Art: motion picture vs. canvas?
I was having a discussion with a close friend last night and the topic of art came up. Neither him nor I really know the first thing about fine art, keep that in mind. What we do know to some degree is motion pictures, again not the artistic aspects (ie. cinematography, photography, direction etc).
The conversation turned to how some films have certain indescribable features while others to not and how often these phantom features add much to a film. We concluded that if films don’t have these magical somethings then they are usually bad movies. By that I mean that on the surface most films are the same. Films have music, they have scenes, a setting, characters, story, yet why are some films great and others are just bad? So we decided that there was something operating on a different level that added a dimension to film.
But at the same time all film has characteristics in common that must be present else people simply refuse to accept it, so one can’t make a film that operates only on this “higher level” (if such a thing were even possible). This thread of conversation led to something that got me thinking.
Why is it that we have a structure for film and nothing outside of that structure is acceptable yet (here’s where the title makes sense) we have no such structure for painting. It seems anything goes in the painting world. Can you imagine watching a movie with nothing but stripes of colour on the film? People would be outraged at having paid for something like that. Yet we pay money to go into an art gallery and look at stripes of colour on a canvas.
Why the disparity? Are the two formats just fundamentally different? Or does this structure of film constrain it to some degree? I suppose the constraining force could be nothing more than popular culture and its demands/tolerances. We demand things of our films yet we make no such demands of our paintings.