10oclockdot:
10 New Aphorisms 1. Artworks that ask nothing of the viewer ultimately give nothing back to the viewer. 2. Don’t confuse esoteric with meaningless. 3. Which is more likely? That the critics are ALL either wrong, biased, stuffy, out-of-touch, or trying to impress each other, OR that you must have missed something and should take a second, closer look? 4. If you want to begin to understand the art of cinema, stop looking at the objects in front of the camera. Rather, look at their relationships: object and object, object and frame, color and color, light and shadow, shot and shot, sequence and sequence. As in chemistry, it’s not the atoms; it’s their arrangement that matters most. 5. Art should be about the freedom of the viewer. To expect a single unified meaning is to expect art to be propaganda. 6. A cover is only good if it’s good for a reason besides the reason the original was good. 7. Saturday Night Live is where unfunny stereotypes go to get hooked up to life support while being beaten to death. 8. Trying to use the internet productively is like trying to read a Faulkner novel if all the odd-numbered pages had been replaced by porn. 9. You’re only a dilettante if you’re trying to reproduce what others have already done. 10. It’s impossible to say anything truly trivial. Everything connects back to the ultimate questions in some way. You’re only trivial if you refuse to trace back the connections or care about the questions.
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