Interesting that no one got upset when Tim Burton carefully
recreated scenes from Ed Wood's crummy little Z-pictures.
Ah, but then those were not "masterpieces."
Yet the same duplication of Hitchcock--and a Hitchcock
picture where Hitchcock was arguably imitating Ed Wood-style
exploitation, but one-upping the genre--invites disdain.
The very fact that the project puzzles people, ironically,
proves it was worth doing.
That is: the fact that the remake upsets people is an index
of the fact that the postmodern aesthetic project
(duplication without orginality, the absence of the Romantic
conception of the author, parody without affect, etc.) is
significant and has the power to shock in the way notable
modernist works like _Le Sacre du printemps_ did.
If the index of a powerful interpretation is that it changes
the status of the original, then Van Sant's work
qualifies--even sight unseen.
Which is to say: it's a great work of conceptual art, and
thus does not demand beholding.
Edward R. O'Neill
UCLA
General Education/Sociology
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