ON TAR ART

Live or die, life is really short and it’s meant to be lived. Everyone gets to choose and never give up. I’ve been on airplanes millions of miles everywhere. It’s my passion. You get on a plane that is going towards the unknown and you are told that you are welcome. That’s when I feel alive. I have met many people, some of them have stayed in my life, and some have not. You shouldn’t be afraid of life; you should live it with a smile and courage. You never know when the last day will be.

an online post

When the British playwright and screenwriter David Hare was meeting with Steven Spielberg sometime after the release of the film The Hours, which he had written, Spielberg said to him confessedly: “Everyone knows you have written the best screenplay of the year”, after which the renowned director looked down. It was in that moment Hare realised that he had not received Steven Spielberg’s vote for the Academy Award for the best screenplay of the year.

Now that the worst of awards presented to film are over for another year, some universal truths remain and are nowhere as noticeable as in how Tár, the film written and directed by Todd Field, dwindled away with hardly any of the more prestigious trophies in its wake. This is not to say that the impact of this highly ambitious and artistic film – both features to elicit frowns and uncomfortableness – cannot be felt even after many days of seeing it. As a piece of cinema, Tár, like its eponymous central character, stands alone, not entertaining enough to relax its viewer and not poetic enough to permit a full dismissal upon seeing it. For those who have become aware of the film merely as a cultural curiosity it represents exactly the kind of target for unbridled anger we have come to expect from cinematic art, now more than ever, when our universe is in constant danger and needs periodic rescuing from superhuman beings. What, says the moviegoer, to watch a lesbian conductor do what? What for?

Tár, like all great works of art, is about many things and hardly any of them are explicitly on its surface. It is simply not possible to walk away from it spouting conclusions such as life-affirming, tragic, gorgeous and mysterious, without the awareness of a more buried uneasiness undoing any full take on the experience. No sigh of relief for this work, no ‘putting cinema to its place’ without the guilt from a tendency to unculture oneself; to not have to face the world of contradictions or the questions (all of the deeper questions) still unanswered. In a word, no escaping from art. When a powerful work of art is presented to the public it is rarely met with universal praise or an immediate acceptance, because artistic expression – real, deep-seededartistic expression – cannot be met with indifference or banality. It can be banned and constricted, but to have a real take on it one would have to – heaven forbid – take a closer look, and in this act the socially acceptable veil of an approach to art (when so much of it is now restricted to demonetised no-longer-than-a-minute appearances to be glimpsed, swiped and forgotten) starts immediately to come down. Similarly, when a person is truly heard, and this is naturally one of the themes of Tár, only two things remain, a recognition through empathy and the stubbornness of a refusal.

To ignore the highest form of cinematic art is akin to refusing to see the world as it is. By saying no to a work of art the consumer (of culture, of life) is choosing a less cultured path, something to contain an ultimately boundless existence, and puts an importance on a hierarchy that is there to comfort and to lull to sleep, in shifting variations, but never far from the underlying message that art is in its place to service a society and the values within, and never the other way around. When a film such as Tár comes along, this agreement is in immediate danger of starting to disintegrate in the mind of the viewer. Watching a film seems an activity simple enough, safe even, and yet there are occasions when something outside of control starts emerge, the near-lifeless undercurrent starts to move, and at last the voice of an artist is heard. It pierces through political discourse, conversations about opportunity and rights, the truth about what remains important, through infrastructure and culture itself, and finally reaches the heart of the matter, morality. It is here that the greatest danger of all is revealed. The protecting and seemingly benevolent forces that run all the way through to the most revered institutions in a society (therewithin the ‘message’ to the masses) start to tremble with the slightest suspicion of art running wild, and while recent developments would suggest that the acceptance of the artist is gaining more footing than before, certainly in Western countries, this is quickly being replaced by the story of a societal awakening, of a country correcting its course, and hereupon the appeasement of any and every neglected sector of artistic people, now indistinguishable from other neglected groups, and the qualified critic who is inseparable from the one who simply gathers a following.

