Category: Art

Soooo many people died in 2016, right? Wrong.

Should old acquaintance be forgot…

New Year’s for most of us has been more a question of ringing out the Old Year, rather than ringing in the New. It’s more or less universally accepted that 2016 has been a crummy one, at least within my circle of acquaintances. One particular feature has been the remarkable number of deaths, with George Michael and Carrie Fischer being but the last in a long list of casualties claimed by that angry teenager, Not-so-sweet ’16.

However, in actual fact, as a proportion of the total population, fewer people died in 2016 than in 2015. What’s more: as a percentage of the population, fewer people died in 2016 than in any year in the history of humankind. That’s right: In 2016, 0.76% of humans on earth kicked the bucket. By contrast, back in the ‘good ol’ days’ of say, 1960, that number was a whopping 1.77%. If you went back a Century, when the Great War was raging, it might have been closer to 3 or 4%. So in fact 2016 was the safest year ever to be a living human being.
cohen-and-african-kidsjpg

This was thanks to lower infant mortality rates, better access to medicine, improved diets and – despite what has happened in Syria and a few other places – overall a reduction in violent death.

Adieu to the former artist formerly known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.

But the good news doesn’t seem to apply if you were a celebrity. The BBC has a good article which tracks obituaries for 2016 compared to previous years and yes, we’re not all just imagining it: The hard data backs up the commonly held opinion that 2016 has been a grim year for the rich and famous.

According to the BBC's count of obituaries, 2016 has indeed killed lots of famous types.
…and this chart isn’t even counting the most significant death of all: That of Brad and Angelina’s marriage!

Which got me thinking about why we care so much. Why does it matter to us that someone – a singer or an actor – has passed away? Sure, they produced art which gave joy to our lives. But in almost all of these cases, the people in question were well past their artistic primes. And the art they gave us can still be enjoyed, even if they have now moved on to the Great Dressing Room in the Sky. Yet we seem to care, not just about their art, but about them, as people.

Which on the face of it is very weird. It hardly needs saying, but these people are strangers to us. We don’t know them personally, they certainly don’t know us or even want to know us, and even if by some freak chance we found ourselves snowed in to an alpine cabin in the company of a selection of Hollywood A-listers, we would quickly discover that they have nothing in common with us. So instead of cursing 2016 for the handful of complete strangers it has taken away, why don’t we choose to raise a glass of New Year’s bubbly and thank 2016 for sparing our friends and family?

Thou shall have no other gods before me, except perhaps the Kardashians

Of course we are grateful for our loved ones. But the fact is, celebs do matter to us. They fulfil a need which appears to be very human, that is, the role of the idol. This is nothing new to our age. The desire of the masses to look up to quasi-real demi-gods and follow their every movements is as old as mankind itself. Is our fascination with Angelina Jolie’s shocking decision to divorce Brad Pitt not the same kind as what the ancient Greeks must have felt about the decision by the mythological Jason, leader of the Argonauts, to divorce the powerful Witch-Princess Medea of Colchis, in order to tie the knot with the Corinthian princess Glauce? Did the plebs of Ancient Rome look upon Cleopatra any differently to the way the plebs of New York saw Marilyn Monroe? And the Hollywood Walk of Fame, can it not be seen upon the walls of any Catholic church, in the form of a star-studded line-up of Academy Award-winning saints?

In a sense, it is the decline in religion which has left a void in us; a void we seek to fill through celebrity culture. The image of callipygous Freya, the most beautiful female form imaginable, riding in a chariot pulled by two great cats through the Norse woods, together with her omnipotent husband Odin, is lost to us. But in its place we have bootylicious Kim and her theomaniac husband Kanye, riding in a sleek SUV along the highways of Los Angeles.

There’s one degree of separation between me and you: Kevin Bacon

And yet, while celebrity idolatry may always have served the purpose of setting a distant horizon to our plebeian ambitions, it seems that in recent years, the phenomenon has grown even more pervasive . I speculate that this is because, as cities become more vast and anonymous, and society more fragmented, we feel an ever larger yearning within ourselves to have something that connects us. With greater labour mobility and smaller families, more and more of us are moving about, lonely and disconnected. Shared references and common history are scarce, lost in the back of a rented U-Haul truck. Yet celebrities can restore that bond. We all know these beautiful super-humans from our one common altar – the TV screen. Taking an interest in their fate, becoming intimately acquainted with their ridiculously-named offspring and keeping track of their drug addictions and failed marriages becomes a vital source of shared reference. In the cold urban jungle, it is a comfort to me to think that while I may not know my neighbours, at least I know that they are watching the Oscars too. These saintly figures who float down the red carpets, in a mythological universe that seems planets away; they are the one true bond between us plebs.

