September 2009

Something I wrote in a snit a few years back: "Marketing culture wrecks everything it touches" (after encountering Harry Nilsson's song "He Needs Me" in a mawkish Nike commercial)

is being construed by an Internet interlocutor as

"High popular art must never cross the line to be used in low popular art contexts" (a paraphrase but I think that's the gist).

"He Needs Me" worked ironically in Altman's Popeye when Shelley Duvall sang it about wifebeater Bluto, and it worked in PT Anderson's Punch Drunk Love when sung over shots of Adam Sandler as a more contemporary rageoholic. It did not work as an anthem for a school girl's ordinary crush on her tennis coach.

Somehow saying this has been translated into "drawing a hard line" between high and low Pop (whatever those are). That was not my meaning. Dissing commercials doesn't necessarily mean proclaiming anything as "high" or claiming that it's inviolable. By and large commercials do suck--few dispute this. It's more a question of honesty than aesthetics.

Dreamed I was in a room with Guthrie and some other people showing artwork back and forth to each other. I was showing how certain things looked printed out (can't remember what). Guthrie blew everyone away with this animation he'd found. It was this morphing plane piece twisting around in 3D space. Inside one of the planes, moving independent to the other movement was a line of scrolling text from an art professor telling the student to do better work. It was impossible to tell if the professor had inserted the text into the student's piece to show his superior skillz, or if the student had taken an older work with the prof's criticism and mutated it up several levels to show his own superior skillz. Everyone laughed and said wow when this animation was projected.

Not that this looked anything like it but I probably had it on my mind.