Time is a sort of trinity. It wears three hats, past, present and future, but we know it collectively as simply, time. Sadly, we choose to honor artists and works in only one of these realms, the past. And, bitterly, that is the one place they cannot hear our accolades.
What do we define as art? Painting is art. And yet so many of its contributors died unknown and penniless. Only in the past do we revere them. Literature is art. Scores of masters of poetry and prose, stories and reveries, scorned and imprisoned in their lives, move us today as never before. Music is art. Time can never dull the tones that make our hearts take flight. Photography is art. Frames of still yet moving life cause wonder to well inside us. But what about film? Is not film art? In our finite judgments we esteem value by rarity alone, and film is never rare. But film is truly art in many forms. Painting graces the backgrounds of film, and painting is art. Literature is the substance of film, and literature is art. Music swells the soul in film, and music is art. And photography rushes past like a panning bas relief, and photography is art. Why then can we not love film as we love art? An artist’s craft that fills two hours of our lives with a lifetime of dreams surely deserves a place in our heart.
But my question to you is, why then do we try to remake art? Not one among us would dare alter Mona Lisa with black lips and nose ring and modern attire. The bard’s rare eloquence has never yielded to change, and who would dare to do so. But we do to film what we daren’t try to any other form, and undo the painter’s strokes, the sculptor’s marks, and the writer’s prose.
Battlestar Galactica was a work of dreams, a fashioning of artists at the height of their craft. A Renaissance painting is not denigrated for its place in time, but cherished because of it. Art is a piece of history, our history, a still life forever frozen within the persistence of an immutable media. Why should we revile the styles it captured and chisel the Pieta into another day? Is imagination so dead a modern artist can only deface what has come before?
Despite time and wear and style and change, no copy ever made, no revision ever tried, can outbid the original canvas, our love the dowry whose purchase alone can wed it.
Art does not succumb to time, but time to art.
Affectionately and respectfully,
Muffit
A Moustache for Mona
Re: A Moustache for Mona
