JMS: Arc a Fake?

 Posted on 5/11/1996 by J. Michael Straczynski <71016.1644@compuserve.com> to CIS


Rebecca Eschliman <76072.2345@compuserve.com> asks:
> Don't we have here a really good example of the Heisenberg
> Uncertainty Principle shifted from the laboratory to the
> storytelling platform? Are you ever astonished at the
> interpretations applied like a varnish over the story as you see
> it?

Yes, I'm often intrigued -- don't know if I'd say astonished --
at how the story is sometimes interpreted. But that's the interactive
part of the process, what the viewer takes away is sometimes only
indirectly the result of what's actually *there*. Take modern art for
a moment. You show me a white canvas broken only by a single red dot
in the lower left hand corner, I see a single red dot in the lower left
hand corner of a white canvas, nod and walk away...somebody else takes
a look at it, and sees a telling commentary on isolationism and the
Communist scare of the 50s and man's basic inhumanity to man.

Anything that passes for art reflects the work's creator, and
the viewer; it's a mirror that works in two directions, and neither
reflection holds the totality of the work individually. Art happens in
the moments in-between.

jm(could I possibly sound more effete?)s