Being a successful artist today, means also being a celebrity. Charisma and media sensibility (lasciviously) as well as a smooth talk, can be very fruitful; just as always has been the case with movie actors. In the post modern age (?) personal views and rebellion, even avant-gardism, is no longer disputable, or rather, not as threatening as before. This makes it easy to plan a career in the art business and to setup a network with agents, who'll "casts" the artist at museums and art galleries etc. The post modern artist is now considered to be a culture-preneur, surrounded by assistants and servants, to brush and shoot him up in a mutual beneficiary agreement of succes. Art making will in many circumstances be a cooperative undertaking, with similar conditions as in film making - viewed from the practice of the film director. This will again make film (and entertainment business) the precursor of this typical approach to art: the culture-preneur.

Apart from art undertaking, also with respect to content there are similarities with film making. Many works of Andy Warhol for instance can be considered as cinematographic induced imagery. Of course the 'magazine adds' have been equally important as a well, but the coloration is closer to film than it is to printed artwork. (partly one of the intrinsic properties of silk screening) The 'crash' series from 1963 however are very much looking like individual film stills pasted next to each other and top down on a board (a canvas actually). There's in fact no motion involved, but rather the changes between the individual pictures makes these works dynamic. Warhol actually did some cinematographic projects and even the celebrities from Hollywood are a centrepiece in his work. Like mags and newspapers, film (and TV as it's electronic counterpart) is also a popular medium and the influence on pop art must have been important. 
 
Maybe it isn't bold to state that an important extension on techniques available such as the 'collage' was indeed fixed motion (or dynamics) directly emerged from cinematography. The importance - and influence on modern art - of pre cinematographers as Jules Etiènne Marey and Edward Muybridge is unquestionable. 
 
Experimental film is no exception with regards to the (mutual) influence from popular cinema and at later stages in the age of modern art video has been introduced as a new technique and means for making works of art, some of which are merely formal but increasingly cinematographic and meanwhile replacing film in artistic cinema. Now, at the end of the 20th century, where several artists - in painting, sculpting as well as in media art and performance art having a preference for themes as violence, death and crime, (pathetism: 'pathetic art' according to Ralph Rugoff; 1991) - the same cinematographic influence (as the cinema of today is heavily preoccupied with crime and conspiracy and the extreme violence as a result of that) is very likely.

The preoccupation with violence is also apparent in the phenomenon of video games, some of which are extremely creative in both technological and artistic respect. These video games themselves are clearly - sometimes confirmed to be - influenced by cinematography, but in turn inspiring (young) artists to work with new media and any other suitable medium alike. Recently a revival of animation film and specifically the cartoon, against all odds, - partly due to modern computer aided animation - developed new means to the creation of content and aesthetics of the cartoon animation film. A closer examination of some of these productions ('Cow and Chicken', 'Dexter' etc.) reveals once again the usual violence, but also profound creativity and delightful absurdity, stranger, because it's aimed at children... (or isn't it?). 

Perhaps these expressions of popular culture have many aspects of works of art, being art, macro emotive and even more profound than so called 'high quality' (traditional) art. 
 
BACK