“Shadow Artforms”

The epicenters of power migrate, from place to place on the earth’s surface, but also across artforms. It’s easy to spot a culture’s major ones (follow the money); not so easy to realize the hidden economy of the others*. Once favor has shifted away, an artform may continue on pretense, like deposed royalty in exile; at the same time the culture at large may still go through motions of respect, without anymore having any contact with the living artists. Then, the image of the artist in that medium acquires a different, shadow-power. The artist becomes a symbol, & carries the weight of dreams that more mainstream art-heroes (whose lives are all too visible) cannot.

This process can be seen most clearly in movies which treat the lives of famous writers, but painters & poets as well receive the dubious honor of cinematic depiction. These comprise a subgenre, sort of a pornography of the spirit. Aside from the obvious difficulty that the creative process itself is about as amenable to pantomime as subatomic physics (maybe less so), leaving only the sad story of a messy life, the subject invariably turns into co-optation itself, or how a popular medium hungers for the high legitimacy it can never achieve so long as economic & not aesthetic factors control it.

Never mind the irony of, say, a multimillion dollar movie celebrating some “starving artist” whilst encouraging none of its poor viewers to consider patronizing their actual artistic contemporaries (starving or not). This is clearly the realm of myth. Gods do not walk the earth. Their impersonators do.

Are there advantages, besides nostalgia & the glory of resentment, to being the artist of a shadow-artform? One could argue that, as great artists develop, they often surpass the comprehension of their erstwhile audiences: a shadow-artist is spared at least the backlash of thwarted expectations, if not the struggle for economic & psychological survival. There’s no incentive for self-pastiche.

And that may be the deadliest enemy of all.

09 18/22 04

----------------------------------------------------------------
*Shadow artforms: silent movies after sound, black & white after color, painting after photography, poetry after rock ‘n’ roll, the novel after television.