I recently bought a copy of William Goldman's book of Essays entitled The Big Picture, and sub-entitled Who Killed Hollywood?, for 99p. All hail the collapse of the Net Book Agreement, even though the politics of that collapse was all wrong. (If a publisher wants won't sell any more books to a bookshop, on account the bookshop is selling them at a price the publisher doesn't like, that should be the publisher's right. As with everything that happens in British politics, this was a European Union thing.)

Anyway, Goldman. It has lots of good bits in it, of course it does. This is the guy who wrote Adventures in the Screen Trade. This paragraph, for example:

When I was nominated for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, I watched the awards at home, in New York City, on the tube. Why didn't I go? Because I thought I'd lose, because I was obsessed with the Knicks' first championship run. But also this: The Oscars were not such a deal then. But they sure are now. When I was a kid, novels were important, theater was important, movies were our secret pleasure. Now, movies are the center of our culture. And the Oscars are the central awards.

I am fond of coining laws. Not laws you have to obey; laws you already do obey, and which I'm just pointing out. I'm especially proud of this one, which is two thirds of why I mention this. I still have fond hopes for this law. But the Micklethwait's law that is relevant here is the one that goes:

The quality of a twentieth century man-made object is inversely proportional to the frequency with which the word "art" was slung around during its creation.

Well, this sounds good, but I wonder if it is actually, er, true. I doubt if William Goldman would agree. Perhaps I need to refine the law and say that for the creators to be thinking of themselves as artists is good, but for critics to be agreeing is not good.

During the Old Days of Hollywood, the creators definitely thought they were artists. Why else would they call their enterprises such things as "United Artists"? But the wider culture was divided, if Goldman's observation above is right, into those who thought that what Hollywood did was silly candyfloss and those, like Goldman, who thought that it was profoundly pleasurable candyfloss. Any "art" being done in the cinema was, in the view of the critics, being done by Europeans.

Goldman has a couple more nice paragraphs about that syndrome:

In case anyone gets the idea I'm anti-Hollywood – the reverse, actually, but in any case all is not lost – the worst movie of the year was neither American nor new; it was Contempt, the revival of a Jean-Luc Godard films from the '60s. I would rather have root canal than sit through it again. (And remember I wrote Marathon Man – I'm not your calmest guy in the chair.) Contempt is endless pretentious garbage.

Of course, the critics thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. The most disgraceful piece of writing I've come across this year appeared in the New York Times. An incoherent multicolumned rave by one Philip Lopate. I have never met him,. know nothing about him, but he's writing a book of film criticism.

So here's what I think. When an artist says it's art, to himself, this puts him on his metal. But when Philip Lopate agrees with him, that's when the trouble starts. That's when he starts to think: whatever I do is art, so I can do whatever I like, no matter how appalling.

(You get a similar syndrome in sport. When a sportsman believes himself capable of sporting genius and works like hell to achieve it, he sometimes does. But when they then tell him he's a genius, watch out. That's when he may decide he doesn't have to work at it any more. If I am any sort of blogging "artist", then my "art", such as it is, is rooted in my ability to get and keep your attention, and I must never forget this. If you think I'm an artist, keep it to yourself.)

But what Goldman says of Hollywood now (in the late nineties, that is to say) is that it has lost its artistic ambition. It's now run by people for whom money is the reason they do it, instead of just one of those things you need to do this particular art. The films are "product". Those Jewish ex-rag-trade eccentrics with their altered names and tyrannical habits who founded Hollywood and ran it until the nineteen fifties were true artists, in their own eyes, which kept them shooting for the heights, and often attaining them.

Then, in about nineteen seventy something happened. Those fancy critics, having trashed and at best patronised Hollywood throughout its early years, finally decided that it was Art after all. For eighteen months between nineteen seventy something and nineteen seventy something plus two, Hollywood creatives were given unlimited money to throw at whatever "art" it occurred to them to create. When those budgets were mostly lost, the accountants then decided that this art stuff had to stop. From then on: Jaws – which was the film that signalled (if not caused) all the recent damage that Goldman writes about.

Me, I'm not sure that I agree. I do agree that Hollywood does different stuff now, stuff that is crafted to appeal to teenagers all over the planet rather than to folks of all ages in America. All this talk about how "Americanisation" has conquered the world in the form of things like Spiderman 2 is the wrong way round. Spiderman 2 is as much the world conquering America as vice versa. Goldman describes all this, but gets in a bit of a muddle, because he confuses change with death.

Like Goldman, I personally don't care for such films as Spiderman 2 any more, and prefer quieter, more conversational and less blood-bespattered stuff. I also now find myself liking Brahms chamber music a lot more and Brahms orchestral music a little less. But this is because I'm getting older and quieter in my tastes, not because Brahms orchestral music is any less good than I thought it was when I was twenty. But this doesn't mean that Spiderman 2 is necessarily any less artistic than a Brahms string quartet or The English Patient. It's just a rather different art, is all. Not one that Goldman or I now care for.

Goldman points out that foreigners are now providing an increasing proportion of the profits of Hollywood blockbusters, and Americans less, and seems to think that this is bad news, from a business point of view. No, it's just business. And now that those fancy East Coast critics, prodded by Goldman, are back to despising Hollywood, the updated version of Micklethwait's law ought now to be kicking in and making those blockbusters really impressive, and I suspect that exactly that has been going on for some time now. While Oscars are handed out to foreigners making mediocre conversation movies for grown-ups, Hollywood is (if the law is right) cranking out Blockbusters that will last for ever.

A lot of it is politics. The blockbusters are all about fighting in very unrealistic ways, true. But they also embody lots of ideas. That these ideas are often communicated in half a line, after ten minutes of solid, wordless (and hence multi-national) mayhem, doesn't mean that they aren't ideas. But many of these ideas are unwelcome to those fancy critics, so they call these movies "mindless". A lot of them are anything but mindless.

I should stop now. Attention spans, and all that.

Just a final thought, which is that I think that this already probably-too-long posting does something to explain why I think that arguments about just what is and is not "art" can be so important. This is a word which has consequences. If something is thought of as art, that matters, and influences what is then done. Art, the word, causes the roofs of houses to leak. Art, the word, causes movies to be boring. Art, the word, causes paintings to be ugly and pointless, and plays to be boring and incomprehensible. It is a word worth arguing about.

In the piece I've just linked to, Aaron Haspel says:

The modern religion, as Tom Wolfe beat me to pointing out, is art, which has become the highest term of praise for anything at all. A well-played bridge hand, a well-placed insult, a nice-looking ashtray are all "works of art." Except they aren't, and neither is architecture. Art is art, and non-art is non-art, and never the twain shall meet.

I disagree rather severely with those last three sentences. But the question What Is Art? is one that I entirely agree with Haspel in taking seriously.