Tag: film

What is art?

Posted on by philipdodson

All art is useless, I think Oscar Wilde said that.

A fork is useful but I could live without a fork. Art is use-less but I couldn’t live without it.

We slave away in our so called ‘proper’ jobs doing very important stuff to earn lots of money. We’re told at school and by parents that the arts aren’t important and we need to focus on math, science etc so we can get those ‘proper’ jobs.

Then what do we spend our money on from our proper jobs? Well, art for the house, music to listen to, we go to watch a play, we go to the cinema to watch a film, we watch TV, we watch YouTube, we buy a beautifully designed and crafted piece of furniture, we pay an architect to design our new house, we buy a beautifully designed fancy car that looks amazing and so on.

Yep, we work hard to spend our money on stuff that artists, musicians, actresses, designers, architects, creative writers, and so on, who have worked tirelessly as an artist to bring you their art to entertain you or for your enjoyment.

Art is imperfect and it is the imperfect that we love in life, the cracks are how the light gets in.

Useful things are just that, utilitarian and functional. Art is the life and soul of the party, the reason to be alive.

Art is life and without it life would be just useful. I want a use-less life filled with art.

Don’t queue to be an ‘Atmospherian’

Posted on by philipdodson

atmospherians

I was listening to a podcast from 99%Invisible, Roman Mars, all about film extras, and the now world famous Central Casting in Burbank California. The story behind how Central Casting came to be is fascinating and it was born out of the exploitation of mainly women by the Hollywood film industry.

Extras were referred to as ‘atmospherians’, which I thought was a wonderfully descriptive phrase for people who are the mute crowd in films.

It’s interesting that these people will literally queue all night and through the day just get a chance to register with Central Casting, that’s not to get a job as an ‘atmospherian’, that’s simply to get a chance of getting on the database.

There are two points here:

1. The words we use are important, if you want to stand out don’t use the normal, mainstream and unremarkable, use words like ‘atmospherians’ or even better create your own unique words that are rich and descriptive.

2. Don’t queue all your life to get chosen by others. Choose yourself, bypass the heartache of waiting for others to notice you. Bypass the process of queueing day after day hoping to get on a database. Create your own stuff, make yourself the lead role not the extra.

You can become a ‘creatorian’.