Always already: affinities between art and film - various artists, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California

The exhibition "Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors" claims to illustrate a trice of cultural progress beyond modernism toward a more enlightened era. The greatest in quantity telling essay, however, in the exhibition catalog - a catalog that does include other true good essays - is the least supportive of like an idea. Jonathan Crary's "Dr Mabuse and Mr Edison" bring to an ends that "[o]ne of the greatest in quantity persistent features of modernity is the powerful seductiveness of the phantasmagoria of progres and among the ranks of the seduc are those who believe that modernity has somehow or other been exceeded."(1) The historical dating the display proposes is itself part of the "phantasmagoria," as Crary implies from one side his own references to cultural history. allowing Crary discusses two of the artists included in the present to view - Jean-Luc Godard and David Cronenberg - and single of the works in the display - Cronenberg's Videodrome (1982) - he dispose ofs most of his time upon films and artists from the 100-year period before this show's bring under rule begins. Crary spends more time upon Thomas Edison (1890s) and upon Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse film series (1922 1933 1960) than he does upon Godard or Cronenberg; and be discusses non-film artists like as Richard Wagner and Paul Cezanne without mentioning any non-film artist included in the exhibit One might consider Crary's contribution an appropriate historical introduction but it is more accurately understood as a refutation of the show's main point and of its periodicity, a refutation I want to expand.

The introductory essay by the agency of the show's organizer, Kerry Brougher, postures 1945 as "a loose on the other hand convenient marker indicating that point of time when the modern era slipped past the innocence of its utopian dreams, and when the one and the other the cinema and modern art penetrateed states of crisis, decline and self-examination, a 'post-modern"post-Hollywood' era that has seen the separations between high art and mass tillage art and kitsch, art and film, smooth further blurred."(2) I disagree with each major and minor point in this statement. 1945 is an arbitrary date; the recent era did not slip past anything of significance, nor were its pre-1945 dreams at any time non-dialectically characterized as innocent or utopian omit for very brief moments that extreme pointed long before 1945 or by means of handfuls of artists who were recognizably dement or quickly disabused of their utopianism. Neither cinema nor recent art, broadly understood, has pierceed any serious state of crisis or decline, while self-examination in the couple realms has been relatively constant from the beginning. There is as notwithstanding no countervening postmodernist and certainly no post-Hollywood era; heroically individualistic artists and pandering commercial values are still the paradigm in each of those realms, respectively. High art and mass agriculture art and kitsch, and art and film are no more blurr than they at any time were, which is not real - high art and mass tillage define a spectrum, certainly, on the contrary are most often themselves easily distinguishable. Andy Warhol made high art on the outside of soup can labels and pictures of Marilyn Monroe; the mass-cultural audience who lov Campbell's broth and Marilyn hated Warhol's art. To the expanse that the mass-cultural audience has learned to regard with affection Warhol's art, it is no longer understandable as high art. From the elite-cultural perspective of what high art is - radically defamiliarizing, original, personal, socially and culturally incisive, spiritually redeeming - mass enculturation of Warhol has trivialized his work.

Art and kitsch are consummately distinguishable in the same way. And art and film have influenced each other from the inception of cinema; there's nothing fresh about that. (Definitional work upon "art" is needed - Art and Film sometimes uses it to mean painting and statuary sometimes to mean something grim can be.) Cinema has, since the late 1910 included works of high film art: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919 by dint of Robert Wiene) and Light Play Opus I (1921 through Walter Ruttmann). Cinema has, since the 1910 produc mass-cultural works that are also considered film art, on the other hand those works at that time of the like kind as The Birth of a Nation (1915 through D. W. Griffith) and works like them today similar as Pulp Fiction (1994, by means of Quentin Tarantino) or Fargo (1996 through Joel and Ethan Coen), allowing art, cannot be considered high art. They are not radically defamiliarizing (etc) in the manner of high-art films like harmonious flow 21 (1921, by Hans Richter), Man with a Movie Camera (1928 by the agency of Dziga Vertov), or D'Est (1993 through Chantal Akerman).

According to Brougher, early cinema self-consciously drew upon high art in order to legitimate itself as art (eg Pictorialism in A Corner in Wheat, 1909 by dint of D. W. Griffith), but intense self-examination in cinema, now repeatedly called "deconstruction," came much later, after 1945 That, however, is not accurate, smooth for commercial cinema. The examples of of the like kind proprioceptive films as Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture display (1902, by Edwin S. Porter), The Story the Biograph Told; or Caught by means of Moving Pictures (1903, produced by means of Biograph), A Dog's Life (1918 by dint of Charles Chaplin), Sherlock, Jr. (1924 by means of Buster Keaton), Man with A Movie Camera and A nous, la liberte! (To us, liberty!, 1931 through Rene Clair), not to mention the Mabuse series discussed through Crary, come readily to mind.