how to spot true genius, part I

This past week, a topic that I think circles around appeared twice in the Times, prompting me to come back to it once again. It's the eternal battle in the field of the arts: that of raw skill versus intellectuality, as seen through the lens of the question of what makes a truly great work of art.

Whether talking about a movie or a dish, the question of value is often dependent on which of these lenses you use to view the work. To make matters more complex, the motive of the creator and the reaction of the participant are both criteria for judging, inextricably intertwined, and yet totally separate.

Take cinema, for example. Deciding where to place a movie on the spectrum of greatness can be tough...go to any summer cinema, and chances are you will find it easy to see a completely entertaining yet wholly unoriginal and forgettable piece of fluff. So was it good? Well, it wasn't bad....and maybe it was kind of good, like Titanic, perhaps. But you don't even care, because you enjoyed it.

Then there's the movies that pretend to greatness, that relish the opportunity to be classified as festival, or art house, films. We all know them. They're beautiful and paced slowly to give you time to enjoy that beauty (so vain!). They work hard at representing certain cinematic ideals or fashions. They touch on "deep" topics, and often focus on dialogue or landscape. You can't not see these types of films sitting in the halls of any film festival. A few modern day examples? One I saw at Zinemaldia was 10 to 11. Beautiful, artistic, but kind of opaque and boring. A few other art for the sake of art and NOT for your sake- Tuvalu. Brokeback Mountain. Margot at the Wedding. Don't believe me? A google search for 'boring art house films' returns over five million web pages.

Then there are movies like Citizen Kane, Pulp Fiction, Synechdoche New York, to name a few, that manage to combine the entertainment and immediate likeability of a blockbuster with the originality, quality, and stamp of its maker that typify art house cinema.

So that leaves us still with the question of what makes a truly great movie. Our reaction to a film, our visceral response, is important! But it is far from all. And some of those art house movies carry import, whether it be due to their place in the evolution of cinema or another factor. It's all so relative it makes your head spin trying to take in the opposing sides. I like this quote as a point in the debate because it makes concrete the arguing factions, those would-be determiners of greatness: profit, art criticism, popularity.

"Many studio executives argue that films can't objectively be categorized as "good" or "bad": either they appeal to a given demographic--and make the studio at least a ten-per-cent profit--or they don't. 'most critics are not the target audience for most of the films being made today, so they're not going to respond to them," sony screen Gems' Clint Clupepper says. "How a fifty-six-year-old man feels about a movie aimed at teen-age girls is irrelevant." -The New Yorker, January 19, 2009

I feel motivated enough to wrestle with this question a bit more, and in writing, so I will be approaching it with regards to food, art, and music over the next few posts. Trying to make a little bit of sense out of it all.