Nowhere is this take on art present as vividly as in the American film industry. The existential struggle that is ravaging through it on every level is narrowing many of its freer qualities, among them the celebration of art for art’s sake. The cultural shift has taken on such politically subverting elements that there is now one question to settle before all others: to remain American through and through, how can cinematic art continue to be a part of its surrounding society? To this day the greatest outcome of this struggle, still universally seen and heard, is the Academy Award for the best film of the year. I have no desire to take a stance here on whether films are political, since all art in one form or another is political, but to define the grievous destiny of cinema more accurately, it can be said that as much as artistic work remains political and in dialogue with the political forces of a society, it is equally a reflection of the kind ofpolitical environment that surrounds it. To remain free in one’s art, there are ultimately only two routes to take. Either the work is subjected to a specific political goal, however vague in detail, or the political discourse is made aware of itself, not only by criticising it, but by creating art powerful enough to illuminate the flaws of a unified vision for the world.

But what does it mean to step away from society itself? In the first place, the artist refuses whatever notion is given as the way things should be. This is no small feat, for if we keep with our example of the most dominating form of them all, the American art, to turn away from or to even show indifference towards a literally potent, unrivalled industry (as with entertainment, so with military), one is turning away from the American exceptionalism and the American dream, its liberal forces, its joys and abundant gifts, the promise of a unified world under one banner, and to a certain extent from behaviour and morality itself. Artistic work that refuses to show what should be and instead turns its focus on what is cannot be celebrated by a culture that is more concerned with an image and an impact on the world than on an authentic view of what there is behind a press conference pamphlet, and this is true of most Western cultures. The time we are living is terrible for art for art’s sake, because a social stranglehold is now forbidding financial forces from finding interest in the complexity of human life, and instead a light is shone on the relentlessly redeeming qualities of it; a heroine must rise, lost connections must be mended, forgotten truths remembered, obstacles overcome, and all human complexities resolved. In a phrase, good must continue to prevail. From here we return to Tár.

Todd Field’s third film has mostly been criticised for being pretentious and brooding, and this reaction culminates in the reception of the acting by Cate Blanchett. Works of art that address directly one or two of the inconveniencies that are present in the act of viewing itself are periodically pushed back and criticised for doing precisely this. When a film begins to communicate on the level of the awareness the viewer is having about the ongoing viewing, reactions are bound to be varied. It is easy to ironize this exchange, and the latter period of cinema is noticeably full of irony. In some ways this is an era of entertainment that can only be described as ironic, when budgets and brutalities are beyond comprehension, and the ever-expanding ‘messages’ are those of security, salvation, awareness, and acceptance. But when a film does not make a mockery of its thematic depth, when it doesn’t shield itself against the ironizing gaze, but rather opens up to represent a simple channel for conflicting human responses, when it neither shakes up nor pacifies, it has the potential of turning into an occurrence of a truly artistic experience. Among the many unspoken agreements the public is now having with cinema is that it can represent life in all kinds of ways but not become a part of life. Sitting in a movie theatre is still by and large an escape from something unbearable by itself, and however briefly, perpetual hope descends to eradicate a looming responsibility, and a life without art. Tár is a film that by all accounts cannot be enjoyed completely personally, and in fact it can be argued that this is one of its objectives, in other words, the refusal of anypersonal relief. The judging eye is put to the test, and the work of art finally stares back, as if to say, “This is what you are, no more than this, no less”.

Another point of contention though less frequently articulated is the intelligence of Tár. Popular artistic entertainment puts itself at risk by becoming intelligent, and the intelligent actor is the bearer of disappointment felt by the offended viewer. Thinking is still largely unacceptable activity in a movie theatre, and thoughts that are not easily articulated, worse still the ones that need illuminatingrather than verbal expression, eat away at the promised sense of comfort one is meant to experience before anything else. Artists the world over are accused of making a point about creating art, and this is faithfully presented to them as though the thought had never occurred to them in the first place, but a finished work that can withstand the entirety of accusations is closer to a monumental existence in a literal sense; not separate to the experience the shorts-wearing, phone-operating obedient tourist is having at the pyramids of Egypt or the Colosseum. There are moments when the ridiculousness of the endeavour rushes to the head, and the following thoughts are inevitable: What are we doing with these ruins, what is the point of them? What if we simply blew them to bits and carried on with our lives? Who would suffer from it? Ancient Egyptians? Romans? Once again, these are themes of Tár. Artistically speaking, the film is at its highest when depicting the preciousness of art, the obsession surrounding it, and the three letters easily rearranged to ridicule and obliterate it. It speaks as much to radical student theatres as it does to the concert-going public, but only a great artist, someone at the absolute peak of their craft, is able to communicate within that sweet spot, where art is both revered and frowned upon, without the viewer ever being absolved with a ruling. In the marriage of Todd Field and Cate Blanchett this resonant force is present in rare form.

