Decadence and Poverty: More Art Problems
Anything but Simple: Gift Drawings and the Shaker Aesthetic - American Folk Art Museum - September 13, 2024 - January 26, 2025
Playing with Design: Gameboards, Art, and Culture - American Folk Art Museum - September 13, 2024 - January 26, 2025
Robert Frank - Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue - MoMA - September 15, 2024 - January 11, 2025
Klara Liden - Verdebelvedere - Reena Spaulings - September 17 - October 27, 2024
Charles Steffen - 1995, A Lesson in Life Drawing - March - September 4 - October 19, 2024
Lorenzo Amos, Richard Artschwager, Mary Ellen Bartley, Lena Christakes, Victoria Gitman, Phoebe Helander, Martin Kippenberger, Asher Liftin, Jara Lopez Sastre, Rodrigo Moynihan, Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein, Stephen Shanabrook, David Smalling, Emi Winter, Rachel Wolf - Vanitas: A Group Exhibition of Still Lifes - Palo - September 4 - October 19, 2024
Mercedes Llanos - Te Soñé Primero - Amanita - September 5 - October 18, 2024
Arshile Gorky - New York City - Hauser & Wirth - September 4 - October 26, 2024
Richard Tuttle - A Distance From This - 125 Newbury - September 13 - October 26, 2024
Win McCarthy - Kingdom Come - Francis Irv - September 7 - October 12, 2024
Mimi's Restaurant & Piano Bar - Mimi's - In perpetuity
Wang Bing - Youth (Homecoming) - New York Film Festival 2024 - September 29, 2024
Francis Ford Coppola - Megalopolis - Alamo Drafthouse Brooklyn - October 1, 2024
I guess my thoughts always revolve around why today's art appears so incapable of producing anything new or good, but at the moment I've been trying to parse out something more specific. It's relatively clear why contemporary painting can't match up to its history: the burden of the past is stifling, painters are free to borrow from any tradition but those traditions are kept at arm's length by being borrowed, there's no connoisseurship to distinguish a good painting from a bad one and the bad one is probably easier to sell, etc. Painting is a discipline intrinsically tied to its past, which is to say it's an expression of a received culture, and since our own culture is dismal and confused it makes sense that painters are trapped in a mire. It's less clear why other modes that are less burdened by history like photography, film, installation art, or anything else, aren't faring any better. I don't care about medium-specificity; my concern is with 20th century art that was good by the force of its obviousness and effortlessness, and why even those avenues seems closed to us. To put it another way, the burden of what has been done makes sense, but the reason we can't still invent the undone is less clear.
This all started when I saw some rare Warhol films at Anthology; I tried to see some more rare Warhol films at the Museum of Sex to include in this piece, but they don't do press passes and I couldn't bring myself to give them $36. I'm an unreserved believer in Warhol's films because they're such messy, raw, unmediated cinematic experiences that they're still entirely radical. I've been looking for years for an essay on Warhol's films I read 8 or 9 years ago in an anthology of film essays that focused on Warhol's negation of all conventional cinematic content in his films, particularly Blue Movie. (All I remember about the rest of the book is that there was another essay on being fed up with the idea of Orson Welles as the perpetually thwarted genius, and I think the cover was green. [EDIT: A reader more resourceful than myself tracked it down, it's "Warhol's New Sex Film" in Parker Tyler's Sex Psyche Etcetera in the Film. The cover is not green.]) That negation is present in Warhol's best-known durational films like Sleep and Empire by making literal the passage of time, but it's even stronger in those that feature "acting" because there's little to no effort from anyone to produce any cinematic verisimilitude. His actors are his friends and hangers-on, playing themselves in front of a camera even when they're supposed to be playing characters because there's no real preparation or pretense of theater. Lonesome Cowboys consists of Taylor Mead, Viva, Joe Dallesandro, and others hanging around much as they would normally except that they're dressed up like cowboys and half-heartedly trying to be witty in front of the camera because Andy wants to make a film. Blue Movie doubles down on this because it's filmed sex. (I haven't actually seen it, I'm just going off of my memory of the essay.) Porn is known for bad acting that's relatively similar to Warhol's