not exactly your grandmother's beach reading.

First and foremost, the premise of the Benjamin excerpt is one that I find very engaging and decidedly relevant. I have no interest in this standpoint he's apparently taking against commentaries on proletariat art, but rather the substance of it, which seems to consist in establishing what constitutes art when it can sort of spring into being in a rather perfunctory and cold way (think Thomas Kinkade galleries and T-Pain's auto-tune albums, if you'll forgive the pop culture reference). In pursuit of all this, he goes about explaining exactly what the various facets of art are, including their contextual relevance and origins.

Of these explanations, I thought the most interesting was XIV, "One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later." Obviously, since I'm nothing if not contrary, I immediately took issue with this. What's he saying here? A truly great piece of art is merely a foundation for other art? How unsatisfying and disrespectful. Then I realized how stupid that sounded and a) that wasn't what Benjamin was saying and b) this was merely one part of what he thinks contributes to what makes art "art." After reading the footnote (which I thought was actually clearer than the body of the argument), this point actually makes a lot of sense.

I can't really relate to Benjamin's example of Dadaism here, nor to its apparent successor in Charlie Chaplin, so for our purposes we'll use Star Wars (the original three, not the new ones. I'm talking A New Hope style here).

My parents and brother remember when the Star Wars trilogy was released, and the thing they raved about the most was the special effects and how incredibly impressive they were. Of course, when I saw the movie at 9, I was already jaded and couldn't figure out what they were talking about. But anyways, I think that special effects sort of get maligned fairly often because in some films they tend to take center stage over acting and plot development, but in all honesty I think they play a pretty crucial part in creating an engaging and appealing film, which can be considered a work of art; Star Wars and other films like maybe Blade Runner or Waltz with Bashir (which used a different sort of special effect) would probably widely be considered "art" despite some impressive looking stuff on screen. But the great thing about Star Wars was that I think it really sort of marked this incredible turning point. It was pretty advanced for 1977, but one of the reasons it's so great is that we now have all these films that push special effects to create the sort of cinematic atmosphere that Star Wars was going for in its incredibly epic way. Just like George Lucas was influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey, James Cameron can trace his roots back to A New Hope, and with him we have arguably the dawn of the age of 3-D cinema, something that will probably be regarded in the future as akin to the transition from silent film to "talkies." In fact, they're even talking about re-releasing the original Star Wars films in 3-D. But the important thing is that none of these films are derivatives of one another: they seem like natural evolutions. Benjamin writes that art will carry beyond its goal, and that is absolutely what Star Wars did, not just in the indirect spawning of other great films but because it lead to the creation of this entirely new medium, 3-D technology, that's a kind of technology and this new kind of cinematic art.