I don't see how you can compare a feature length movie and a 30 second short... I see this project as quite different from the cinematic context and so apply different criteria in my assessment and enjoyment of what's happening here.
Can you define fashion ? Personally I see fashion as a rather pernicious industry the products of which when combined with a human being and a sense of style can be fascinating on many levels from aesthetic through sexual and intellectual. It's that possibility for having my melons twisted on many levels that keeps me coming back.
Unlike Madonna who is a business with no interesting by-products.
Arts and Culture
From Shakespeare to The Smiths, Wittgenstein to WarholDon't you just love Madonna?
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I'm sorry, I know that we should be discussing art or the new hybrid emerging as fashion and art (and which I am going to coin 'FA:art' ) but I was really hungover today and found an old VHS of InBed with Madonna and watched it and all I can say is, what a wonderful little piece of film making! I was so engaged by it. I've seen it loads ages ago but I think today I must have watched with different eyes. If you want fashion film, just watch it, it's black and white, so suitably avant garde and it has loads of swearing and sex. I think we forget just how great Madonna is. And I hate the staple 'yeah, like her old stuff but her new stuff is shit' mentality. I know Guy is a bit of a drag but she's in love and they have a beautiful family together so we should be happy for them. Have you seen her new video? The bit where they're in the dancehall and it goes all quiet aside from the ticking of clocks is an example of what I consider, beautiful filmmaking. That to me encapsulates so much about aesthetics, the movement of the body, fashion, sexuality, and I love the way Madonna is dressed so unremarkably that her ensemble becomes almost striking in its mundaneness. I know everyone is going to hate the fact that I posted this but I just think that the video is really exciting and that it really gets me. No, I don't think it's that original but there is something genuinely potent about it that I can't put my finger on. I suppose my concern is that people get very principled about when you say you like stuff like Madonna. Okay, but in an attempt to elucidate things further I'll put it like this: I love fashion. Fashion excites me, in fact it always has. At some shows that I've been to, the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Film, in my experience has, on certain occasions, done the same but none of the films from this week managed. I would have thought, through two of my favourite mediums, somebody might have come close. But no. I would also like to say that I did not see any of the films previously so maybe there were some good ones that I missed out on.
I don't understand what your argument is. What you are talking about is the valency of fashion; the potential, the promise that clothes make to us before we put them on. Yes, they can be appropriated and collocated in different ways and yes, they can also yield a number of different effects and provoke different responses as you outlined. However, my proposal was not Madonna vs. Fashion as you have misconstrued. The idea that I wanted to put forward was to do with FORM. I'm saying that the combination of music with moving image, regardless of whatever label you choose to impose on it, is essentially the same thing, whether 30 seconds or two hours long. It requires all the same ingredients. You wouldn't say to me that I couldn't compare a miniature or limning from the Renaissance with a full-scale portrait, would you? Heck, at uni we had to compare poetry with paintings, brush strokes with syntax, music with film. You can't just earmark certain media to be cordoned off to their own little sphere of critique! That's tyrannical! I mean, it's the same shit, just a different toilet!
Secondly, you contradict yourself. What do you mean by by-products? By saying that Madonna doesn't offer anything you insinuate that fashion suddenly becomes redundant as soon as the wearer dresses himself. I don't really see how that caveat works. Is she just too mainstream for you to deal with her? And yes, she may have turnedwhat she does into an elaborate business, but is that not what everyone is doing, or at least trying to do?
I like madonna not as an artist but purley as an entertainer but and never liked abba to me they feel like a cheese grater to my brain. wrong move madonna
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