How the Reviews Were Won [UPDATED]

In Today's Times, Margo Jefferon calls out performance artists. Great, the kind of sneering disdain for those cream puffs of the art world. Normally, I live for this kind of stuff.

"Do what you're good at," she yells (paraphrased, cause she's, well, let me put it this way: she hates talking in straight lines when circumlocution will do). Her call for collaboration is appreciated. But only as a critic. Any artist would be a fool to listen to her, unless they actually cared about the art.

Americans don't want to believe in collaboration. They believe in the monoartist: for a film, he writes, directs, lights, dresses, dollies grip, and controls each of the actors with an elaborate mannequizing machine he designed himself. Oh, also, he *was* the sick kid that inspired the whole damn thing. If a singer took Jefferson's advice not to write their own songs, every middle-class critic (the kind who actually create middle-class snobs, who are the ones spending middle-class dollars to create media-class empires) would deride them as just another pop-tart, propped up on the backs of hacks so untalented they can't even get their names known.

If you want to make it as an artist, you have to be Woody Allen. I mean, except for the, well, you know. But this is something so devious you have to be as neurotic as Woody to get it: every time somebody criticizes his jack-of-all-trades-approach by saying, "he may be a great director, but he limits himself with his acting", well, he just got you to compliment his directing.

And that's one more compliment for directing a major motion picture than you've ever gotten.

[Of course, the thing Jefferson would hate most is a world in which instead of using another's points, we responded directly. Shakespeare and his cronies^Wpeers were the men who took a tale they liked, and redid it. Now such productions are the province of Jerry Bruckheimerettes, looking for a cheap way to generate power by harnessing the rotational energy of Jimmy Stewart's Grave. How ironic to shape something out of the ashes of a movie called Flight of the Phoenix, eh? (if this blog were a Batman-era comic, there would be a sound effect balloon with the words, stylized, "Unintended Irony!") Of course, this is what English is like nowadays: armchair readers who only write about emotions at several syllables' distance. And historians have long since stopped talking about events, and only now discuss analyses of second-hand retellings.

Or, maybe in her darkest nightmares, she envisions a land in which some awful blogger, finding himself with nothing else to say, decides to tear apart nonsensically her earnest warning, instead of just taking to heart what substance he could find in it.]