The 10th Muse: Dick Wolf

I love Law and Order. I love Law and order: Special Victims Unit too. ( I do not like Law and Order: Criminal Intent. AS much as I love Vincent Donofrio as a souped up, more attractive and importantly realistic Columbo type character, that show just lacks something like, uh, drama and suspense for me. I digress.) Well courtesy of metafilter ( those guys are the freakin' best- Side note-does anyone know how I might be able to change my blog to movable type so that I can use the trackback on metafilter? Please?) I present to you Law and Order: Artistic Intent.

Some of the art is fairly crappy ( "Briscoeteque" and "Lennie Grabs a Dog" are both fairly lame), but there is the very fun Law and Order coloring book. Brandon Bird, the organizer and a contributor, also organized a show based on Edward Norton. Again much of the art is lame or just plain unpenetrable (see "Timid Angel" or "Fenestrated Norton") but some of the work, in particular the not too creatively named "Many faces of Ed Norton", is interesting. The many faces piece does have relevance to my shattered identity post. Indeed, being an actor to some degree means that having a shattered ego is almost a job requirement. Perhaps the increase in my fracture self has to do with my abadonment of acting and fiction writing. Perhaps these pursuits were in fact theraputic outlets for the alternative selves to find some form of expression in a healthy way.

Although art has often times been inspired by popular forms of expression ( think of all those Moulin Rouge paintings), I'm not sure about these works being "real" art. Too many of them seem like they are one step below Elvis on velvet. There doesn't seem to be any thought or deeper meaning to them with a few exceptions. ( "Lennie Briscoe and the Immaterial Witness" is one of the few that at least made me sit and think-think about what I leave you to judge.) So I guess I'm posting just because I'm interested in if fan art can BECOME art in general or if it is simply doomed to be forgotten.

One of the things I taught my kids two years ago, when I had to teach Dante's Inferno, is that making references to contemporary figures pretty much dates your work. For example, most of my kids don't get the references in the book American Psycho. They have never heard of Genesis or Huey Lewis and the News. Ellis, although he wrote a book that has been radical misinterpreted ( much like Natural Born Killers) to simply be in praise of violence, was trying to suggest that in a culture that is so focused on material wealth, human life becomes a cheap commodity. Essentially he was, to some degress, arguing that capitalism breeds murderers, particularly yuppie murderers. The existence of the "Billionaire Boys Club" and the variety of men who were dubbed "yuppie rapists" or "yuppie murderers" ( of which, I believe the Unicorn killer Ira Einhorn might be considered) might be considered as evidence.

In the end, it just a fun link that I'm trying to justify by yabbering on about universality and "dated" contemporary references.