The arrangement of counter forces in Tár is truly all-encompassing: women composers and conductors, lesbians, European life, high art, wealth, languages, exotic landscapes, psychology, female relationships, nazis – one building block after another saying to the man holding the financial reins: no, no, no, and for the last time, no. And yet the images that linger in mind days after seeing the film are of ordinary quality, more allied with how the experience of the world has now become to millions of people, to the vast mass that can now travel, enjoy culture and the arts, and have every opinion about life – in short, a vision of luxurious banality. We see a person coming home wheeling a suitcase late at night, we see corridors of hotels, we see an exotic waterfall, we see calming rivers, we see Berlin in all its worn-out polyphony, we see concert halls, European cafés, parks, good-looking and well-dressed people wrapped in thought, and things, things and more things. This multitude of things is what keeps Tár from becoming a purely elitist work. The viewer is the continuation of Lydia Tár, flawed and in a sense having accidentally stumbled into the world of classical music, eventually being held captive by the assigned position – as the conductor, as the film critic – and yearning for some kind of relief, of humanity even, where titles and past failings can finally wash away to reveal a person like any other, with as much potential for love and destruction as anyone. A film that can communicate to all levels of society in such expansive ways is popular art in the truer sense. Upon seeing it, Tár can be denounced, but it cannot be diminished in its effectiveness. It is the cinematic equivalent of a citizen stopped walking through a busy metropolis by a sudden political or humanitarian plea. Nothing quite hits the tax-paying consuming body like a foreign cry for assistance. In this shared understanding, in this intelligence, lies our real predicament. The viewer cannot help the opinion forming, as Lydia Tár cannot help being the great artist and behaving as such, and there is no unaffected state to return to anymore, for to denounce anytake on the film is to denounce one’s own intelligence, the very core of human existence and the source of cinematic art, among other things.

What I have wanted to say in this essay is that while there has been universal praise for the film Tár, there is something to be said about the fact that at the greatest film event of them all it was all but neglected. Not one Academy Award was presented to this film, and I cannot think that it didn’t have something to do with the seemingly more challenging aspects of it, with its unapologetic mixture of simplicity and complexity, of artistic and of decrepit, of East and West, and of being neither here nor there, and the greatest sin of them all, of not being about one universally understandable thing, or the kinds of things films are meant to be about, such as the importance of family, realizing one’s own value, making amends, overcoming insurmountable obstacles, finding a voice, etc. Surely a popular film cannot only be about art? But there it is, an artistic film like none before it, one not produced by recycling what is soothing or shocking to the moviegoer’s mind, but rather by pushing to the front that which is unpopular and nevertheless unquestionably still there, like the event from our past we wished to forget so badly we nearly succeeded at it over many years, until for whatever reason and quite disagreeably it surfaces again, forcing us to bear the entirety of our failings, of still remaining human despite our perfected story. But for all the film’s rawness, Tár is perhaps most surprisingly not unpleasant. (Another stroke of incredible artistic luck.) On the contrary, its viewing is mostly an enjoyable experience, and furthermore powerful in that it manages to introduce a character that has been missing not only in cinema but more pathologically in the attentive political discourse at large, and by default the consciousness of the citizen: the fearful, uncertain leader.

