Dave,
Re your response to my comments below:
> What I don't get is how someone can
> make the logical jump from someone not faithfully
adapting a work, or
> taking liberties with it, to the
director/screenwriters disrespecting
> the author. Seems kind of silly to me--but this is
an argument we're
> never going to meet any meeting of the minds with.
Although it does
> seem from the responses that far more people here
liked Altman's
> version of Long Goodbye than despised it, so I think
we do have a
> RARA AVIS consensus that the Long Goodbye was a damn
good movie ;)
I don't make a startlingly difficult-to-see logical jump. I
look at the movie, in conjunction with Altman's public
comments, and come to the obvious conclusion. But we're
beyond that now.
You may disagree with the position that, morally, an adapter
owes some fidelity to the originator of the source material.
But what Miker said is that artists have no moral
obligations, at least not in the creation of their art.
Ever.
At all.
It's one thing to say Altman was or was not violating a clear
moral standard when he used Chandler's novel to make an
anti-Chandler movie. It seems clear to me, but I can
certainly see that it's a debatable point.
But that's very different from saying artists, as a
professional group, have no moral obligations whatsoever when
they produce art. EVERYONE has moral obligations, in their
personal life and in their professional life. Why should
artists be different?
Is child pornography defensible on the basis of artistic
freedom? Is plagiarism? Is bigotry?
I hope no one here thinks so.
To exploit children sexually in the name of art is morally
wrong.
To steal another person's work and sell it as your own in the
name of art is morally wrong.
To promulgate hateful ideas in the name of art is morally
wrong.
And to say that an artist has no moral obligations to his
fellow humans and to society at large is to say that any or
all of those acts are okay.
And to say that any of these acts are NOT okay, are
intrinsically immoral, is to acknowledge that artists DO, in
fact, have moral obligations.
JIM DOHERTY
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 11 Feb 2007 EST