actors, but the sex itself is inevitably over-the-top, athletic, aggressive, etc., to approximate arousal and intensity by exaggeration. Warhol makes no attempt at a cinematic simulation of the erotic, it's just the literal fact of two people half-heartedly having sex because Andy wants to make a film. What you're faced with is the disinterested, alienated presentation of sex, which is pretty unpleasant, but there's a kind of genius in the way Warhol manages to document life straightforwardly while simultaneously laying it bare. Instead of artificially recreating life as narrative cinema or striving for documentary impartiality, he maximizes the artifice of the medium itself by emphasizing the self-consciousness created by putting someone in front of a camera and hitting record. His films capture the awkwardness of amateur performance, where someone lacks the technique necessary to pass off their acting as a representation of reality, which is why they often feel both staged and literally real, similar to the feeling of performing for a camera in a home movie. That's understandable enough, and in large part Warhol's films do come close to home movies except for the names of the people involved, but Blue Movie is particularly extreme for extending that self-conscious distance to sex. Pornography is distinct from art because it serves a purpose, i.e. arousing the viewer by simulating the experience of sex, so it's rare to see sex portrayed without that motivation. Because eroticism itself is a form of fantasizing, even in life, porn is necessarily artificial and remote from the actuality of sex. Where Farocki's An Image documents the artifice of porn, the remoteness of interpersonal intimacy from the studio effects and unnatural, minutely controlled poses necessary to make a convincing Playboy photo, Blue Movie shows what sex looks like without any pretense of erotic fantasy. Again, I haven't seen the movie, and I doubt I'd think it was particularly great if I did, but it's still fascinating. My point in bringing this up is that it feels like that raw fascination of filmed reality should still be accessible to art, but I see little evidence that it is. That block seems to have something to do with the mediation of Instagram, TikTok, reality TV, "porn brain," etc., which has extended the artifice of acting and fantasizing into our first-person experience of life. But I don't want to get bogged down in bemoaning the internet for the millionth time, and my point is more general. The concept I'm proposing is that we're in a state of cultural decadence, where our perception of reality has calcified into always already mediating life in unreflective and narrowly prescribed cycles, like the iron grip our phones have on our brains writ large. Broadly speaking, our psyches have been warped into a state of permanent virtuality, constantly performing a fantasy of ourselves to stave off any notion of reality that hasn't been aestheticized. In this state art necessarily becomes a recursive perpetuation of the idea of itself, which makes it an imitation of art's representation of reality and renders it impotent. (We're coming close to Manhattan Syndrome, but on a larger scale.) In opposition to this is what I'll call poverty, a short-circuiting of decadence by means of a blunt invasion of reality that's incompatible with our usual anesthetized churn. Warhol is one of the great artists of poverty because of his resolute coldness and distance, taking nonchalance to its logical endpoint of active alienation used as a means to produce art. Poverty, to be clear, is not a very good word for what I mean. I won't invoke "counterculture" because it's too corny and loaded a term, but it is a relevant point of reference as a mostly extinct resistance to normative ideology. Just for the purposes of this piece "poverty" makes sense as a contrast to decadence, but it's far from a clear binary. Picasso, for instance, is an impoverished artist in spite of his stature because of his love of ugliness and his subversion of classical harmony, and Megalopolis, as we'll see, is both decadent and impoverished in generous proportions. Many, if not all important artists since modernity could be considered impoverished in my usage, so it's not particularly intuitive. I only want to clarify that I'm not seeking to coin a term outside the scope of the present essay; I'm trying address a very generalized quality that I'm not interested in naming. I know that's annoying. Hopefully in the following examples a sense of what I have in mind will come through.
