by Ashish Gokhale

Created on: January 12, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

It's true that movies, like books and music (all art) are windows to one's soul....
Too often we find that life imitates art instead of vice versa, of course there is a cause and effect inter-relationship matrix that art and life are entwined in, you know - the chicken and egg thing. It is a source of continual amazement how, or why, some people seem willing to lay down their lives for art. That seems to me a perversion of the principle that art should follow life. I guess that's decadence when the whole is subsumed for the part.

When life begins to follow the dictates of art one has somehow lost it. When art becomes so consuming a passion that life itself seems of lesser value, somehow, somewhere there has been a perversion. To some extent, all obsessions are perversions - two sides of but the same coin, whether good or bad comes from it depends on what one ends up doing with it and if one's publicist is worth the money! As the Devil, in 'End of Days', an otherwise completely forgettable movie, says, 'God is the ultimate under-achiever with a good publicist. If something good happens, it is His doing, if something bad happens, He moves in mysterious ways'.
How high (or low, depending on your particular point of view) one is willing to go defines one's station in life as far as art is concerned. 'Arty' or 'just right' or 'Aurangzeb'. An 'aurangzeb' is a euphemistic (Indian) term for a philistine - from the Mughal despot Aurangzeb, who is rumoured to have been one of the stinkiest - beheading people because they professed a love of music.
A program that aired on NPR (Dallas, TX) in the month of December., 1999 had, as it's central theme, a debate concerning the dark side of genius and whether it was an unavoidable consequence or a cause of genius itself. An argument was made by citing numerous examples of creative people that have lived through the ages, people that were obsessive, petty, self promoting, selfish, even cruel. In short, these were the 'bad boys' of society. Destroying hotel rooms, getting in drunken rages, suffering from addictions, covetousness, lasciviousness, manic-depressive tendencies, what have you.
One side of the argument held that the creative people involved in science, engineering, business - in general, areas where 'intrinsic creativity' was seen as less an attribute than simply their 'raw intelligence', seemed to escape the negative afflictions of genius while the writers and artists do not. In short, the former group are affected by

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>