The Art of the Blockbuster

Some of the paint seems to have been squeezed from a syringe or scraped from the studio floor and glued on in some arbitrary corner of the picture. The toxic luminosity of his palette is simply untranslatable through photolithography, and the incredible chances he took with his art — that is, the number of works that by all reason should be failures but somehow manage to triumph — are reiterated with an arrestingly physical presence. You’d think that after a century of artists trying to imitate him, his images reproduced on every possible surface in quantities that boggle, his tabloid lifestyle even more widely disseminated and his technical innovations debased into the stuff that formulaic TV landscape painters excel at, van Gogh’s work would by now be inaccessible through the cloud of cultural associations that surrounds it. Not entirely so.

But people don’t spend much time looking at art anymore. Our brains are hard-wired for the shifting flatness of the TV and movie screens, and the video-arcade windshield vistas of freeway driving. Yet we’ve been told all our lives that art is important and meaningful, even spiritual and transformational. If you’re already primed for and open to an exemplary fine-art experience, you could probably walk into any anonymous gallery and see van Gogh’s paintings for the great works they mostly are. For the rest of us, we depend on this symbiotic harnessing of the most powerful art form going — advertising — combined with the ages-old power of the controlled mob consciousness, to successfully convince us that we’re having an extraordinary experience. And not only is there nothing wrong with that, it’s a more honest account of how art can move humans in the contemporary world than most of what the art world offers. Plus, it pays the surprising dividend of permitting the citizenry to encounter great art again in a mass, public, almost religious ritual performance that threatens, but never quite manages, to overshadow the iconic objects it is "about."

Not bad for $17.50.