Anything but Simple: Gift Drawings and the Shaker Aesthetic - American Folk Art Museum
Playing with Design: Gameboards, Art, and Culture - American Folk Art Museum
I was reading about Surrealism on my way to the American Folk Art Museum so I had them on the mind. I'm no great fan of their analytic adventures into the unconscious because cultivated Europeans acting out their own Freudian eccentricities always feels more like a quirky imitation of weirdness than anything actually strange; a reflexive, self-aware relationship to the psychological is stifling, i.e. decadent, whereas folk art is composed by individuals who are subsumed in a collective unconscious they have little to no awareness of. That "poverty" of reflection makes the work more powerful for being a far more convincing act of channeling the visionary. The Shakers are particularly extreme in this case, exchanging these drawings they strictly referred to as "gifts" to get around their social prohibition on art. In spite of being sublimated away from any conscious consideration of the artistic, they're byproducts of religious euphoria that express their unconscious with an immediacy that bourgeois Europeans are fundamentally incapable of. Only a strictly structured society that prevents modern individuality from emerging can produce such direct invocations of that structure. By comparison the game boards are less eloquent illustrations of folk consciousness, but as artworks they're no less impressive. They might even be more surprising, if anything, for documenting the depth and fertility of American folk culture in the 19th and early 20th century without any romantic narrative about an eccentric religious sect to justify it.
Robert Frank - Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue - MoMA
More than the rest of the visual art in this roundup, Frank is indicative of the positive impoverishment that I relate to Warhol. Frank almost feels like a beatnik Warhol; if the Beats were the previous generation of real New York hipsters then Warhol's was the one that perfected the abrasive indifference of "coolness" outside of society. The Robert Frank of The Americans isn't yet so distanced, so his artsy, impulsive naturalism could still resonate with popular culture. What his work brings up is the maddening problem of why photographers can't just go around taking pictures and end up with something comparable. Is it really all just the romanticized iconicity of America in the mid-1950s, the quality of midcentury cameras, or the influence of Jakob Tuggener and Walker Evans on Frank's eye? Probably not, but it's pointless to try to pin down the specific causes as if that would bring anyone closer to making a The Americans 2.0. What we seem to lack now is immediacy, by which I mean the possibility of approaching photography as a material chance process not presorted by the intellectual baggage of our visual imagination. Even attempts at the random and unconscious are mediated by the history of aleatoric methods of artmaking. Art aspires to a state of free action within the scope of what the artist does, to synthesize the artwork with an impression of present reality as distinct from the past, and at the turn of the century that freedom coincided easily with the excitement of the American postwar boom and the novelties it brought with it. Now we're far too self-conscious (consciously or not) about the history of images to stumble on new ones by walking out the door or driving across the country with a camera. The show's theme is his work after The Americans anyways, and he couldn't keep up that photojournalistic mode itself for very long. After he moved to Nova Scotia his work turned into a much more diaristic mode where he explored how photography could be used to mediate his internal states of mind. While those scrawling text-on-image and collage works can get pretty self-indulgent and muddled, he still occasionally lands on a perfectly composed image, like the back of a curly head of hair next to a hand and wrist coming from outside of the frame holding a railroad spike like a giant arrowhead, the top of the head and the bottom of the hand meeting along the line of the horizon.