The discomfort felt at morally ambiguous deeds are no more than the fears of the experiencing witness manifested. We are unnerved by bad behaviour and simultaneously drawn to it, and a story that succeeds both at giving us space to purse our lips and position our noses for a downwards lookand simultaneously awaken our bloodthirst is worth the price of admission alone. Consider the climax of Tár, where our floundering protagonist charges the stage of a concert hall and pushes the substituting conductor down from the podium. What could be more inappropriate? What more embarrassing? How could anyone have misjudged their response so completely? And still, Lydia Tár isn’t entirely wrong. Even here, when her struggle for art is at its most absurd, her actions are not unrecognisable. Who hasn’t thought about what it would be like to conduct an orchestra or do anything in front of a full concert hall, inappropriate or otherwise? In addition to this, the greater themes of the film are revealed in this scene. This is what wewant from an artistic experience, this what we expect from a civilised society; an evening of classical music must be a safe space, certainly after tickets have been bought and behaviour fitted to the occasion.

Tár brings to mind two films of somewhat equal substance, Black Swan and The Square, but the main difference here is a lack of terror and an addition of empathy. The company of Lydia Tár is not altogether unpleasant, and at moments it is the very opposite of this. At the end she gets nothing less than what she deserves, and she bears her fate finally with surprising dignity. After the unbearable Europeanness and a few glimpses of New York, Tár is cast off to two locations where high art isn’t – at least not in the sense in which we consider it. Both places are interestingly left undefined. First we see the conductor return to her humble American beginnings in a detached suburban house, firstly to rekindle her love of music and conducting with VHS cassettes and in the next moment to be brutalised by her unsympathetic brother calling her Linda – again, when is the particular dynamic of families of artistic people ever discussed? –, and finally Lydia Tár leaves her Western surroundings entirely and ends up living, and conducting, in an unspecified Asian country. There are a few references to Marlon Brando, but otherwise we could be anywhere from India to Indonesia, at least to the forever-traveling eye. It is hard to think of a more appropriate ending if one wanted to pull the rug from under the all-knowing, all-seen cultured audience who has at long last concluded that it has been watching a film about somebody unknown to it. And then without warning the ultimate discomfort falls upon the viewer. A tropical landscape fills the screen, no language is understood anymore, and the way in which most people on the planet have been living all along, with very little prospects of change, is simply dropped to silence a self-important voice. All of this is pretention, of course, we have not left our comfortable cinema seats, and the difficult question about human value lingers to unite those who have never seen life outside a Western city, and those who dreamed of making it to be big city and sometimes in this process left their home countries far behind, the environmentally savvy and the pure consumer alike, all are united by the awareness of a paradoxical, counter-intuitive world we must share in one way or another, one which cannot really be discussed away nor made sense of with a soothing turn of a phrase. This world can only be looked at, and in this undertaking there remains no greater approach than art.

The five hundred

Rolling Stone has published its latest list of the five hundred best albums of all times, this time mostly refreshed by what the western world has repeatedly made to understand as diversity, all the way to raising Marvin Gaye to the top spot, and almost immediately the list is met with criticism not only of its too-little-too-late manoeuvrings but also of the very need for a list in our time. This reaction, unanticipated in its ingredients but not in essence, proves that there is an uncontrollable mass of music listeners by whom it simply cannot be done right, not even after the inclusion of colour and gender. Perhaps more than ever before, people are showing their anger (or, in a vaguer sense, reaction) at any authority telling them how things are, and popular music is at the top of debilitating experiences for modern consumers: accessible enough to allow an everyman’s expertise, but simultaneously on the verge of being valued for reasons ultimately unrelated to music. Of course it shouldn’t be assumed that the editors at Rolling Stone are not aware of this.

To begin with, it might be easiest to state some of the most obvious conclusions and be rid of them. Here in no particular order:

There is no competition in music. The need for a list is brought about ultimately by two things: a continuing attempt to limit music to a mathematical and calculable entity and a frustration with the now unlimited amount of popular music, much of which can only be lost. Certainly there is no-one who has actually listened through the entire list of the five hundred albums, and I doubt if anyone has done so even with the top twenty, let alone done so with actively assessing the contents of each album. Even if someone decided to set out on such a quest, by the time they got to, let’s say, the hundredth album the musical landscape – as the fleeting amalgamation is repeatedly referred to – would once again have changed.

