Re: Wes Anderson’s Worlds by Michael Chabon | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

[Joseph Tracy]

Good review. The comments were intriguing in that I identified with both the reactions of the harsher critics and those who like the work of Anderson. No one mentions that these movies are really funny. Anderson takes apart the inner lives of the culture savvy, their half hearted tries at escaping the frames and boxes that are the love-hate stuff of their comfortable lives to  both tender and biting comic effect. Isn't he, among other things, admitting that what a successful artist does is boldly take risks to expose reality with all its betrayals , in a way that is completely safe, entertaining and profitable

I could analyze Anderson's work and force myself to see it as shallow, but is he trying for depth or pleasure? Matisse is one of my favorite artists and produced a body of work whose delights never seem to fail or fade. For him the purpose of art was to give pleasure.  Sure I also love Goya, Caravaggio, Hamlet, Ellison's Invisible Man, Joyce . To do something well there is a lot one must choose not to do.

I like his movies and have modest expectations of almost all art.  

However when Chabon says the world is irretrievably broken, and that this awareness is the essence of adulthood, I hear one more  re-formulation of some grand deeper truth, the western artistic preference for tragedy.  I have to say that one may also come to doubt such creedal notions or even start all rumination from a less agonistic foundation.
On Mar 24, 2014, at 7:24 AM, Markekohut wrote:

> In which he sees Joseph Cornell and Nabokov as ways of understanding. Written before
> GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL. 
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
> Begin forwarded message:
> 
>> From: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>> Date: March 24, 2014, 6:01:37 AM CDT
>> To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>> Subject: Wes Anderson’s Worlds by Michael Chabon | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books
>> 
>> 
>> http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jan/31/wes-anderson-worlds/
>> 
>> 
>> Sent from my iPad

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