Klara Liden - Verdebelvedere - Reena Spaulings
Going into this show with no knowledge of the artist and my last editorial fresh in my mind made it feel like a Manhattan Syndrome prank: Classic silver NYC apartment roof panels, benches made from the green walls that block off NYC construction sites, and a video of the artist climbing through the diamond-shaped window in one of those green walls at a construction site. I think there was another TV with a black screen playing techno too, but that's it. Liden has been doing this urban assemblages-and-found-objects-as-dérive thing for two decades now so I can't accuse her of trendiness, but what was once a surprising, brash intervention in the city ecosystem now looks like a tired readymade-as-copout. The panels look like gritty faux-minimalism, sure, but whatever sense of punk insurgency there once was in stealing pieces of infrastructure and calling it art has dissipated into a slight twinge of recognition and an idle thought about where she got them from. This might just be an uninspired iteration of her practice, but there's also a sense of a once-impoverished tactic turned decadent. Her methodology hasn't been co-opted as much as the city itself no longer feels like an untamed space of excitement, danger, and possibility that her exploratory interventions once thrived on. Like 5th wave Dimes Square skaters, the gesture has had all its edges polished down to the point of conventionality, a simulacrum of transgression grounded in dated social signifiers. I don't blame Liden as a decadent herself, it's just that her practice has run aground as a symptom of our cultural decline, like almost everything else, and I'm interested in why that slump feels so inescapable. For one thing, the art world clearly isn't what it was 20 years ago because no one can start a career doing this kind of thing now. I read the Bjarne Melgaard NYT article the other day, and what might have been the biggest shock was the reminder that someone making sculptures of the Pink Panther smoking meth could be a market darling in 2013. It's hard enough to be an exciting new artist, but in a cultural climate that doesn't encourage anything exciting or boundary-pushing it's almost impossible. That's why this idea of poverty relates to counterculture: it's about building an artistic subjectivity that doesn't operate within the confines of normative society or the art market, but everything cedes to the gravitational pull of the norm without a support structure to enable that outsideness. Liden hasn't necessarily sold out, but the cultural soil that gave her work a context and let it thrive (i.e. Reena Spaulings in general) has pretty much dried up.
Charles Steffen - 1995, A Lesson in Life Drawing - March
Steffen's dense, cartoonish figures land somewhere between Hans Bellmer, Akira, and the wide, rounded calligraphy of graffiti. He has the precision of line of a proper outsider artist, where the artist's internal life coincides immediately with his technique, and that carries through to his handwriting. That's already something, but his figures are so repetitive that his hermetic documentation of his life isn't comprehensible enough to become truly compelling to a viewer. Art's expressiveness is an articulation of cultural content, so outsiders are often held back by their personal cosmologies and fetishes because they're characteristically less interested in communicating that material than following a compulsion. The solitude of the recluse is a form of impoverishment but the total isolation also means it loses its insurgent force; the resistance is an involuntary condition instead of a conscious subversiveness. The major outlier and the best work, then, is his copy of Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters, which marries a classically accomplished composition to the specificity of his hand with all the confidence of a Las Meninas by Picasso or Cézanne's Bathers by Johns.
Lorenzo Amos, Richard Artschwager, Mary Ellen Bartley, Lena Christakes, Victoria Gitman, Phoebe Helander, Martin Kippenberger, Asher Liftin, Jara Lopez Sastre, Rodrigo Moynihan, Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein, Stephen Shanabrook, David Smalling, Emi Winter, Rachel Wolf - Vanitas: A Group Exhibition of Still Lifes - Palo
Not much to say with this one, I knew they were baiting me with Kippenberger and Artschwager and I was right. That itself is a good example of art world decadence, gallerists resorting to digging up a drawing and a joke assemblage by big names to get them in to look at a bunch of dull figurative paintings. For a collection of artists doing randomized iterations of painterly history they're not particularly bad, except maybe David Smalling's garish photorealism, but the one who most caught my eye, Phoebe Helander, has a nicely Impressionist touch that's completely undone by all her paintings being slightly varied images of a flower and a hammer. At least I think it was her, there's no documentation. Because her subject has no imagination outside of what you're liable to be assigned in a life painting class she unveils herself as a prime subject of decadence: the technical virtuoso, incapable of bridging the gap between a mannered copy of 19th century French painting and any engagement with reality whatsoever beyond the specificities of technique.
