Why pop bombs?
Because in a pop culture world saturated with chase scenes and falling-in-love montages, with reality show starlets entwined in focus group-friendly cat fights, with wacky sitcom neighbors and their punchline-toting ten-year-olds do we really need another music video, another blockbuster, another blog (yes, like this one, smarty pants). I say we do not.
Orson Welles would agree. This is perhaps why, when he adapted HG Wells's World of the Worlds, he did so as a hoax. After all, without its willful violation of the audience’s understanding of reality, it would have been… just another radio play.
Steven Spielberg would learn more or less the same lesson years later when his spectacularly slick, special effects laden version of Wells's classic would leave audiences largely unmoved. Sure, the movie was seen by plenty – millions in fact. They laughed, cried, clutched their seats, gasped and shut their eyes when it was all too scary, but in the end it was just another movie.
Nobody really cared – and why should they have?
Why should an audience already dazzled into a jaded state of numbness by thirty years of Star Wars and The Terminator and The Matrix and clever commercials of people morphing into jelly donuts and magic trolls and flying wizards be impressed?
Besides people were too busy talking about Tom Cruise. No not Ray whatsisname, his character in the movie; Tom Cruise the nutty scientologist, professing his love for Katie on Oprah’s show, indecorously jumping on her couch and otherwise being weird.
Now that’s entertainment!
Maybe the lesson learned here is that reality, however absurd, indeed however unreal, will always trump fiction.
The founding principle behind the Pop Bomb Conspiracy is: what the world wants today is the “real” thing. With lots of jumping on couches.
Why pop bombs part 2
Because they’re fun. And oh yeah, there’s this too:
My artistic heroes have always been the provocateurs: Marcel Duchamp, Dali, Yoko Ono, Bunuel, Beckett, Coltrane, and the two Andys: Kaufman and Warhol.
And here is the thing about being a provocateur in the 21st century: You can’t do it by hanging something on a museum wall anymore. It just doesn’t work.
For an audience that has already lived through dada-ism, surrealism, pop art, abstract expressionism and whatever the hell that was that De Kooning was doing, museums, once a source of wonder, have become gilded mausoleums – designed to preserve the past (if often in new clothes).
The shock of the new has grown irreversibly old.
Of course, art lovers – even ones as curmudgeonly as myself - will always enjoy the odd stroll through the dusty corridors of the art world’s past. And we will find much of value there: Sustained brilliance, beauty and even inspiration. What we won’t find is the same kind of slack-jawed bewilderment that greeted Duchamp’s early work. For today’s audience dada and surrealism are things they’ve seen on this morning’s commercials – selling toilet paper or ice cream. A once scandalous pop art painting is now fodder for a print ad or a myspace design scheme. And then another. And another. Can you blame the audience for not caring anymore?
So what is there to do? That’s an easy one - you do what Beckett and Picasso and Bunuel and Dali did: you litter the world with stunning absurdity. But instead of aiming for the stage or the museum wall or the screen or the page you aim for… well, the world. You gleefully assault your audience’s understanding of reality – on its own terms.
Is there a better definition of a hoax?
Because in a pop culture world saturated with chase scenes and falling-in-love montages, with reality show starlets entwined in focus group-friendly cat fights, with wacky sitcom neighbors and their punchline-toting ten-year-olds do we really need another music video, another blockbuster, another blog (yes, like this one, smarty pants). I say we do not.
Orson Welles would agree. This is perhaps why, when he adapted HG Wells's World of the Worlds, he did so as a hoax. After all, without its willful violation of the audience’s understanding of reality, it would have been… just another radio play.
Steven Spielberg would learn more or less the same lesson years later when his spectacularly slick, special effects laden version of Wells's classic would leave audiences largely unmoved. Sure, the movie was seen by plenty – millions in fact. They laughed, cried, clutched their seats, gasped and shut their eyes when it was all too scary, but in the end it was just another movie.
Nobody really cared – and why should they have?
Why should an audience already dazzled into a jaded state of numbness by thirty years of Star Wars and The Terminator and The Matrix and clever commercials of people morphing into jelly donuts and magic trolls and flying wizards be impressed?
Besides people were too busy talking about Tom Cruise. No not Ray whatsisname, his character in the movie; Tom Cruise the nutty scientologist, professing his love for Katie on Oprah’s show, indecorously jumping on her couch and otherwise being weird.
Now that’s entertainment!
Maybe the lesson learned here is that reality, however absurd, indeed however unreal, will always trump fiction.
The founding principle behind the Pop Bomb Conspiracy is: what the world wants today is the “real” thing. With lots of jumping on couches.
Why pop bombs part 2
Because they’re fun. And oh yeah, there’s this too:
My artistic heroes have always been the provocateurs: Marcel Duchamp, Dali, Yoko Ono, Bunuel, Beckett, Coltrane, and the two Andys: Kaufman and Warhol.
And here is the thing about being a provocateur in the 21st century: You can’t do it by hanging something on a museum wall anymore. It just doesn’t work.
For an audience that has already lived through dada-ism, surrealism, pop art, abstract expressionism and whatever the hell that was that De Kooning was doing, museums, once a source of wonder, have become gilded mausoleums – designed to preserve the past (if often in new clothes).
The shock of the new has grown irreversibly old.
Of course, art lovers – even ones as curmudgeonly as myself - will always enjoy the odd stroll through the dusty corridors of the art world’s past. And we will find much of value there: Sustained brilliance, beauty and even inspiration. What we won’t find is the same kind of slack-jawed bewilderment that greeted Duchamp’s early work. For today’s audience dada and surrealism are things they’ve seen on this morning’s commercials – selling toilet paper or ice cream. A once scandalous pop art painting is now fodder for a print ad or a myspace design scheme. And then another. And another. Can you blame the audience for not caring anymore?
So what is there to do? That’s an easy one - you do what Beckett and Picasso and Bunuel and Dali did: you litter the world with stunning absurdity. But instead of aiming for the stage or the museum wall or the screen or the page you aim for… well, the world. You gleefully assault your audience’s understanding of reality – on its own terms.
Is there a better definition of a hoax?
posted by Copper Smith at
12:37 PM
0 Comments
