Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson
Stephen Michael Erickson, pen name Steve Erickson, is an American novelist, essayist and critic. He is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, and is considered an important representative of the Avantpop movement...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 April 1950
CountryUnited States of America
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When people start yammering about artistic responsibility, artists become wary. The subtext of such talk is that the arts need to be regulated, which is to say censored.
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Condemning art as manipulative is a non sequitur, of course. All art is manipulative.
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The notion of artistic responsibility begs questions with no satisfactory conclusions, the most inevitable and ineffectual being that we should just keep thinking and talking about it, given that the alternative - a governmental body monitoring the movies we make and see - is unacceptable.
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Pablo Picasso, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Mel Gibson, Lou Reed, Norman Mailer, Vanessa Redgrave, Van Morrison - each is distinguished by controversies unrelated to his or her art; by many accounts, some of them are not nice people at all.
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For thousands of years, we've insisted that art can make us better people. Unless a brief can be fashioned that, by its very nature, art appeals only to the best in people and never the darkness, which defies both logic and intuition, then we have to acknowledge that art can make some of us worse.
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'Homeland' was a sensation out of the gate in 2011, gathering acclaim and sweeping up Emmys, and the reason such shows are so overrated is because, unlike with other forms of popular art, success in TV is measured almost purely by how obsessive we become.
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Among the mysteries of the creative ego is how the transcendence of what artists do is their own response to the darkness of who they are, and the same personal darkness that is at odds with the art is what propels artists to the light of what they create.
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It was visible across probably a third of the sky, probably from Burns Hole to Muddy Pass. It looked like fireworks. When it separated, it had color to it.
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I've decided 'Breaking Bad' may be one of the best TV shows ever, but I had to watch every last episode of the first four seasons to come to that conclusion.
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The witch-hunting McCarthy era found Hollywood's view of the press growing bleaker along with the decade's view of everything else.
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The ritual of families watching TV together passed into antiquity around the time I was my son's age; that was when households tended to have a single television and when the choices of what to watch were manageable.
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Escapism always has its place, but when movies connect to other things around us and suggest implications that haven't been considered before, that's a dividend, too, even when our love of movies becomes complicated as a result.
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Scarlett Johansson has a smile she tries to suppress in every movie she makes. She's been trying to keep a straight face since she appeared with Bill Murray 11 years ago in her breakthrough, 'Lost in Translation.'
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Quentin Tarantino is my 15-year-old son's favorite director, and by that I mean no condescension to either Tarantino or my 15-year-old son.