is Disney paying her? (Score:5, Funny)
I always thought ET for the Atari 2600 was art, because I really didn't get it.
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, I get it. Art is subjective. Sometimes someone's "best movie ever" is another's pukeorama. I know this.
But, no.
Just no.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe she defines "our generation" as "people who were 5 when the movie came out, and still think like 5-year-olds".
Re:No. (Score:5, Funny)
But, no.
Just no.
I think you mean :
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly, this was suppose to be the big emotional moment. When I saw this I just started laughing at it
Besides I never really had a feeling from the move from the Light side of the Jedi to the Dark Side of the sith.
Emperor: I am the Sith Lord, Join Me.
Skywalker: OK, let me kill Samuel Jackson, then a bunch of helpless kids to show that I really crossed into the dark side.
If it were artistic you would have had a series of moral quest where you slowly cross the line.
Heck War Craft 3 had a better story arch of turning the good guy to the bad guy.
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That's because they cut out the scene where the emperor describes the 401K plan and stock options.
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What story? There were just a bunch of walking cardboard cutouts and CG clones.
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I'm mostly with you on AotC, aside from the giant tic love scene and a few scenes with horrid directing/bad acting i really liked it.
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Uhm, but isn't that all of them?
These reviews basically scientifically prove how much the prequels suck: http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/ [redlettermedia.com]
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I think movies are more personal than objective. I don't really watch movies because their artistic, I watch them because I like to imagine myself as part of the experience.
That works better with things like porn and anything with Scarlett Johansson, not so much for things like Saving Private Ryan and anything with Will Farrell.
Re:No. (Score:5, Funny)
I agree completely. The red-brownish turd was by far the best of all three turds.
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It looks like you just arbitrarily decided that your own standards are capable of objectively qualifying the quality of a piece of art. At any rate, I didn't see any proof that the matter is objective.
Ha Ha (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot trolled by feminist academic.
Re:Ha Ha (Score:5, Insightful)
What I was thinking, brings to mind a quote I don't quite remember the exact details of, talking about shooting a gun to see who jumps.
So much of our mass media these days are just professional trolls who just take a contracdictory opinion to feed their bank account from the attention: Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, countless pundits, etcera. The whole 2012 election coverage was a farce to make it seem like there was an actual photofinish race vs a marathon where one guy was lagging a mile behind. Or CopperCab on Youtube.
I don't understand why people fall for the tactic again and again. So the worst is the lady may actually believe this, does anyone take the argument seriously? No, then move on and don't give her attentions/book sales/whatever either way.
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Like we're giving her any attention. This. Is. SLASHDOT! She's just a reminder of an excuse (RotS) for us to vent our collective rage/smartassery. We won't remember her in twenty minutes, except as a tiny extra layer of righteous indignation should we accidentally encounter RotS again.
Well, at least it will get page views (Score:2)
The sad thing is that I might have bought this before the three prequels came out.
What?! (Score:5, Funny)
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
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You should have seen the rough draft. It was a steaming pile of sith.
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NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! [nooooooooooooooo.com]
Some random text to avoid Slashdot's "Lameness filter". I wish you all a good day and may a horde of beautiful vaginas find their way to your crotch in the nearest future.
"art critic says" (Score:2)
Enough said. Always been a fan of the bonkers commentary that Brian Sewell [wikipedia.org] comes out with myself.
Re:"art critic says" (Score:5, Funny)
From History of the World, Part I:
"Even in most primitive man, the need to create was part of his nature. This need, this talent clearly separated early man from animals, who would never know this gift. And here, in a cave about 2 million years ago, the first artist was born. [a drawing of a buffalo is shown, and a proud artist] And, of course, with the birth of the artist, came the inevitable afterbirth... the critic. [the critic urinates on the drawing]"
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Ah yes, Brian Sewell (who insists on calling Mary Magdalen, the woman, not the college, Mary Maudlin) is absolute proof that critics are failed artists.
Re:"art critic says" (Score:4, Insightful)
Nonsense ! (Score:5, Funny)
Nonsense ! YouTube Charts tells me that Psy, Justin Bieber and Jennifer Lopez are the greatest artists !
