I’m not much for those “end-of-year, top ten, most awesomest things that we read/heard/saw and can fill the remaining short days of December arguing about” lists. Push John Cage to the top of the charts if it makes you happy, twist up Yogi Bear and impress the internet by all means, but why reduce your yearly experiences to ten items when the sum of all the parts can generate something like this:
[via]
I don’t like those lists either. On the other hand, they allow people with more rarified cultural interests in areas like new music, live theater, literature, or contemporary dance to present some of the year’s best accomplishments. For whatever that’s worth.
The video above seems like an ad for Hollywood. It contains clips from the best moments in 270 movies produced in 2010. It is a good reminder that Hollywood is a massive, heavy industry that utterly dominates our cultural lives. It has the resources to rake up almost all of the world’s best talent, and it controls tens of thousands of cinemas covering the entire planet. It then uses this talent, massive industrial infrastructure, and bottomless financial resources for purely profit motives, with the result that the work is usually more oriented toward relatively superficial entertainment rather than artistic expression. Entertainment is important and much needed, but if the balance is shifted too far in that direction at the expense of work that is more artistically oriented, the overall effect can be somewhat debasing for society. Especially in America, this process has also greatly weakened regional cultural identity since local arts organizations cannot compete with Hollywood for a public.
Does this represent a problem in your mind? Why did you post that clip? How can artists who might work on the otherside of the entertainment/artistic balance keep from being completely marginalized by Hollywood? Should the marketplace be the sole arbitor or our cultural lives? If the more marginalized artistic side of our cultrual lives is funded almost exclusively by donations from the wealthy, does this represent a form of anti-democratic neo-feudalilsm?
Anyway, I hope the clip makes people think about the larger picture of the cultrual industry and our cultural lives.