 

Rendering Joy: the most difficult and most under-appreciated craft

The Art of Joy

The thought has often occurred to me that there is an imbalance in the way we value artistic quality, when it comes to rendering negative versus positive emotions. The expression through art of negative emotions is very often seen by critics and the public as particularly laudable. Poignant, gripping, gut-wrenching. One only needs to look at the cinematic offerings that plague the screens of Arthouse movie theatres the world over. Most are dreary, depressing affairs, detailing sordid experiences which culminate in unimaginable tragedy. And we, the middle class connoisseurs, gush appreciation as we discuss the deeper meaning behind this vitriol, in between snatches from the circulating plate of canapés and sips from our glasses of Pinot Grigio.

A masterful composition - Rockwell captures a moment of pure joy in a way few, more 'serious' artists, ever could.
A masterful composition – Normal Rockwell’s “Christmas Homecoming” captures a moment of pure joy in a way few, more ‘serious’ artists, ever could.

In reality of course, the portrayal of misery on screen or through other artistic media is not particularly challenging, at least to the extent that it provokes some sort of strong emotional reaction in the viewer. That is because our brains are hard-wired to react to negative images, which in an evolutionary sense might signal threats to our safety or well-being. We quite literally respond more quickly to negativity. As a result, fear and distaste are perhaps the easiest emotions for an artist to excite in his audience (with the possible exception of the titillation provoked by pornography). Consider the multitude of poor quality horror films out there. Even mediocre acting, direction and cinematography are no deterrent to the achievement of their intended effect – to make us recoil from the abhorrent.

What is much more difficult to convey artistically – and hence what I consider to be a higher form of art – is the opposite: Moments of pure, unadulterated joy or quiet contentment. In art as in real life, joy is something elusive. It is fleeting and often only retrospective. Do you for instance remember that summer’s day, when you were perhaps seven or eight, and you played badminton in the park with your cousins? Late in the afternoon, someone produced a five pound note which some auntie or other had bestowed for the general good of the group, and you all ran, barefoot, towards the jingle of the ice cream truck that pulled up at the gate to the park? The sun was low in the sky when finally you all crossed the bridge of stones that led back to your uncle’s house, where the smell of fish and chips awakened in you an appetite you had been too busy to realise you had? Of course you remember that day. It was perhaps the happiest of your life. But the very fact of this happy day is only something you have registered in retrospect, which itself evokes a certain melancholy…If you were to describe that day in art – a sequence of images perhaps – how hard would it be to convey that youthful, carefree spirit, without seeming banal or clichéd!

For contentment, the case is even more difficult. To be content is to be free of negative experience or feeling, and an absence is a thing very hard for an artist to capture and convey.

This thought is not new to me, and I daresay it’s been pondered by many’s an artist or writer before me. But it returned to me in full force the other day, as I chanced to visit, in the company of my brother, a museum dedicated to the works of the iconic 20th Century American artist Norman Rockwell, whose work my snobbery had previously always dismissed as “mere illustration”.

How wrong I was to do so. Rockwell, more than any artist I know, captures the elusive quality of joy in many of his paintings in ways ‘greater’ artists would surely struggle to emulate. The happiness in his work is inescapable, and doubtless contributed in no small measure to the mythos of the golden age that was 1950s America. One such scene is “The Runaway”, in which a friendly Massachusetts State Trooper converses earnestly with a little boy who has run away from home and made it as far as the high counter stool of the local diner. As the two speak, the grubby waiter behind the counter listens in and can barely contain his mirth. We imagine their conversation: perhaps the boy is explaining to the policeman his plans to join the circus and become a famous trapeze artist. We know the trooper will be taking note of the encounter in the little black book we see tucked into his rear pocket. He will be sure to check in with the boy’s parents that evening, just to make certain the truant has returned home safely before it gets dark. The image is basked in an air of familiarity, comfort and benevolence that makes the soul sing.

As my brother and I paced the halls of the museum, we briefly debated whether or not the happy sentiment Rockwell was leaving us with could be considered artistically valid. After all, so much of what is styled serious art is bent on reminding us that the human soul is a tortured thing; that doom is our natural condition. Yet why is joy not as valid an emotion as suffering?

In my opinion, joy is just as valid as its negative counterpart. Let Rockwell’s paintings be an inspiration to us all. Fellow artists: Let’s try to paint, compose or write some happiness. Make your audience feel your joy.