Greater Artist (Score:2)
I once knew a kid who, whether through a mental disability or through general weirdness, liked to smear his poop around places in public. I would consider him a greater artist than George Lucas, except for the fact his works could be considered an imitation of Revenge of the Sith.
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I once knew a kid who, whether through a mental disability or through general weirdness, liked to smear his poop around places in public. I would consider him a greater artist than George Lucas, except for the fact his works could be considered an imitation of Revenge of the Sith.
Michael Bay?
Oh, you said greater artist.... never mind
Critics need an opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
If art critics and movie critics would just blindly follow the popular opinions, there would not be much point in having them around.
We can check what's in the IMDB Top 250 without needing their help.
Same with Picasso... I'd much rather look at a peaceful picture of mountains than his morbid creations. It takes a critic to like it.
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If art critics and movie critics would just blindly follow the popular opinions, there would not be much point in having them around.
We can check what's in the IMDB Top 250 without needing their help.
Same with Picasso... I'd much rather look at a peaceful picture of mountains than his morbid creations. It takes a critic to like it.
No, not really. Your own statement shows that his art is better because it evokes a stronger emotion within you than all the landscapes which you can't remember specifically. "Better" doesn't always mean that you find more enjoyment or happiness in it.
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Better doesn't mean 'evokes a stronger emotion' either...
Its all subject.
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Same with Picasso... I'd much rather look at a peaceful picture of mountains than his morbid creations. It takes a critic to like it.
No, it doesn't. Art isn't just "hello clouds, hello sky".
What a load. (Score:3, Insightful)
Any so-called art critic and professor who wants to put George Lucas next to William Shakespeare needs to just drive off a cliff.
Yeah, the Star Wars universe is pretty awesome, but it's hardly a cultural masterpiece that stands alongside works of art hanging in the Louvre.
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George Lucas blows Shakespeare out of the water in a couple of ways. He engages the imagination in a way that Shakespeare just doesn't. Imaginative panoramas, gadgets, events, forces to the universe, and all that is the cluttered sci-fi visuals of his movies. He doesn't have Shakespeare's wit, nor his ability to tell a tale of someone else's sound and fury in a way that makes it personal, etc. But, now I think we're comparing one type of artist to another. People are comparing Lucas to writers and to
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Imaginative panoramas, gadgets, events, forces to the universe, and all that is the cluttered sci-fi visuals of his movies.
90% of SF works involve all of that, and there are plenty SF artists who can write good stories with those elements. Lucas' work is just not that great; it's just entertaining. Which isn't bad, mind you; it's just not great art.
Free publicity (Score:4, Insightful)
Entire Star Wars section added solely to gain publicity for the rest of the work.
Mission accomplished.
Copies (Score:3)
Actually, you can know how good a work of art is in objective terms. Just look at how many people copy it. Take a painting from 1700's. The ones that were most heavily copied in their day were the most influential. The ones that were still being copied in the 1800's could be seen as great art.
How many people have copied ''Revenge of the Sith'. I know I saw it, but I don't even remember it. During Halloween you still see kids copying the first three movies. The 1977-1983 movies.
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Re:Copies (Score:4, Interesting)
My definition of how "arty" something is, to counteract all the shite that I see pushed as art, is thus:
"The amount of skill needed to reproduce the piece given the same time, materials and techniques."
So a square of splatty paint on a bit of canvas that the artist pondered over for a decade isn't very arty at all. 5-year-olds could copy it. Michaelangelo's David? That's a serious piece of art that's incredibly difficult to make. Sure, you could mould it or 3D print it or laser-scan it and then even CNC it, but it would take an artist (a proper one!) to make it using only the same methods / materials as it was originally produced with.
Similarly, splatting a bit of moondust or graphite sheets on a canvas and calling it art is stretching it because GIVEN those materials, the arrangement of them isn't anything fabulous. They *can* be highly-skilled art, but there the art is in the skill, not the materials, and the higher-skill, the harder to reproduce given those materials, no matter how rare they are.
This (to me) helpfully eradicates all of the shite that pretends to be art (especially the "interpretive" art where you're supposed to appreciate the message more than the delivery - pretty much everything since Picasso) while keeping all the classics, the masters and the geniuses firmly in their age-old deserved places.
