A Delicate Irony
With the genius of destiny, this film is getting the same reaction as Turner himself did.
Admired, reviled, hated, loved, and understood by the same 5% which validate all culture.
5% of us are artists, 5% left handed, 5% gay, 5% wealthy, whatever, and 5% understand that this is among the great .0005% of all human endeavor which we allow to speak for justice, for love, for art.
Bravo Mike Leigh, Tim Spall, and all who created this.
For those who don't understand this, well, 95% is the vast majority, and you could do worse I suppose, couldn't you?
P.S.:
This wasn’t meant to be self congratulatory; it takes neither courage nor vision to view a work of art as you or I did, only a ticket. I'm surprised at being raked over the coals for pointing out that the audience for this film was tiny. The comments weren't aimed at those absent, but rather at those who saw the film and expressed disdain for it. Sorry, but I felt that deserved a rebuke. I'm protective of the things I love, and I loved this film.
What takes courage, and what I was congratulating, was the artistry.
The courage to travel a hard road, and risk so much, for a vision. To accumulate resources, to achieve.
What’s annoying is this:
Financial failure: Total reported gross for the film in 2014: $5m, about 5% of what a blockbuster can makes on its first weekend.
Peer rejection: The director, the star, and the film itself being ignored by the Academy.
Public response: Roughly one movie ticket in 2000 in 2014 was for Mr. Turner. And about half of the comments, (at the time of writing) were of the genre: “two hours of my life I’ll never get back…boring snooze-fest…Grunting is not acting"…etc. The irony was the parallels of these attitudes to the work of great artists throughout history. "Grunting is not acting" seems a haunting echo of Ruskin’s own criticism of Whistler: "Throwing a pot of paint in the public’s face".
As for elitism, well, a work of this caliber is elite, but why elitism? Elitism is simply snobbery, and one major point of the film is that a barber’s son from Covent Garden could show the world, and continues to show the world, how it’s done. He was elite. By extension, the audience for Turner, and Mike Leigh might be called ‘elite”, (though I wouldn’t choose that word). But this isn’t a moral judgement.
To be elite is just a category. Elitism is a social construct designed to discriminate. Elitism is exclusionary, it exists to create a barrier between one group and another.
Those who fight for the place of art in society get little satisfaction. The reward is in the work itself. They are rarely Elitist. To the realm of art all are welcome, even the occasional Aristocrat, (provided they mind their manners). My disappointment is that so many seem not to care.