Now you can see Edvard Munch’s The Scream in ‘film form’, but why would you want to? |
I have always thought the worst thing about paintings is their static nature. That really is the main shortcoming of the form, isn’t it. Mona Lisa is so still. Whistlejacket – that near life-size George Stubbs masterpiece – is unrealistically motionless for a horse. Completely unbelievable for the famously jittery creatures. And the one thing that Edgar Degas clearly did not understand about ballerinas is that they’re supposed to dance, not just stand there in functional rigor mortis.
We have the technology to create moving images now – the movies, duh – so why bother look at all this leaden canvas weighed down with oil paint, blobby and lifeless?
Well, thank goodness for the people down at Imaginae Studios and their Art Awakens project: now you can watch Edvard Munch’s The Scream in “film form”, three minutes of the tortured figure – all blue and abstracted and AI – walking under that burnt orange sky until finally contorting into the painting’s final form. The hand-on-face, melodramatic scream we all recognise.
Talk about a solution to a problem that never existed. Or an answer to a question that no one asked. But don’t worry: there is far more of where that came from. Next on the hit list is Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. And if the listless, isolated despair of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks doesn’t quite do it for you, don’t........