Artsy-fartsy in the best possible way

Lee Siegel's television column at TNR has always struck me as eloquently written, occassionally on-target and, for whatever reason, not particularly compelling. Maybe it's that I confine the majority of my television viewing to Law & Order sponsored afternoon naps and a few select shows (Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, 24), but his column rarely sparks my interest in a way that motivates me to actually tune in and seeing whatever show he's talking about. On the other hand, his newish slideshow-based art column at Slate is magnificent. Headier and generally more academic than either his TV writing or pretty much anything else on Slate, it's not just a thrill to read, it's criticism that really energizes me to find out more about his subjects even though my knowledge of fine art is fairly limited.

In the case of his most recent column on Pixar, I'll admit to being fairly well-versed on the work of our era's foremost animation geniuses, but his essay is a delight anyway.

As you follow the mechanics of telling an animated story, you can see why intelligent cartoons might well displace literary fiction. When we disparage a poorly developed character in a novel by calling him a "cartoon," we're saying that he's too general and abstract to be believable as a person. But the generality of a complicatedly scripted animated figure has the reverse effect. As the character deepens from type into a concrete figure, symbolic and specific meanings fuse. Novelists have become increasingly self-conscious about psychological categories. Cartoons, however, offer an evocative externality. The viewer supplies the interiority himself—out of his own.

Siegel's willingness to broach these topics in a weighty, relatively high-minded way alone makes it worth reading. While I dearly love Edelstein's pop-crit wit and the educated snark of Dana Stevens (a writer who actually makes me interested in the TV she writes about), Siegel's clear-but-substantive approach appeals to the same part of me that loved comparing Beckett, Brecht and Abramovic in college. Add this to Slate's recent addition to their movie coverage, the DVD Extras column, which gives second, and often more out-there, mildly obscurantist looks at films after they've had a few months to digest, and Slate (even without dearest Edelstein), has the best set of media critics in the business.