simultaneously, but by people alone or in fairly small groups and scattered
across millions of different locations. These dissimilarities set up quite dif-
ferent possibilities for artistic representation, expression, and formal
achievement in these two media. It seems more natural to expect coherent
plot closure from a movie that one may well see only once, just as one expects
closure in a traditional play. (Movies, of course, have possibilities of close-ups,
tracking and traveling shots, multiple points of view, dissolves, cuts, use of
landscape, etc., that are closed to plays, while plays can rely on the bodily
presence of actors and on their action“in the moment”on different occa-
sions of performance in ways that movies cannot.) In contrast, both the
situation comedy and the ensemble drama have developed on television as
natural ways of investigating shifting relations among characters whom we
continue as an audience to visit week after week for whatever the natural life
of a series (five or more years if very successful) turns out to be.^86
In all practices of contemporary art, a great deal is a matter of experimen-
tation, contestation, and interaction with other artistic practices and with
the wider phenomena of social life. The traditional practices of“high”art
either make use of the vernacular or they shun it and turn toward self-
enclosure and modernist hermeticism (or both). Practices of mass and popu-
lar art are either dominated by commerce or more responsive to the artistic
imperative to present a subject matter as a focus for thought and emotional
attitude, distinctively fused to the imaginative exploration of material (or
both). New technologies invite and enable the continuation of traditional
aesthetic affirmation by other means or its transformation into intellectual-
ism, provocation, advertising, or social commentary (or all of this at once).
Throughout all this experimentation, contestation, and interaction both
with other art practices and with the wider culture, a central issue remains
how to balance and blend some measure of vernacularism with some meas-
ure of formal constructivism. Without vernacularism, purely formal, con-
structive works of art become artificial, intellectual constructions. Without
distinctively worked through formal construction that is both innovative and
absorbing, vernacular works become in one way or another utilititarian:
politicized or commercial or self-aggrandizing, among many other
possibilities.(^86) See Ted Cohen,“Television: Contemporary Thought,”in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics,
ed. Kelly, vol. IV, pp. 369–70.
282 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art