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All art is entirely subjective and viewed through the eye of the beholder, and Stanley Kubrick did not care for what he saw the world becoming in the early 1970s.
As a master craftsman in his own discipline, the filmmaker had a distinct outlook and perspective that informed his own movies, but he was happy to cast his gaze beyond the confines of the silver screen to denigrate what modern art had become.
The period is generally regarded as having spanned from the 1960s through to the decade Kubrick made his comments, so it was firmly on the way out when the masterful auteur behind 2001: A Space Odyssey and Paths of Glory offered his withering assessment.
The 1960s and ’70s, in particular, gave rise to a number of radical new offshoots, many of which were popularised in the United States. The post-war period instigated abstract expressionism, conceptual art, pop art, minimalism, photorealism, performance art, installations, and performances, with that ability to create in so many different ways, evidently rubbing the auteur the wrong way.
“I think modern art’s almost total pre-occupation with subjectivism has led to anarchy and sterility in the arts,” he explained to Michael Ciment. “The notion that reality exists only in the artist’s mind, and that the thing which simpler souls had for so long believed to be reality is only an illusion, was initially an invigorating force, but it eventually led to a lot of highly original, very personal and extremely uninteresting work.”
In Kubrick’s estimation, artists of the time were creating and curating works that, while personal, didn’t hold much appeal beyond that. He wanted to see art that would transcend boundaries and barriers, which was in short supply. Paraphrasing Jean Cocteau’s 1950 classic Orpheus, he wanted modern art to “astonish” him.
“Very little of modern art does that,” he lamented. “Certainly not in the sense that a great work of art can make you wonder how its creation was accomplished by a mere mortal.” Comparing it to his own line of work, Kubrick suggested that “films, unfortunately, don’t have this problem at all.”
He saw celluloid as having “played it as safe as possible” since the advent of the medium, suggesting that “no one can blame the generally dull state of the movies on too much originality and subjectivism.” What began with a shot fired across the bows of the art world eventually circled back to the current state of cinema, and it turned out Kubrick wasn’t a fan of that, either.
Fortunately, he wasn’t in the business of making dull films, taking it upon himself to shoulder the self-perceived burden and ensure the art he was creating lived up to the ideals he championed.