By that definition, given a budget as large as the movie had, given the computer technology and everything else that was there, how hard would it be to generate something like that movie (or so similar as to be indistinguishable)? I don't think it would be as tricky as George Lucas would like to make out. Maybe *I* couldn't do it, but certainly any director of merit probably could pull it off quite easily.
The best artists I see today are putting work online for free, scrabbling for space on street corners, and selling things that must take them FOREVER to make for a few pounds on etsy or from their back yard or similar.
The best artist I've seen lately was some old guy I found living in a house in the Highlands (a turning in Erogie, near Inverness, Scotland, marked as "Art Gallery" on a scrap of paper by the side of the road, you can't miss it - there are about four houses in the town, and after you've driven 2 miles following those signs off-road through fields, over bridges, past farms, etc. and there's NOTHING else but those signs until you end up in front of his ramshackle house with a yappy little dog excited to see ANYONE, that's the guy!), who sells some beautiful "classic" paintings of things like stags and deer for a pittance out of his back bedroom.
Out of the thousands of "galleries" around that area, his was the only one that wasn't mass-produced, didn't have 10,000 prints of an actual nice painting (being the only thing really worth the money in most places, in my opinion), and had things that you actually had to whistle in disbelief when you saw the skill and time that had gone into it.
I can't believe people will spend an hour in some posh art gallery down the road, spending thousands while looking at the millionth print of a photograph someone took of the local scenery (it's really NOT that hard to take a photograph of nice scenery in that area, and then print it out) and the crudely Photoshopped to remove the huge electricity pylons that were in it, rather than go look at the old guy at work (hell, just his conversation is worth the price of the paintings).
It's not how many people copy it, it's not how long it took you to make, it's not what name it has on the bottom, it's not even how much it cost. It's how hard it would be to reproduce using the same material, techniques and time as the original creator did.
And by that definition, the "first" episode of the Star Wars trilogy (chronologically) is probably more arty than all the newer prequels put together. But where they come on the same scale as everything else is probably floating around the same rating as The Blair Witch Project.
I agree (Score:4, Informative)
Some of the junk she thought was art, created a "feeling" in me. I "felt" it was crap.
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Every time I step in dogshit, it evokes a feeling or response. To some that would mean that dogshit is art. So her definition is equally as self-fulfilling as ours. :-)
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To put it another way... Van Gogh never sold a painting, and Renoir died in abject poverty.
unconsidered candidate (Score:5, Insightful)
And the worst art critic award goes to... (Score:3)
And the worst art critic of our generation award goes to...Camille Paglia. Honorable mention goes to Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia for hiring this tool. Even Jar Jar Binks was quoted as saying, "Meesa thinks she's a nutcase."
This is the same idiot that describes herself as a "dissident feminist" (whatever that is). Perhaps she is also a dissident art critic. Let's call a duck a duck. She's a heretic.
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Well put, I would add that she is a moron as well, BUTshe did get a posting on slashdot and that's worth less than you might think.
Is this the 90s!? She's been trolling for years. (Score:5, Informative)
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The brilliant and hilarious political writer Molly Ivins wrote the ultimate takedown of Camille Paglia's absurd intellectual methods (20 years ago!). Archive.org has a PDF of the original article [archive.org] from Mother Jones magazine.
If you plan to read it, ignore the rest of this comment, but if you're not going to follow the link, here's the final paragraph of the article:
Well, THAT was unexpected... (Score:5, Informative)
I never expected to agree with TFA. I mean, come on; if Revenge of the Sith is truly the greatest work of art produced in the last thirty years, then the artistic state of humanity has fallen far indeed. But then I went and read the thing, only to find that the critic is pretty much saying exactly this: that it is the greatest work of art produced in the last thirty years, because the artistic state of humanity has fallen so far.
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Compliment to Lucas or Insult to Our Generation? (Score:2)
Obviously she's saying it to be provocative, but is her underlying message that Lucas is a genius, or that our generation venerates garish reheated tripe? We have extended and expanded copyright into such a giant cash spewing regulatory juggernaut that it has drowned out art, strangled cultural commentary, and left nothing of media production but self-loathing prostitution of regurgitated, once-great story lines. Maybe she's just a senior citizen taking a shot at "these damn kids these days".