Mercedes Llanos - Te Soñé Primero - Amanita
This is an odd foil to Srijon Chowdhury's show because of the childbirth peak-experience thing, but she's an embodied expressionist in form and sensibility where Chowdhury is more distanced as a technical painter and a tripper. Some of the larger canvases like Esto ya no es mas una historia de amor cross the line from impassioned to messy, but her charcoals have a consistent verve. What's strange is that much of the work rushes headlong into corniness and kitsch, like the one of herself breastfeeding with a bouquet of flowers growing out of her leg, and while I think it's funny and doubt the artist sees it that way, it also makes the work more likable. The notion of painting your experiences with a newborn child is so literal-minded that it comes close to how people document their own lives on Instagram with vacations and sunsets, but the expressive intensity of her technique makes it work. The violations of art historical seriousness actually makes her a more interesting painter that comes closer to breaking out of contrived simulations of the idea of painting than even an extremely convincing imitation of de Kooning would be because AbEx in 2024 can't be more than imitation. That's not to say she does clear the hurdle of contrivance, but in the decadent schema of contemporary painting where not doing hackneyed imitations of past painting is almost impossible, the bluntness of baby paintings comes surprisingly close to feeling like something fresh.
Arshile Gorky - New York City - Hauser & Wirth
Someone like Gorky blows whatever enthusiasm I can muster for Llanos out of the water, naturally. It's incomparable to see the work of a painter ensconced in a social context (the curatorial theme, incidentally) exploring the given signifiers of contemporary activities in cubism, Dada, surrealism, and so on, to develop a methodology unmistakably of a part with those influences but irreducible to any particular reference point. His approach to painting is more forceful, exploratory, varied, and, to this day, new, than anything even remotely comparable in the realm of the purely painterly today. Painting in his time was a struggle of signification with real stakes that were set up and broadly agreed upon by Gorky and his peers, who had a brief history of avant-gardism set before them to set the course for whatever they were going to do. The abstract expressionists existed in thorough impoverishment as obscure, struggling artists at a considerable distance from any possible decadence; Gorky died before Pollock's breakthrough so he never even glimpsed success. What matters more than fame and money is that certitude of painting, of the drive to be a starving artist with no prospects of fame or wealth because one believes in art itself. That has almost nothing in common with the artist's narcissistic conviction that their work is important, which is abundantly easy to come by in a gouty art world that only creates inflated egos. The AbEx vanguard, positioned on the edge of the emergence of postwar modernity, sought to grapple with art itself in the present, invigorated by what had happened in Europe in recent decades and desperate to find an adequate response by whatever means necessary. Gorky's earlier post-cubist works show their influences while working against them, creating almost traditional museum scenes and cityscapes where Picasso and Braque would have avoided situating their figures on a ground. The late works, after he finds his own method without escaping his influences entirely, works with diaphanous layers of sketchy application that, like some of Léger's best work, still feel disorienting and unfinished today, and their ambiguous use of layering suggests possible techniques and effects that later painters still haven't explored fully. Art itself is immune to decadence, it's our inability to match up to it that makes it appear exhausted. The proliferation of artistic modes in the 20th century created the illusion of art decoupling from its history, but that did little more than excuse artists from engaging with the past. All artists receive their understanding of art from their forebears, but in doing so they invent a particular idea of their predecessors that creates an image of themselves. Painting is derivative now because artists are encouraged to be solipsists, reliant on the idea of their individual creativity without understanding that artistic individuation is a product of the social and the historical. The personal is only a means, not an end in itself.
Richard Tuttle - A Distance From This - 125 Newbury
This is instantly reminiscent of Lynda Benglis's show that was here a year ago, funnily enough, but Tuttle's jokey non-compositions have an insistent wit and specificity that suggests a vivid internal landscape instead of arbitrary assemblages that look like snot-filled tissues and suggest nothing. Prong 25 gives a clue to his success: the caricatured canvas, frame, and easel clarify that he's still exploring the '60s convention of deconstructing easel painting, à la Kelly and Stella, just with a goofy hippie poet sensibility instead of a modernist minimal/maximal one, which is to say I doubt he has assistants. Both his poverty of materials and the rigor of his formal language, no matter how abstract, shield against the decadence of too much freedom that leads to tissue art.
