@MrZiebarth
Sep 7, 2018 · 2 min read

Journalist as Anti-Artist

The most recent issue of the New York Times Magazine features a story on the British documentarian, Adam Curtis who has a few interesting ideas that draw me in to explore his work, with which I’m completely unfamiliar.

On being called an artist:

“If you’re an artist you tend to have that rather smug sense of I’m doing this great work. I don’t have that at all. I go out and I find stories, and I find ways of doing them in an imaginative way. I’m a journalist, and I’m responding to my time.”

Seems like he’s being a bit smug himself, about his imaginative way of telling stories. I am interested in the idea that artists and journalist often share the same goal — of telling a story. And it sounds as if Curtis uses strategies of the former in his work on the latter. Here’s one such strategy, the way he edits:

“What I do deliberately, is I show the joins. There’s no reason you can’t join any two pieces of film up. So I will often in the editing deliberately make a discordant edit. It just makes you aware of what it is you are watching.”

Later he describes the negative effect of some types of art. He said it began with Warhol who came up with, what Curtis calls, the Inappropriate Aesthetic Response, where artists “take horrific images like the electric chair and aestheticize them.” He accuses some artists for working for property developers. Curtis said, “you need the aesthetic of decline in order to make those buildings desirable,” which is exactly what Mr. Theriault noted in a recent tweet about development in Banning Ranch:

Since I haven’t seen any of Curtis’ work yet, I can’t recommend it, but I will definitely begin digging into his archives. As a primer for all of us unfamiliar with his work, here’s a trailer for “Everything is Going According to Plan” his 2013 film-concert hybrid collaboration with Massive Attack. It gives you a good taste of his editing style, his medium, his message:

https://youtu.be/25g6ShHtzWo

    @MrZiebarth

    Written by

    I teach English and journalism (print and broadcast) at FVHS in Southern California. Pedestrian. See also: http://t.co/37lawYoRZ3