MC Guffee, 9/25

Artists who question the rules "are destined to have little credibility"; "they have no guarantee of an audience"

Lyotard explains that the artist choosing to go against the conventions of society have no clue if their efforts will be a success or fail to catch ground. We also established that art can be extremely effective in transporting ideology. But how can an artist challenge society and cultivate an audience that shares this perspective? When challenging the norms of society, the artist must do so in spectacular form in order to garner emotional and intellectual intrigue from an audience. The avant-gardist is then creatively competing against the conformity of society and therefore, finding an audience is as challenging as it is satisfying once complete. By swaying an audience emotionally, and/or intellectually, an artist can offer a new perspective to which an audience is persuaded to accept.

Film scholar Bill Nichols observes that in society, “dominant values must struggle to remain dominant,” while “Alternative values must struggle to gain legitimacy” (Nichols 2010, 103.) However, in our society today, these dominant values are rapidly reproduced through the extensive media market. Force-feeding a seemingly unconscious audience with the concepts of the majority attempts to supplant a totalizing ideology over a pluralistic domain. The film The Cooler Bandits (2014) challenges the justice system's sentencing of four minorities who robbed restaurants as adolescents and spent over two decades into adulthood contemplating these crimes. Now it is extremely difficult to persuade an audience to undertake this same ideology towards crime, however, John Lucas, the filmmaker behind The Cooler Bandits (2014) expertly pairs a fluctuating pace and precise framing with a variety of perspectives to cultivate the film’s credibility as well as a sense of community between the audience and the Cooler Bandits. Lucas uses film as a medium to critique the just aspect of our justice system and through cinematic techniques and brilliant story structure, he is quite convincing.

In summation, art encourages the most creative artists to push the limits of society to resolve inequalities in societal standards through the spread of their artwork. In the example of John Lucas and The Cooler Bandits (2014) film provided this medium for him to reach a global audience. Lucas used his cinematic expertise for good, but unfortunately, not all artists are held to this standard. This very principle makes artists both incredibly brilliant and potentially dangerous.