The decline of art...

"The artist cannot, and has no right to, lower himself to some abstract, standardised level for the sake of a misconstrued notion of greater accessibility and understanding. If he did, it could only lead to the decline of art... Marx said, 'If you want to enjoy art, you must be artistically educated.' The artist cannot make a specific aim of being understandable - it would be quite as absurd as its opposite: trying to be incomprehensible."

Andrei Tarkovsky in Sculpting in TimeI totally agree with this quote above. But in reality, filmmakers (especially for the mainstream cinema) are facing a big dilemma as they don't want to lose their audiences who are mostly not artistically educated while they are also trying to be faithful to themselves. It is especially important when you consider that the cost of filmmaking is not like purchasing an apple in a supermarket, the success of  a filmmaker depends highly on how he is able to gain the trust of the people who would make an investment, and sadly these people are usually the ones who need to be artistically educated most.

Nowdays more and more films are made for the sake of the general audiences rather than for art itself. I want to believe that there is only the distinction of a good and bad film, but somehow, in today's world of filmmaking, it is sad but true that a lot of filmmakers are trying to (or are forced to) accomodate instead of remaining faithful to their artistic visions in order to keep themselves working or surviving.

Look at our films and our TV drama today, the use of cinematic languages are so dry and hackneyed, the filmmakers are accustomed to repeating the successful formula, and the audiences are getting used to see what they expect to see, their emotions are getting ready to be driven by what they expect to experience. If they see something they are not familiar with, they just tend to show resistence (e.g. sleep during a rather slow-pacing film, or if they see something unusual, they refuse to think or decipher the meaning of a film and quickly draw to an easy conclusion that thie film is incomprehensible). The problem now is that both the filmmakers and audiences just seem to be too lazy to explore different ways to appreciate the art of filmmaking.

The result of a easy but lazy and backward approach in both making and watching films is that, it is eventually leading to the decline of art!

p.s. certainly, the "filmmakers" mentioned above don't include the artistically vibrant group here on AnD...