Win McCarthy - Kingdom Come - Francis Irv
I had to go in person to give this show a fair shot, and it is better than I presumed. The photos work very well in person as a sort of Baudelairean invocation of melancholic decadence (note the Fleur du Mal lingerie ad), which is a surprisingly effective flipping of the decadent on its head, but I still get nothing from the bricks, sheets, and plastic containers. Like with Liden, appropriated objects no longer feel like a surprising interpenetration of the gallery space and the real world. The readymade has been shorn of its radicality, at least in cases where the artist does nothing to contextualize them. A decade ago there was an excitement around the notion that everything was art, that any piece of trash you see on the street could be used in an iPhone photo worth posting on Instagram, and gallery art followed course by making aesthetic appropriation into a popular mode, a kind of competitiveness about who could fetishize the most obscure stylistic signifiers. It was fun while it lasted, but that apparently infinite mediating lens turned into oversaturation and fatigue a long time ago. I remember very clearly having a revelation in 2016 that aesthetic objectification was inherently less complex than aesthetic representation; that a drawing of, say, a samurai sword has more potential as art than a samurai sword bought at a store and put in a gallery. Since readymades were anti-aesthetic from the beginning that should be an obvious claim, but I do remember a time when that wasn't taken for granted. McCarthy's objects aren't crass examples of that because they're plainly going for the nonidealized grit of New York City, but, as we've established, Manhattancore is a de rigueur aesthetic signifier in the city, and I don't know how to read them except in the sense of mid '10s aesthetic clutter. I do like the photo works, but the objects feel like an afterthought as aesthetic clutter often did, even in its heyday.
Mimi's Restaurant & Piano Bar
This is, of course, a restaurant, but a friend I went with suggested I give them a review as a little flourish and it fits into my narrative. I don't think the food has ever been good, the service is far from gracious, and I hear the new pianists can't hold a candle to Chicken Delicious, but that's the charm. It may be creaky and run-down but it was never a well-oiled ship and that's why it's been so well-loved. It has character, which is poverty gives you and decadence takes away. Nowadays it's the swan song of a time when New York was a real place, bars had regulars, Yelp reviews didn't exist, and people didn't confuse waiting in line and wasting their money at a new restaurant with a good time. I mean, our table talked with Aaron the pianist about Thomas Pynchon so he played us "Blinded By The Light," improvised extra verses about other war crimes on "We Didn't Start The Fire," and one of us sang "Short People" by Randy Newman so we all knew we were on the same page. Sure, the salami platter wasn't very good and our server got mad at us for not ordering any entrees, but that makes me feel like a human being at a restaurant run by human beings instead of a bunch of self-effacing cogs at a good restaurant. And people pretend Balthazar has atmosphere! Atmosphere my ass, the art world died when there was no one left to distinguish culture from wealth. It's not like the food's too hot there either...
Wang Bing - Youth (Homecoming) - New York Film Festival 2024
With Wang Bing if you've seen one you've seen them all on the banal level of "a Chinese guy following poor Chinese people around with a camera." On a more substantial level he has one of the most fertile cinematic practices active today, which is why the word "poverty" as a positive term popped into my head while I was watching this. This film is the third in a trilogy about migrant workers that sew children's clothes for 15 hours a day, making very little money and living in squalid workshop tenements, not that they have time to be home for more than eating and sleeping. I haven't seen the first two that focus more on their working lives; this one hinges on the New Year holidays where the workers travel to visit their families, trekking up icy, unpaved mountain roads in transport vans to their home villages that are too poor to survive without the money sent home by migrant laborers. Still, the villages are where they belong, where they have dignity and a sense of self, the heart of their world. Their time spent in cities is a sacrifice to keep alive the village life because that's what matters to them, they have no desire or chance to put down roots and work their way up to become one of the bosses that are always stiffing them on their wages. The whole saga is of unmitigated hardship and literal poverty that's almost impossible for Americans to fathom, but it's also a riveting document of real life. There's a sense that any straightforward coverage of any of these people's lives would be endlessly compelling, and Wang's filmography continuously delivers on that. How, and why isn't this possible here? American daily life is dull unless its given a narrative by being satirized on The Office, dramatized on a "reality" show, or romanticized in "come to work with me" TikToks. American life is decadent and distantiated, insulated by the constant placation of media that stops us from ever confronting reality if we can help it. Even the most significant moments in life are pasted over with that veneer of artifice, like a wedding where the main ritual is photographing it to look perfect for people who weren't there. The wedding in Youth (Homecoming) involves the entire village, the newlywed couple walking down the road while everyone else follows behind, the groom getting teased by his friends and goaded into carrying his bride on his back to a concrete patio where everyone gives them gifts and sets off firecrackers. It's not particularly idyllic or romantic, but it's a real tradition everyone participates in as a moment of liveliness in their difficult lives, a bright point of happiness to justify the drudgery they're about to return to. The groom makes a rude comment to his wife about her makeup looking sloppy, but then when they go back to work in the city it turns out he's privileged and got an education but he constantly fucks up at the sewing machine. Things don't seem destined for happiness or prosperity, and I'm not idealizing Chinese sweatshop labor, but there is a nagging quality of reality in his films that's eminently engaging and contains a kernel of something we lack here. His movies may be bleak, but I'd say a YouTube video of a Disney adult wedding is bleaker.
