The Cult of the Artist

During the Renaissance a new phenomenon emerged in which the artist was seen as important as the art he or she produced. The most blatant iteration of this philosophy was shaped during the Romantic movement, when the Artist was seen as some kind of spiritually and emotionally advanced person capable of capturing beauty and truth better than other people. The stereotype persists.

In our postmodern "everyone is unique" milieu, the idea that the artist is a different kind of person has led to all kinds of nonsense, like eccentricity as a badge of creativity, the acceptance of bad behaviour as a necessary corollary to the process of creation, and the association of artists with darkness and melancholia. (Melancholy as a prerequisite for good art is its own absurdity; it deserves its own post.)

The Artist (as its name might imply) propagates the artist cult motif shamelessly. Ironically, I have problems with the film on an artistic level, but many more from an ideological standpoint. To get the artistic problems out of the way: the director steals plot elements wantonly (most obviously from Singin' in the Rain, Sunset Boulevard, and Vertigo), fails to capture the feel or attitude of a silent film, and (at 1 hr. 40 min.) has created a film that, using the salient elements of talkies while eliminating dialogue, is much too long. Jean Dujardin does a fantastic job as the Artist (hilarious and emotive as usual), but his performance isn't enough to save the movie.

In a nutshell, the plot involves a silent movie star who refuses to adapt to the changing times when talking is introduced to films and quickly sinks into despair and depression when his career and personal life fall apart. He's able to return to work at the end, but only when the studio execs agree to let him enter talkies on his own terms.

The Artist is a man dedicated to his art, dedicated to himself, and unwilling to compromise. By the standards of the Cult of the Artist, he's an exemplary human. What he produces is almost inconsequential; his self-produced, self-directed, self-starring film is panned by the critics, and in truth what we see of it is silly and poor, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that the Artist isn't a sell-out, he refuses to sacrifice his own standards on the altar of popular opinion, critical engagement, or current trends.

What happened to valuing art itself? The Cult of the Artist leads to ridiculous things like claims that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, a theory only permissible if the artist is valued higher than whatever he creates. It's a little odd that such a Modernist attitude should still be defended in our postmodern era (Foucault, after all, declared the death of the author), but The Artist clearly demonstrates that society is unwilling to dispense with the idea.

I reject that attitude altogether. The product is the important part; the artist is simply the conduit. That's not to say he's wholly unimportant or to be disregarded, but he's not some different kind of human or some spiritually advanced sage. A good artist is simply good at what she does, like a good baker, or a good plumber, or a good economist. Once we can break the ideal of the artist as a special kind of entity, maybe we'll have a return of art that says something valid, reflects universal themes, and isn't self-aggrandising. Until then, I think we're doomed to artistic dross on the level of The Artist that neither speaks to the human condition, nor is particularly entertaining.