Cultural impact overrides musical importance. Music journalism is a strange enterprise, since there is only a questionable value in writing about music, and invariably when journalists take it upon themselves to list the qualities of some musical output or another they end up writing about a great many things that have little to do with music. The situation is perhaps worst in music because such a primitive emotional response is often awakened that any listener would be swept away so strongly that sooner or later something would have to be said or talked about. Here is one of the more obvious reasons why it is difficult to talk about why a piece of music is better than another, and also why it is easier to recognize the merits of an album such as they are, first and foremost as a mental construct and an approximation of an already existing state. But it is not only the cultural impact of a music album we are talking about here, but the musical importance of music journalism itself, and Rolling Stone without question is at the very heart of such a conundrum. What it is therefore constantly promoting, even when renewing its list, is an acceptable terrain of American music. There are some foreign albums on the latest list, of course, but never to such an extent that would challenge the culturally unified whole. Looking at the list of the five hundred one gets the feeling of looking at the American society, neatly listed, with all its agents in their places.

Music is for men. Since there is no competition in music, and while concessions have been made to follow with at least some of the trends and developments of the times, the paradigm for celebratory, life-affirming music can stretch or reduce, but not change in its essence. This is most dominant in the presence of the male musician, for while women are beginning to populate lists of the most acceptable cultural items, there is no proof to suggest an actual shift in the central thought. Looking at the evidence, out of the fifty greatest albums ever produced seven are made by women, and in the top ten there are barely two, both of which are without doubt largely unknown to a male audience. Joni Mitchell is finally elevated to third place with the common album choice Blue, but the top of three – a black man, a group of white men and a woman – is indicative of very little change, culturally speaking, since the shift from a leading white man to a leading black man comes over a decade after it has been witnessed in the country’s highest position. As it stands, Joni Mitchell is held back by at least six men of music, and to get to Lauryn Hill one would have to wriggle through an entire platoon of male musicians.

Greatness equals commemorating. The biggest difficulty and source of contempt for the magazine is in the use of the word great. In its vagueness a concept of greatness can involve ’acceptable merit’, ’sufficient noticeability’, ’up-to-the-minute resonance’, and many more things. As a later development we see a call for the celebration of those that have been systematically left out, predominately minorities, and a rising tide from not only a crisis in journalism but from a hitherto never-changing culture has begun to threaten Rolling Stone in a detectable way. Ours is a time when many, if not all, of the greatest establishments are forced to tip-toe around a suddenly foreign ground, an inconsiderably overlooked minefield of hurt and misunderstanding, continuously filled with the fear of causing further harm. A list for our age can only aim at appeasement of the public as well as salvation of the journalist, but even after the humane refreshment the end result may not be any better for it, as we have already witnessed. To run to the aid of a suffering public, as it were, is to neglect the amount of hurt and the unwillingness of many to be appeased.

I was here first. One explanation for postmodern art that I have come across goes as follows: whereas in the old days an artist was a skilled craftsman who was capable for producing works that the general public could not, what we have now are people who are producing works that many others could themselves produce, and when they are faced with this predicament, that is, when someone says, ’I could do that as well’, the correct response is to now say, ’Yes, but you didn’t and I did’. This, to me, is as close a description of a popular magazine as can be. With Rolling Stone, for example, one of the greatest sources of anger seems to be in the sheer audacity of their dealings, and while this reaction can be traced all the way back to the guilt of a magazine reader, at least a part of the success of this kind of publication is in the tension between its public and its editors. A list for everybody is not a list at all, and journalists at Rolling Stone know this, as they know that the universality of a story is no story worth telling. There is something interesting at play with the magazine, a kind of exhibition of popular modern art, with much of the publication’s success and enjoyment coming from the mere privilege of being allowed to exhibit, to give a somewhat violent view of contemporary life and times, and then to fall silent. There is an unapologetic streak in publishing lists such as this, but it is no less present than that of the reader’s or the critic’s.

