I have finally found the time to watch the new arty horror movie Velvet Buzzsaw. The trailer, like the whole movie, really intrigued me in the first half — until badly executed demonic powers started killing people — from there it kinda went downhill …

But the point I got from it was really interesting and I decided to share my thoughts, as it pertains to the core of my beliefs about what art is about and how it affects us at the centre of our being.

In 1973, Ernest Becker, a renowned and quirky philosopher and anthropologist from America, wrote his last book The Denial of Death. More or less an academic outcast for the last 10 years of his life, his work described a wonderfully written point: The core function of the stories we tell about ourselves and our culture (Freudians would call these the Ego and Superego), are put in place by our minds to guard us from the biggest, most scariest truths of all: 

We’re all going to die.

Now, as macabre and dramatic as this sounds, it’s actually written is a hearty and quite positive manner; while the book is obviously the work of an academic and written with the expectation that the reader has some prior knowledge of sociology, philosophy (especially Freudian thought), it isn’t the dense cluster of overly-complicated words that many books on such topics can be.

But let’s get back to the point of the book and how well I think the movie’s concept tried to show it. And failed in its execution.

The whole movie is a wonderful depiction of the internal workings of the art world; from political pressures that public and private museums face from powerful collectors and other art world individuals to just the nastiness of the art business — where once popular superstar artists are thrown away, used more as pebbles to pave the way of their agent’s road to success than being given genuine and sincere support to foster their careers and mental wellbeing.

Then, after the paintings of the deceased troubled master-painter Dease begin to kill people, the real message of the movie starts to unfold. 

Art is one of the highest forms of storytelling known to man. Somewhere close by are religion and culture and political ideologies like socialism, communism, nazism — all intertwined into the fabric of our society. 

So if one would believe what Becker wrote in his book — namely that stories guard us from the reality of being mortal — all these areas of storytelling function exactly with such intentions. And we can see that there really is a lot of truth to this.

Religion guards us from death by making-up stories of an afterlife, ideologies do the same by promising utopias and finding some central foe — be it terrorism, immigration, Russia, America etc. — that has to be conquered for such utopian dreams to come true. 

Culture works the same way: We burry the dead to say goodbye, we have seances to try to speak to our deceased loved ones — even though deep inside we might all know that there is nothing else we can do, to actually communicate with them when they pass away.

But art is especially exceptional in its power to embody such stories — especially in today’s evermore atheist society.

The narratives of religion, ideology and culture can be understandable only if you believe in their main story — that is the main dogmas of whatever religion, culture or ideology you might belong to. 

But art, art doesn’t need you to believe any story. You can be a full-blown evolution-backed, Richard-Dawkins-reading atheist when it comes down to your tastes, and you can still appreciate art and the story it tells you.

So the real power of art, and possibly one of the bigger reasons of why it works so well and consequently sells so well in today’s society (apart from money laundering) is primarily connected to the fact, that we don’t need to believe in invisible people or magical oil lamps to be able to still enter the mystical world that art can create for us.

When looking at a Rothko for example (this goes for most abstract expressionist works), you can immerse your vision into the enormous colourfield that is in front of you. And if you give yourself time, space and peace (probably not something one can do in a museum or gallery), you may just experience something, that could as well be called the sublime.

You may feel incredibly small, minuscule in the eye of the universe. You may begin to sob, feel absolute joy, you may also feel a deep, dark void inside of your being, something left unnurtured for too long, just hungering for attention.

Or you may feel nothing at all.

Art is a tool. And if properly used, it can produce changes in our physical and mental states with such intensity as almost nothing else in the world. But it can just be used to decorate an apartment. The same goes for iPhones too. 

You could use yours for writing a book, making YouTube videos, making a Podcast and calculating your taxes. Or you could just look at what other people ate that day and maybe a cat video here and there.

Art is also a tool of power. The power to buy a 60 million euro painting, the power to control people’s tastes and decisions. And ultimately the power to create a narrative of personal immortality. All these topics are presented in the film, albeit with a twist: in Velvet Buzzsaw, art actually does the absolute opposite — it kills people.

This twist in what art can be, I believe, is what the creators of the movie wished would guide the viewers towards the truth of what art can actually do. And they might have failed (I don’t think the movie is campy enough to ever be regarded as good because of being bad — unlike The Room by Tommy Wiseau) but I did appreciate Dan Gilroy’s vision in making the film.

In the end, art is subjective and what it gives to us is absolutely dependant upon what we are prepared to receive — even if that thing is “just” a soothing lie about our immortality.