The Asylum Heights comic experience. Asylum Heights is a satirical work of fiction, any resemblance to any people or institution living, dead or imagined is purely coincidental.
A few centuries ago, a bunch of over qualified doodlers became rather cocky when they realized they would be forever immortalized as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Subsequently, they felt that their work was obviously far removed and superior to all other artistic disciplines. Armed with high social regard, and super human martial arts skills, they divided artisan skills into "High Art," the painting, poetry and sculpting that they did, and "Low Art" being whatever was left. Historians often applaud this move, as without it, Art School undergrads would have a much harder time coming up with essay topics. The problem arose later, when the artistic philosophy of modernism stripped away the old hallmarks of master craftsmanship and spiritualist mystique. Without any grounding structure big "A" Art has transmuted into an ill defined nebulous entity which could represent anything, whilst simultaneously failing to be anything. This is why, after all these years, I'm willing to admit, I don't understand Art. Craft? Sure. Pop Culture? Definitely. Together, they give us Stained Glass Boba Fett Helmet Lamp!
All you need to know to fully appreciate a Boba Fett lamp, it that it's awesome. That it's awesome, and that awesomeness may be extended by checking out the matching Iron Man helmet lamp curtesy of Michael McLane over at Deviant Art. (I suppose this would be an opportune time to mention that I agree that, objectively speaking, Iron Man in a better hero then Batman.) What Art has lost, is a base metric for cross comparison. The quality of Craft is determined by Craftsmanship, the success of Pop Culture is set by its capacity for cultural resonance. After years of bashing my head against the pretentious academic/gallery Art sphere, I have taken a circular route in developing an appreciation for Popular Culture; A new found respect founded on the premiss that it's honest. The creators of mass media entertainment aren't saddled with abstract, intellectual bullshit, they just want something that enough people will like that they can make money. Pop Culture is filled with templates and formulas, but it is determined by a reactive, evolutionary process. The success or failure of one project will determine what the next project in the works will be. Its success is determined by its ability to connect with the prevailing attitudes, fears and ideologies of the society it's made in, its ability to find cultural resonance. One of the most fundamental tools in Art is the academic field of Semiotics, essentially the discipline of interpreting symbolism and encoded meaning. Capital "A" Art requires one to extract the pertinent symbolic elements and interpret them accordingly to determine the intended meaning. (It's Man's inhumanity to Man if you were wondering.) The same tools can be applied to mainstream culture, to remove the thin layer of highly considered veneer, and look at why it connected with contemporary culture. Simply put, Michael Bay's Transformers is a more poignant dissertation on the state of contemporary society then anything currently showing in a gallery. Which is why I don't care much for those films.
Considering that Marvel has turned the money tap to full with the Avengers this week, you already knew we were heading back there. Beyond the coolest wedding ever, if you want to see cultural resonance in action, just check out this gallery of the Avengers variant covers as classical works of Art. I have a particular love of the Black Widow splendid as Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, and not simply due to Scarlett Johansson's amazing super powers. The rise and increasing prominence of super heroes over the last seventy years is a natural byproduct of our current social trends. It's not that the themes of superherodom are so extraordinary, but they find success because they reflect the undercurrents of contemporary thought. The current super-hero archetypes are the classic hero archetypes which we have used for millennia. The main shift, is that the Zeitgeist is increasingly concerned with dawning post humanism and the social ramifications of unlimited power. Prometheus gave us the power of fire, stolen from the Gods, but we stole the power of nuclear fire all on our own. We are a people who are loosing reverence for gods, as we surpass their power with our own. Our heroes are traditional archetypes, re-conceptualized to conform to a shifting new perspective. Thinking about it, Super Man really is Achilles, a noble warrior of virtue who fights not for profit or glory, but because he must; A perfect hero, fully invulnerable and unstoppable except for one highly specific weakness. (Kryptinite sandals?) Would that make Batman Theseus? Given that the classical heroes of mythology and contemporary comic heroes are both shaped from the same clay of standing human archetypes, I should be able to find direct comparisons for them. I think I'm going to have to go give that idea some though sometime, and see where it leads.
I got side tracked, I just wanted to share a couple more things to go along with my somewhat overly verbose overview of comic-con, like this gallery of gender bent cosplay. That, and as I mentioned, I didn't get the opportunity to see the next Generation cast reunion. This was because the part with the entire cast was an entirely separate ticketed event called Star Trek TNG EXPOsed. I just wasn't willing to cough up the equivalent cost of my weekend expo pass to see these people talk for a couple hours. Thankfully, the whole thing is on the internet, so let's just cozy up together here, and we'll give it a watch. Just pretend there's an Orion slave girl by ether side, (or a Wookie if you swing that way) and if the shaky cam gets annoying, just pretend you're watching Battlestar Galactica.
Tune in next week for more arbitrary words, that on rare occasion form together to convey information. Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.