So here we have a seemingly updated scene of popular modern music, undoubtedly already on its way to oblivion. What is most striking about this moment and inarguably a great source of pain for many is that criticism and lists have persisted well into the twenty-first century. The revisions to the list come at a late hour, and there could be an overall correction at work, were it not for the concurrence which has already taken place at the beginning of the very first list and the need to compartmentalize the products of popular music. What has once begun cannot completely ever change. After a piece of work has been called great it cannot be un-called great, not entirely, as an advertisement cannot not speak to a consumer after the fact. A reported change by Rolling Stone has been that of an expansion of ’the canon’, but this is only following closely with an era of everything expanding rapidly. Simply put, there doesn’t seem to be any popular modern life at all without an all-encompassing expansion. The case with many of the albums chosen for the list is that they mainly serve as a gateway into the actual discovery of the artist and ultimately better works than those mentioned. This library of music is now so vast that there is no-one who can keep track of it all, and even if someone set out to find the bigger picture, by the time they had got through merely a dozen artists, the amount of information would already be too great to grasp satisfyingly. I suppose one could scroll through them all, or have a playlist in the background for a few weeks, but what would that bring other than an even worse cacophony of musical outings or indeed a deterioration of the importance of music?

There is no doubt examining the past fifty years that things have been neglected and deliberately forgotten, but the real question is whether there is a modern album that can demonstrate the same kind of greatness that The Beatles or The Rolling Stones did in their day. How could there be? The frustration felt in many responses to the latest list is one caused by the disintegration of the very thing such a list is there to uphold. Now is not the time for lists, and even if it were, their impact would not come near the excitement or longevity of present politics or an ongoing overturning of public figures and institutions. What has come as an unpleasant surprise to many people in an era of constant streaming and digital libraries is how much music there really is and has been for much longer than its canonisation in magazines. The outright horror of the amount of music that cannot be talked away in an afternoon program is calling for responses similar to those that occur after a large amount of people realize that they have been outrageously swindled, namely indifference, obsession, fear and anger. I quote one especially wounded writer:

“The term ‘greatness’ is very useful for one reason — because of its vagueness. An album’s greatness doesn’t depend on the number of lives that the music touched, or innovative techniques incorporated into the music, or the circumstances under which it was written. In Rolling Stone magazine, what makes an album ‘great’ is that music industry insiders happened to like it. All 500 albums on the list are monumental accomplishments independently of each other, as are albums that didn’t either make the list or get nominated. Pitting the albums against each other only cheapens each work’s individual artistic merit.”

To attack a concept such as greatness doesn’t ultimately take much away from the everyday feeling of greatness. In fact, there is more to be said about the attitude toward the idea of greatness in the text above than there is about whatever it is that makes an album great. It is quite possible that instead of any vagueness of greatness constituting as an absence of meaning, seeing something as great might on the contrary include many kinds of cumulative notions of such a state. The quotation marks the writer has placed around the word great seem no accident or rhetorical choice, but rather an emotional posture. Interestingly enough, this turns out to be an attack on authority, not an analysis of musical merit or anything of the sort. Rolling Stone and its elite contributors, the writer looks to be saying, who do they think they are. The selected group (over three hundred according to the article) are needlessly isolated as a privileged bunch first of all because there is no reason to believe that they would possess any special knowledge in such a boundless entity as music, but moreover because of the alternative. Had the choice been left up to the entire population, the end results might not have been any more satisfying for it. They might very well have been worse. And so it appears that ’greatness’ is absolutely open to the lives music touches as well as innovative techniques and many more things, and no music journalist or contributor is above this. The reactions similar to the quoted article add to the list of the five hundred, of course, and the final picture is far more fascinating as a result. We are discussing, in a phrase, a popularised take on music. What is not discussed, however, is how a great piece of music, much as it is generated by talent, is similarly prompted by happenstance and sheer luck. There is no musical success, as there is none in theatre or film, without an acceptance of forces greater than that of the individual artist. Rolling Stone may have successfully updated its list of the five hundred greatest albums of all time and thereby subjected itself to innumerable opinions on music journalism’s hold on a concept of greatness, but the most powerful act of them all appears to be the publishing of the list in the first place.