Florence, Tommy and Antonio
So bad it is good. In times of Open AI and the immediate professional gratification it bring us, creating images, codes and scripts in a brink, it might be time to reconsider the pursue of art and the appreciation of the practice over the goal.
Not the telos (goal) but the walk. To walk the talk is more important than the achievement of art. It is the admiration of the wasted, the useless and the meaningless.
Within boundaries: I wouldn't like my GPT to hallucinate while I request important feedback or information in an important regard; however it is interesting to see even machines has these deviations of the norm.
After all, the concept of "manniera", "style" in Vasari's Renaissance fro example, packages into the very fine narrative of the Renaissance the seed for its very own deconstruction/implosion : since "style" is a criteria that judges itself by its own rules, anything goes within its boundaries.
In this sense, we bring to the arena three examples that we think can be seen trough a different lens other that the completion of the original objective and the excellence in its craft. There are three angles to see this from the start: a valoration of the process and the non-aesthetic, as modern art shows, and the valoration of the not-beautiful/accomplished. They are linked but they can get us to different paths, from the caricatures of Leonardo to the de-skilling of painting. To no be ignored is the pathos in the journey of the failed artist, a prometheic journey that nevertheless is devoid of the high stakes required by heroic tales.
Artists and poets have come from different background, but not few of them come from a comfortable socio-economic background and Florence Foster Jenkins (1868-1944) is not exception to this. However the exceptional in her comes from the appreciation of her craft by its contemporaries. If we have to resume it, we might say the consensus was a delightful lack of talent, entertaining to see with tint of humouristic tone. However , it is interesting to note how the actress Merryl Streep said it was "challenging" to imitate Florence when she interpreted her in a movie about the socialite; to double guess the copy and not the original, the deviation and not the norm was harder than expected.
Why the auditorium was anxious and mad to see her? The continuous thrill of shattered expectations fills what Umberto Eco said of modern music connivance of dissonance and harmony, that taken to the extreme, postpones the fulfillment of the expected through the extension of the incorrect, disturbance, and noise, a mechanism not alien top storytelling. This prolongation of the resolution of a conflict never happens when the craft goes sideways, and the continuous disillusion goes exhilarating the public.
It is the fruition that recognition brings to us. If platonic ideals look for harmony and perfection in its search of the ideal form, the mere definition of its opposite and its consequent incarnation brings us a kind of joy, in the sense that they are the incarnation of an idea, the idea of the wrongful but nevertheless an idea.
Another stop in this path is Tommy Wisseau (b. 1955) and his movie The Room (2003), topic of already another movie, James Franco's The Disaster Artist (2017) a movie that thanks to its technical level proudly ranks among the candidates to the best worst movie ever, swimming in the allure of the transgressive nature inherently posed by the incorrectness of execution as well as an ironic demeanor of the "camp" or the good taste of the bad taste.
Not far from this place are the periodical examples of badly done restorations were the results are almost comical that they transform themselves into iconic, by virtue of positioning themselves so far from the original that they place themselves into the position of antipodal node and necessary complement of the first work referenced, a necessary antithesis in a dialectic of art.
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Let's take a turn to the side. Enters Salieri, and here we are not talking about the historical musician, but the literary character , a distinct entity and an archetype of sorts that complement of the genius, Mozart. However, what seems like a clear antinomy o duality is much more nuanced, since it is Salieri, above all, who can appreciate the artistry of Amadeus (Mozart) in the higher magnitude of the connoisseur. This is even more notable when in Milos Forman movie, is not clear how aware is Amadeus of his talent.
Salieri is after all, as he proclaim, the hero of the common man, the artisan devoid of the spark of infused creativity. Knowing the steps and the ways but unable to walk through them successfully. A man who knows the craft but can't execute it. And here the image rings a bell. Human users places beside new systems of LLM an the black box that becomes an area where we can not trespass, beyond the reach of our slowly and painfully built understanding, an aura of sorts, and AI configure production almost instantaneously and put all of us into a similar role. A role is more important since we have to be readers, curators and canon creators in time of instantaneous production. Is the gift of appreciation a more delightful one over the artistry of execution or the enjoyment of the experience?
Notes
1) Gener, Ramon. "Escuchen a la peor cantante de opera" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35-y3h6dvZw Explanation by Ramon Gener on the beauty of the ugliness, not much convincing but nevertheless. The echelon of the content producers. Feeding the society to understand the vast knowledge. And here an actual recording https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtf2Q4yyuJ0. And the trailer of the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HszfdNS0JSc Streep declarations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1MkqcuLoww
2) Romano, Aja. VOX. The Room: How the worst movie ever become a Hollywood legend https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/12/2/16720012/the-room-tommy-wiseau-backstory-explained
3)So bad they are brilliant: on bad restorations https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-history-restoration-fails-1591327 and on deskilling in art https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/robertsjohn_artafterdeskilling2010.pdf and https://www.invaluable.com/blog/deskilling-in-art-aka-a-child-could-do-that/