AutHAMn Leaves

I don't know if you can do that without it feeling fake. If you used say, the Great Wave or Starry Night or some other art of that magnitude and fame, wouldn't a viewer of our world expect something "more" than that, given the hype around it?

Feels like the best play would be to not show anything at all rather than have a non-expert in a field try to create it.

This is all to say: I got nothin'.

The closest example that comes to mind is that set of haiku in one of the Yakuza games which had never been translated prior to these games coming out.

I think that the best thing they can do is not show you the work, frankly

I would get exactly as weird about The Courier's Tragedy as the people in Crying of Lot 49. I get it. They were right

I would like to read a story where that's an intentional gag! maybe it's a sci-fi and everyone is afflicted with a virus that gives them bad taste.

Nabokov wrote a 1000 line poem for Pale Fire which is at the very least an incredible technical accomplishment and also gave a number of diegetic reasons why people would be clamoring for literary analysis of it regardless of its quality (which I personally think is still pretty damn good).

As already mentioned Pynchon includes excerpts from a fictional revenge play in The Crying of Lot 49 which are extremely weird and fun and also the main character might experiencing paranoid delusions already which makes her sudden obsession with the play make sense in multiple readings.

Children of Paradise is a film that partially revolves around the incredible abilities of the mime Baptiste Deburau and while I have very little reference for how good he is it definitely seems convincing that he's one of the best in the world. The film does a really good job cutting between background shots that reveal parts of the illusion and the audience point of view.

House of Leaves is a clusterfuck of nested art pieces but one reoccurring plot point is how good Navidson is at photography and film. Since the book doesn't actually show any of this but only describes the technical competence in academic terms it means that the reader is welcome to imagine Navidson as charitably or uncharitably as they wish.

Probably the hardest I've seen a movie cheat when trying to pull off a version of this maneuver is in casting Joshua Bell as the violinist who is actually performing the various solos in The Red Violin. Composer John Corigliano's score is certainly effective but it doesn't need to eclipse all other compositions for the film to work. Indeed, as the metronome sequence in the film demonstrates, you can wring a suprahuman performance out of a mere musical exercise, and film has a lot of tricks it can (and does) use to blur the line between composition and performance.

On a goofier note, I would also credit the Diva Dance from The Fifth Element as a high point in "film pays off promise of superlative artist." True, it's as flamboyantly silly as everything else in the film, and 'twas not her music that soothed the savage beasts, but if you've bought into the film up to that point, you're going to feel the same as those in the opera house when the song concludes. But here again, the film can blur the line between performance and composition to pull this off, and I would wager that many fans of that film don't realize, even today, that Lucia di Lammermoor is a pre-existing opera.

As an aside, I feel like Adaptation pretty brilliantly inverts this with its completely bonkers third-act pivot. Sometimes, the only winning move is to do your worst.

Within the fiction of House of Leaves, there is a book, House of Leaves, that is so terrifying and disorienting as to drive people to madness.

Within the fiction of House of Leaves, the fictional House of Leaves is also the real book House of Leaves that the reader is actually reading.

The real book House of Leaves was so terrifying and disorienting as to make me temporarily paranoid and make me feel motion sick while standing still.

everybody says That Thing You Do for this, but they're not wrong

of course you should never depict it

the alternative is that you do depict it, but make it clear that the response is an odd once-in-a-lifetime fad that could never come again

'pet rock'? who'd buy that? 'rubik's cube?' who but dweebs would be interested?

The King in Yellow gets close, even though it relies so much on keeping supposedly the best part in secret