George Lucas drew a distinction for the crowd at D earlier this week that became something of a refrain for the rest of the event.
Lucas said: there’s circus, and then there’s art. “Circus is random and voyeuristic. What you see on YouTube right now — I call it feeding Christians to the lions. The movie term is, throwing puppies on a freeway. You don’t have to write anything or do anything — you just have to sit there, and it’s interesting. Like American Idol. Just put a camera on your neighbor’s window and see what happens. Then you get to art — where a particular person contrives a situation and tells a story, and hopefully that story reveals a truth behind the facts. With voyeurism all you’re getting is the facts.”
Lucas is a brilliant man who has told some great stories in his day. And I think he intended to defend the enterprise of making art, which we can always applaud. But with this generalization he has cast a great slur on the circus world.
I spent several years of my life as a working theater critic in San Francisco during the heyday of what was once known as New Vaudeville; I witnessed the work of pioneering Bay Area institutions like the Pickle Family Circus and saw the rise of “new circus” institutions like the Cirque du Soleil. And I do not think it’s going out on a limb to say that George Lucas is dead wrong in defining circus and art as opposites.
Circus is art. It doesn’t “just happen.” The people who perform in it spend years or lifetimes perfecting their skills.
Lucas, perhaps, really meant “sideshow” — where they used to put the freaks and the mutant animals and the geeks who would bite the heads off animals. In that sense, sure, YouTube is often a sideshow.
The videos Steve Jobs highlighted as he showed off AppleTV’s new YouTube connection were, essentially, sideshows. Mentos in Coke is sideshow. The “human slingshot” is sideshow.
But surprisingly often, YouTube is art. And when you experience a really great circus performance you encounter a kind of truth, too.
[tags]george lucas, d5, d conference, circus, youtube[/tags]
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Mentos in Coke didn’t just happen either. Do you really think those guys pulled it off on the first take? Yes, there is a certain amount of do-it-yourself vibe to it, and they probably haven’t been perfecting their act for years, but that’s just a matter of degree.
I think it’s more of a variety show. You have acts that good, bad, or indifferent, with no overall story connecting them.
From the context you’ve quoted above it looks like the word circus was meant in the Roman, Circus Maximus, sense.
Say you’ve downloaded Cars from iTunes. Instead of watching it on your computer, wirelessly sync the flick to Apple TV.Then pull up a seat, put up your feet, and play your movie on TV. Give yourself a hand: You’ve just changed theway you watch digital media.
http://www.mp4-converter.net/apple-tv-converter/