Francis Ford Coppola - Megalopolis - Alamo Drafthouse Brooklyn
I love Megalopolis. I went twice, and, although I never go to the kind of movies they show at Alamo or AMC, it's the best "mainstream" movie I've seen in theaters in well over a decade. Sure, it's indulgent and messy, clearly overpacked with five times more ideas and ambitions than could ever fit into any single film, and it's supposed to be a futuristic vision whose most eloquent message is "We are in need of a great debate about the future," but I for one don't care at all about its flaws. The cup of Coppola's imagination runneth over and we should all be so lucky to reap the rewards. I guess people wanted this to conform to the cinematic standards of The Godfather, or provide a simple, cogent answer to all the problems of society, but I much prefer a bizarre hulking mass of half-baked grandiose ideas about imagining the future. Late Godard doesn't make much more sense and is jarringly paced when you can say it has any pace at all, and Ulysses is no less bloated and insane, but what those artworks manage to do is to push beyond convention into a feeling of the wealth of possibilities that can be created by the means of art, and when placed next to those achievements everything that isn't art pales in comparison. I guess Avatar offers an idiotic fantasy that's sort of comparable, but an idea of a separate reality is infantile compared to an evocation of the infinite scope of art, and by extension, life. Of course such an ambition is shot through with as much hubris as it is with a yearning for utopia, and the movie is at root the stoned ramblings of a old man, but criticizing it for its obvious technical flaws is like holding Coppola accountable for not creating an immanent utopia in the film, which is absurd, and an old man's stoned ramblings can be beautiful and life-affirming anyway. Art's aspirations may be boundless but its actuality is most definitely limited, so the communication of that aspiration is itself is as utopian as art can possibly get, and that's what the "great debate about the future" actually is! The film is so dense and frenetic that it feels pointless to try to describe it, but if you can't see the genius in turning Robert Moses into a visionary architect who can stop time driven by the force of love to invent a miraculous living building material in an overlay of Imperial Rome on New York City with gestures towards Shakespearean drama, all to serve as an allegory of artistic exultation, then he's cast his pearls before swine. People complain about laughing at it but there's plenty of intentional humor, the whole thing feels hyperreal and fantastically tripped out at the same time... I haven't seen any criticisms that have shaken any of my faith in its brilliance, I know it's a masterpiece. God willing it'll be canonized in my lifetime. As a $120 million self-production funded by his winery empire that's barely coherent at times, clearly the product of a thousand half-finished trains of thought, moreover as a Boomer-y love letter to democratic ideals that no one my age takes seriously, of course it's decadent, the last fruit of a dying American empire. As a jumbled, ecstatic love letter to life that pushes the boundaries of coherence and the imagination that more than a few of my friends and the general public find totally indigestible, it's a pulsating achievement of the realest qualities of art in the face of death and boredom that I'm calling poverty.