Camille Paglia, George Lucas, & the Work of Art

Thanks to my beautiful friend Joy Harris who told me about this article. Time to pull out my own writings on this and dust them off.

Who is the greatest artist of our time? Normally, we would look to literature and the fine arts to make that judgment. But Pop Art’s happy marriage to commercial mass media marked the end of an era. The supreme artists of the half century following Jackson Pollock were not painters but innovators who had embraced technology—such as the film director Ingmar Bergman and the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. During the decades bridging the 20th and 21st centuries, as the fine arts steadily shrank in visibility and importance, only one cultural figure had the pioneering boldness and world impact that we associate with the early masters of avant-garde modernism: George Lucas, an epic filmmaker who turned dazzling new technology into an expressive personal genre.

via Why George Lucas Is the Greatest Artist of Our Time – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.