It’s been a while since I sat down and wrote an editorial, part of it is my inherent lack of time to do anything lately, but mostly it is my incessant view that I must write something meaningful, and not just dribble on and on about nothing. This made me think more about something which I see every day, namely people’s searching for the next thing to talk about. It seems to me that media is driven to provide us with an abundance of topics for our idle chatter. However in the age of always-on Internet, it is getting harder and harder to come up with anything, cause the Internet is faster than any one else, and so people are always trying to find ways to beat each other on the next big topic. This is the main reason why websites like Digg and services like StumbleUpon are so popular with bloggers and everyone else for that matter. But I can’t help thinking that after a couple of days of digging and stumbling, for news, does it not just become pointless?
Something similar to a critique made of Apple’s iMovie software. If iMovie really is so easy, where are all the new movies that people are making? The fact is that many people do not invest much time in being creative. It is easier to sit back and criticize. Without a doubt the most popular medium for people of all ages are movies, we rent them, we go to the theater to experience them, we even watch them on television. Yet as our insatiable appetite for movies grows, we also complain about them. About their predictable plots and their outlandish conclusions. There seems to be no appreciation for how difficult a feat it is to make even the most mundane of films. We in a sense gorge ourselves on other people’s genuine work and then insult it for not being genuine enough in our eyes. This leads us to an over developed sense of self and perhaps secretly if we ever did try to be creative we would not blame ourselves for not having any creative powers, but our tools. It isn’t that I can’t draw or have vision, it is that Photoshop is too hard, or my camera sucks, I need a better one. We tend to believe that artists need to suffer for their art, yet after viewing their art we scoff at their efforts. So what is it? Did they not suffer enough? Our answer is usually that so and so work copies off another greater more genuine work. There’s that word genuine, again. We tend to believe that genuine works are some how better than just good imitations. Perhaps this is something akin to our post-modern era, but lets face it everyone copied everyone else. Without Eric Clapton, we could not have Van Halen. And we would never have had Clapton without the guitarists that preceded him.
I guess why we even search for things of a genuine nature, has more to do with us than the artists behind the work. We might feel more genuine ourselves if we are the first to point out something unique and authentic in world that seems to be moving on to the next big thing before we even have time to appreciate what we found yesterday. Life may seem boring and not very unique, but it is mostly because we are speeding our way through it, instead of appreciating what we have in the moment.
I’d guess that the majority of people using iMovie are simply cleaning up their home movies to make them that much less objectionable when showing them to their immediate friends & family. They’re simply not interested in sharing those flicks with the world at large. The people who are being creative with digital film are sharing it. See Elephant’s Dream or Boy Who Never Slept as examples. Another point to consider is that not everybody has broadband internet access and even amoung those who do have it; the upload speed may be sufficiently slow that they are reluctant to spend hours uploading their digital film creations to a website.
Of course that’s a point in and of itself. They may not have the resources to host their videos themselves and do not want to give up their copyrights to the film by uploading it to something like YouTube.
I tend to agree that art is greatly under-appreciated these days. I know people who say they’re insulted when an artist asks for (*gasp*) money for their work. As an artist myself, I’m all for open source and getting my work “out there”, but I find it interesting that in the orgy of free music/movie consumption that a significant number of people are forgetting that for the independent artist to keep providing the art people crave, there’s going to have to be some cash flowing from somewhere!