Loading ...At its crescendo, the film V for Vendetta screams. Across a picture-perfect London, realised with an added layering of gothic fascism, the monochromatic people of England stomp their way into revolution, and once again Hollywood does its great global duty by conveying with simple images the fundamental yearnings of our time.
Its success is not in Natalie Portman’s artfully gorgeous features; nor Hugo Weaving’s gravitas; nor the detail of a fascist England; nor the originality of its story. The victory comes from the film’s strength of vision, its example of yet another finely-pitched piece of contemporary culture which abstractly, unknowingly speaks of a kind of promised day, seemingly overdue in human history.
At the current Modernism exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, in London, there is a pointed discussion of modernism’s overt hopefulness that, through design and technology, a new world would be birthed. They were, of course, only half-right; but their optimism is echoed in countless disciplines across human endeavour since the 19th century: everything suggests that we are clawing after, yearning for and screaming at a desperately expectant, needful hope that one day, somehow, life shall become good.
This is the best of contemporary art: it knows something is out there, something good. But art is both unaware of its own innate knowledge, and the promised nouveau it seeks. The learned search all their lives, and fail to apprehend it. The debate over what is art? is endless, but I think I have my own position: Art is Search. I thus emit this call to all artists: neocracy emulates the best of the modernist hope, the V for Vendetta libertarianism, the universality of Bach - etc, etc - in short, the search for that which must be found; that which has been made manifest.
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What’s a crescendo?