I watched Velvet Buzzsaw last night. The central plot element is that a man living alone in an apartment dies, leaving behind a lifetme of paintings he’s never shown to anyone.* An ambitious art gallery employee finds them, recognizes them as great art with massive commercial value, and rocks the art world with her discovery.
Everyone who sees the paintings agrees: a modern Great Master.
Yeah ok but . . . the painter who supplied the art for the movie is definitely not a modern Great Master. I mean that’s an element that would obviously be impossible for the filmmakers to fulfill, so the audience is expected to suspend disbelief and pretend, for the sake of the movie, that the art is, in fact, Great. Kind of like when a character’s differemt ages are played by different actors who look absolutely nothing alike.
Putting aside for now the near certainty that the Dease paintings in VB would, irl, more likely be seen in a coffeeshop than a major gallery, what are we others that require such a stretch of suspended disbelief?
*Pretty clearly inspired by the story. of Henry Darger
So is this like when Mrs. Maisel is supposed to be the funniest female comic ever but her routines are not actually all that funny? Although the show as a whole is funny those comic routines are kinda the weakest link IMO.
Exactly! Although I found my credulity stretched beyond snapping when they expected us to believe that she accidentally found herself onstage and accidentally started telling jokes.
Tina Fey wrote in her autobiography (I think it was there) about why the sketches in 30 Rock were so universally bad. It wasn’t because TGS was supposed to be a bad show - it’s because as a former SNL writer she knew just how hard it is to write good sketches and, even then, a lot of times they still flopped. So they just leaned into it and made them purposefully terrible rather than expending tons of time and energy on them.
I always had that problem with Seinfeld. It was a great show but it was impossible to believe, from the “live” stand up bits, that Jerry was a comedian.
Compared the an average viewer I suspect I’ve had more art exposure than most. Not compared to many posters here but to the typical American viewer? Yeah. Took youth art classes at the Art Institute, mother was an artist, so on.
And I am pretty sure you could put some museum grade art that I have not seen before in front of me, and some stuff made by aspiring art students, and I likely not guess much better than chance which was which.
Which is not to say that there is no difference in quality. But most of us can only say that we like looking at something or not and only know that any specific work is “a masterpiece” because we’ve been told it is. Not so different for what is not.
That said better not to show the work in focus … let imagination fill in the masterpiece details.
My reaction to the art in Velvet Buzzsaw was based o n udgment formed from 4 years at SAIC, and 34 years as an artist since then. That doesn’t mean I’m right, it just means my opinion on thisis an educated and thoughtfully considered one. And while you’re speaking hypothetically, I was commenting on specific paintings that I saw and thought about before making this post.
Ya think maybe your fours of SAIC and decades as a professional artist give you a different view than the average viewer has by some bit?
That maybe your superior training and knowledge makes the willing suspension of disbelief something different than those who have maybe walked through a museum a few years back as their only real exposure to what is or is not great art, and left there not getting why much of was in there as great was considered such? But understanding it was despite the fact they didn’t see it as such.
Those of us with less educated opinions about art can be more easily convinced that something we go meh about is actually great art to those who know. Or at least can more easily suspend disbelief about it.
Part of the problem with there being an amazing undiscovered artist is that you’d have to come up with some idea for a major new direction for art to move, but if that amazing new direction was anything a random artist for hire could come up with it at a whim for the implementation of a screenplay, it probably wouldn’t be too interesting. What’s the likelihood that someone working for a major film is going to randomly stumble upon the one big thing that’s been missing from art when asked to create such a thing specifically? Wouldn’t the artist more likely have been already trying to do so? You can’t use anything like the quality of the painting or similar to be amazed at, because people have painted photorealistic stuff now for decades, you have to use some new approach that’s quite interesting and yet no one’s ever thought of. So what ends up happening is that any sort of big idea that’s been hidden really isn’t all that interesting, or they completely ignore the issue of why the paintings are interesting and just tell you that they are for plot’s sake.
The point he’s making is that for 99% of viewers, if not more, it’s not a stretch to suspend disbelief for the sake of film. For the vast majority of viewers, though perhaps not 99% of them, it likely won’t require any suspension at all. Most of us are in the “but I know what I like” camp when it comes to fine art, after all.
I’m more likely to notice this when it comes to music. Like, you know, it’s a detective show and the client of the week is a musician. There will be a scene where the musician is either finishing up a concert or is laying down tracks in the studio, and it’s usually paint-by-numbers hackery or unlistenable trash that the characters are obliged by the script to act as though it’s amazing and brilliant stuff.
Reminds me of when I was 13 and snuck into my very first R-rated movie in a theatre. It was “10”. The first time Dudley Moore sees Bo Derek in the adjacent car, a woman in front of me said to her date “Huh? She’s not a 10!”
It’s a deadpan comedy about making a film of the novel - and the film within the film is at least as entertaining as the outer film, and very true to the book.
I knew it because my mom had also gone to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as did one of my kids in summer programs getting college credit during HS (and I was YAS - Youth of the Art Institute - on week ends).
Looking up the movie it sounds like suspending disbelief that something might be considered great art by those who know is the least of that movie’s problems.
