It has always been tedious to discuss about art. What it is, what it should be, its moralic and commercial implications. Whatever statement you make about art, there’s always exceptions. Nonetheless it can be said that nowadays we find an overall scepticism and sometimes even hostility towards art. A scepticism that is often not recognized or at least not considered as a problem neither by artists nor cosumers.
What is this scepticism? First, l’art pour l’art has massive legitimate problems in a time that is experienced as a time of crisis. Looking at film awards, it seems art has to fulfill certain purposes, such as to raise awareness for a social problem or to change the audience’s attitude in a normative sense. The artist has become a political activist or activists find their way into art in order to change the world. This ain’t precisely new but now it has reached the mainstream. We don’t want to go too deep into the question, if stories really „matter“ in the way filmmakers try to legitimate their productions. It’s a rather philosophical question, if films ever have actually changed anything. A simple look at the dynamics we’re discussing here, shows quite clearly, that it was social movements which had an impact on the film industry, not the other way round.
When art is considered functional as part of a debate on social questions, it can fulfill this function. But do we really need art for this debate? It seems rather circuitous. Instead of making films (which can be quite an effort) wouldn’t it be more efficient to go into politics, journalism, social science or, even better, actually do something instead of telling other people to do something?
Needless to say there’s nothing wrong about more social engagement and diversity in film, especially when it’s breaking clichés and gives us fresh stories. But breaking certain rules is the new rule and therefore we suddenly find a significant conformity. We’ve come to a point, where the relevance of art is measured only by its political or social impact. But looking at history, the times when art became political are mostly times we don’t think of as a role model.
However, all this scepticism towards art is nothing compared to the scepticism towards the artist. Again this ain’t completely new. The artist has always been suspicious of not contributing to society or of questioning its rules. But for the first time in human history nowadays the artist is seen as incapable of doing what he’s always done: Art.
Many people in the film industry now share the idea, that you can only imagine how it feels like to be somebody, if you have similar features. Therefore the artist can only tell stories about himself (or herself). That might be right in some way, but we shouldn’t stretch this idea. It’s the essential part of creating stories, and the artist’s job to use his (or her) imagination in order to transform own feelings and experiences into the fictional characters. Deciding how this works and if it works is part of the artist’s job. If an artist is not trusted to write a story about, let’s say, a gay boxer, without telling everybody that he’s gay himself, means somebody else (the producer or the studio) decides, that the writer is not capable of imagining how it feels to be gay. Needless to say that a gay person knows more about being gay. But that’s not the point. We’re not talking about a report or a biography. We’re talking about stories. About fiction. No one would insist in hiring a boxer to write this story. Of course a gay person can be a great artist and also a boxer can. And also both of them can write the story and get it all wrong. The capabilities of an artist can not be measured by the degree of similarity between the artist and the fictional character. By contrast, it should be measured by the degree of imagination capabilities.
Instead of dividing society into more and more sub-groups we should think of ways to bring people together. But if we don’t even trust the artist to be able to identify with a character who might have some other features, why would we trust the audience to do so?