Actually.... (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair, there are a couple really good scenes in Revenge of the Sith. As a whole the movie is indeed pretty lacking, but if the whole movie had more scenes like the following, it could have been something truly grand:
The best is the scene (sans dialog!) where (eh, am I really going to spoiler this?) there is one character looking across the city toward where another character is doing something atrocious. That is a brilliant scene, where there is actually a glimpse of emotion, conveyed not by dialog or effects, but simple imagery and the score.
It's too bad, really, that the rest of the movie is so full of cliche and noise.
You almost prove her point (Score:2)
George Lucas is the only one of those people who has been alive in the last 30 years, let alone produced "art". Titian and Bernini have been dead for hundreds of years (unless there's more modern artists also using those names of course, but you'd expect a better reference than those famous single names) and are ridiculous to include in a "this generation"
Wait, what? (Score:2)
It's because the art world has flat-lined and become an echo chamber of received opinion and toxic over-praise.
So she's railing against over-praise by... over-praising something. Maybe there's genius in that, but I think she believes she is being deep, which is ironic, and doubly so when you read what she said just prior to that:
There's too much gimmickry and irony and not enough intuition and emotion.
Gimmickry? I'm not sure it's possible that he could have included any more in the movie (everything from "gimmicky" CGI to story gimmick - I mean come on, Anakin BUILT the two 'droids? Really? It's a big fuckin' galaxy, I ain't buyin' it. And yes I know,
YABP YHL HAND (Score:2)
Successful professional troll is successful.
How can anyone think this? (Score:2)
Proof positive... (Score:2)
And..., if one bother's to RTFA, one realizes that she's talking about the visuals. We are all agreed that the movie was a turd, but the visual art within it is not without merit. Too bad most of it was actually created by artists whose names only appear in the smallest print in the closing credits, but hey, she's an art critic and
Five qualities of great art (Score:2)
Here are what I consider the 5 qualities of great art:
Powerful – It has an affect on your mind and emotions and is compelling.
Accessible – The affect it has on you is worth the effort you put into appreciating it.
Elevating - When it moves you, it moves you toward personal growth.
Universal – It can move people from different cultures and different time periods.
The bar just dropped significantly (Score:2)
Quick, where is James Cameron!
But seriously?!
Nothing about Star Wars is art. Weak plot, dry acting, poor direction. Yes the visual effects are stunning and this is the one biggest contribution Lucas and LucasArts/Films has given the world, but even if it is art, its not the greatest produced this generation. Art should invoke more emotions then just sheer anger and utter disappointment.
This just proves that art criticism is nothing but vapid subjective commentary. I mean it is so obvious that this is a
Art critics... (Score:2)
"...art and literature have sadly been relegated to PhD's and ever-narrowing groups of intellectuals who 'get it', never bothering to ask if it's worthy of being gotten in the first place" [integralworld.net]
Hey, at least Star Wars (as a whole, perhaps not this particular horrible episode) is at least something that has had a major influence on Western culture. That's a lot better definition of Art than the usual postmodernist tripe.
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PR (Score:2)
LMFAO (Score:3)
Need publicity much?
Re:5 words on the subject (Score:5, Funny)
The Jar Jar Binks, The?
Re:5 words on the subject (Score:4, Funny)
Re:How do I troll? (Score:4, Informative)
Srsly, how do I troll?
You post a long, superficially well reasoned argument that she's right.
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How's this then?
1) Great art, as defined by the generation experiencing it, is what that generation is willing to pay for.
2) Revenge of the Sith made nearly a billion dollars in revenue
3) Obviously Revenge of the Sith is the type of art that this generation places the most value on. Along with Transformers 1 2 and 3, Ice Age 3, etc etc
(Incidentally, where the argument fails is that there are other high grossing movies that could easily be chosen following the same argument. Avatar was at least 'pretty'
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I'm pretty sure it got more views already than the latest three Star Wars movies put together. :)
The fact I can describe the Gangham video scene by scene from memory and not Lucas's latest blasphemy doens't bode well for the author's hypothesis.
Of course there's more crap out there. There's billions more people! There should be (and is) more great stuff too. You just need to look harder.
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dunno about you, but I intend to wait until it shows up in the local library's DVD/BluRay collection, and then continue not going to that part of the library.