Anyone can whip up a dish if they have a large budget, access to prime raw goods, a well-equipped kitchen and so on.
But the test of skill is doing it with whatever happens to be available, while camped out on a mountain-side, with only one cooking-utensil and your knife acting as stand-in for a kitchen.
The artist, of any medium, is the one who can deliver a masterpiece from the latter set of conditions.
I'd even argue this is evident with many writers and film-makers: the greater the succes, the greater the budget and the blander the product. And I do mean product, not art.
There's an energy, a something not readily definable or graspable that is lost in success, which is only rarely re-discovered or reclaimed.
Consider the Star Wars movies, the three initial ones. By RotJ, the story was its own straight-jacket; it simply had to conclude in a given way (epic though it may have been). Then consider Willow. Unconstrained except by the genre itself, but deftly handled so that the genre-bound constraints instead serves as tools and high-lights of the craft involved in the telling.
And then look at the SW prequels. Technically superb, wooden acting, non-engaging story, huge budgets, heroic reputation no-one could realistically have lived up to.
Trees grow large enough to rot while still living and growing unless the landowner harvests them while they are still good for something but mulch. An artist not moving on once succesful will become like a tree in the wild; flourishing, inspiring, overwhelming and stifling or even choking out sprouts and saplings in its shadow.
Yeah... I started too late, but I think there's a definite divide. There's people who want to make art and there's people who want to make money out of their art. I'm sure the former would like the latter but the work involved in that is just too onerous.
It's like cooking, isn't it?
Anyone can whip up a dish if they have a large budget, access to prime raw goods, a well-equipped kitchen and so on.
But the test of skill is doing it with whatever happens to be available, while camped out on a mountain-side, with only one cooking-utensil and your knife acting as stand-in for a kitchen.
The artist, of any medium, is the one who can deliver a masterpiece from the latter set of conditions.
I'd even argue this is evident with many writers and film-makers: the greater the succes, the greater the budget and the blander the product. And I do mean product, not art.
There's an energy, a something not readily definable or graspable that is lost in success, which is only rarely re-discovered or reclaimed.
Consider the Star Wars movies, the three initial ones. By RotJ, the story was its own straight-jacket; it simply had to conclude in a given way (epic though it may have been). Then consider Willow. Unconstrained except by the genre itself, but deftly handled so that the genre-bound constraints instead serves as tools and high-lights of the craft involved in the telling.
And then look at the SW prequels. Technically superb, wooden acting, non-engaging story, huge budgets, heroic reputation no-one could realistically have lived up to.
Trees grow large enough to rot while still living and growing unless the landowner harvests them while they are still good for something but mulch. An artist not moving on once succesful will become like a tree in the wild; flourishing, inspiring, overwhelming and stifling or even choking out sprouts and saplings in its shadow.
But ultimately doomed to rot and ruin.
Yeah... I started too late, but I think there's a definite divide. There's people who want to make art and there's people who want to make money out of their art. I'm sure the former would like the latter but the work involved in that is just too onerous.