is claim a character is one of the greatest songwriters/poets/artists/etc of all time, or claim some work of art is the most legendary thing to ever be made, found the greatest work of art ever, and then they post that poem or song or speech or painting or whatever and it's
middling at best, often just flat out bad
it's just the worst feeling. it makes the entire story feel fake, as if everyone in it can only aspire to this level of bad taste lol
so what are some examples where you think the author actually DID create art that holds up to it's legendary description? it actually IS as good as the story claims, this play DOES sound compelling enough to drive humanity insane, this painting COULD sell for 200 billion dollars, this poem COULD cause an entire alien race to decide on love instead of war or whatever the story wants?
This is kind of a weird example, but I think "Boy With Apple" in The Grand Budapest Hotel and Moses Rosenthaler's paintings in The French Dispatch get away with this even though the paintings in question aren't the greatest works of art in the world. I think it works for a couple reasons. Firstly, they're kind of played for laughs. I remember reading an interview with the painter who designed "Boy With Apple" saying he intentionally made it a little goofy-looking, and there's that one line Gustave says about how everything else the painter created was junk. Meanwhile in The French Dispatch you have that first scene where Rosenthaler is intently studying his model while he paints, making very deliberate strokes on the canvas as he studies her body, only for it to be revealed at the end that it's been an abstract, Jackson Pollock-y painting this whole time. Secondly, the worlds in those movies are so well realized and the characters so well thought-out that it's easy to believe these people would like these paintings, even if you yourself do not. I believe wholeheartedly that these artworks could be important pieces of art history in the worlds of their respective films. Even in our world, I could definitely see rich people like Dmitri of the Desgoffe-und-Taxis family or Cadazio the art dealer1 making a huge fuss over "Boy With Apple" or "Simone, Cell Block J," even though I myself would not. I think the lesson here is that if your story centers around a work of art that everyone likes, not only do you need to make the artwork pretty good, but you also need to make sure your characters are very obviously the kinds of people who would go nuts for stuff like that.
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Both Adrien Brody characters, funnily enough.
