Art Theory and Heidi Klum

How naive do you have to be to think that any art theory is entirely adequate to anything? Never mind that the theories of, say, Rosalind Krauss or Arthur Danto may well be adequate to nothing except the desire to exercise the theorist's power, such as it is. So, staying with the improbability that any theory is entirely adequate, let us consider the further possibility that no theory of art, no matter how old or neglected, is entirely inadequate. Take, for example, the neoplatonic theory that art succeeds when it offers an image of some transcendent something that combines absolute Truth with absolute Beauty. Granted, neoplatonism is less rampant in the art world than in the fashion world, where Heidi Klum is being promoted as "the Perfect One." Still, there is a tinge of neoplatonism to any absolutist judgment about any work of art. My point? A theory of art has no power to render any other theory wrong. Theories of art do not supersede one another. They accumulate, and it is only those looking for shortcuts to wisdom who glom onto a contemporary theory as if it were all that is needed. So sad! To think that Kraussian or Dantesque or Buchlovian theory puts you in touch with the meaning of art is like thinking that, to get in touch with ordinary life, one should wear oven mitts.

Valentine's Day Report Card

To deal with Valentine's Day, let's start with the cast, which is an exercise in covering the demographic bases.
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Jessica Alba, Kathy Bates, Jessica Biel, Bradley Cooper, Eric Dane, Patrick Dempsey, Hector Elizondo, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Topher Grace, Anne Hathaway, Ashton Kutcher, Queen Latifah, Taylor Lautner, George Lopez, Shirley MacLaine, Emma Roberts, Julia Roberts, Taylor Swift
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See what I mean? Something for everyone. Young-old, black-white-Hispanic, stars-character actors, movie stars-TV stars, hunks-geeks, babes-mere cuties, and so on. The more you study this cast, the more demographic calculations you see, but it's a game with diminishing returns, and boring to begin with. So, on to the main point, which concerns genre.
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Valentine's Day is a romantic comedy, right? But not just one. It is many romantic comedies interwoven, so many that each snippet of plot is like a clip that a star might bring to a talk show—or, and here it gets interesting, a clip that might be run at an award show. Because that is the other genre in play here: the award show, which is often more popular than anything it celebrates.
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As a mixture of romantic comedy and award show, this movie is an attempt to cash in on the sad state of the contemporary attention span. Stories, however fluffy and obvious, are just too complicated. As for character, it might as well be quantum mechanics. People want logos—in other words, stars not as personalities or emblems of some virtue (Gary Cooper as manly integrity, Katherine Hepburn as feminine elegance) but as sheer image. Image of what? Of some variant on contempo glamor, which, for the contempo audience, is some unarticulated, inarticulable sort of power. Transcendent power, power so dazzling that it blots out everything else and fuses the circuits of the imagination—or whatever you want to call the faculty that a mature mind employs in making sense of such things as fictions, not to mention the real world.
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So that is the brilliance of Valentine's Day. It has been panned and may well turn out to be less than a mega-hit. Still, its mixture of genres shows the way to an ever more efficient delivery of the services craved by today's audience: a quick succession of star images plus snippets of story-lines, just enough to provide transitions from one star-image to the next.
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What does this have to do with art? Stayed tuned.