The Constraint Theory
There's a well-known belief about art; most famously expressed by Orson Welles: "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations."
I've been a believer since the very first time I encountered it. And it makes sense, intuitively. Everyone believes it, really.
But what if it's wrong?
The number of people who can create art without limitations is extremely small. The number of people who have constraints? enormous. In film, for example, there are a few directors who have this opportunity, and because they have the highest profile, their work is guaranteed to always be shown and to be judged against their budget. It's a higher bar.
In contrast, low-budget filmmakers, of which there are legions, might make something terrible that either never gets distributed or barely makes a ripple in the pond if it does. The level of scrutiny is so much lower. People forget about them, skewing the numbers, but they never forget the big budget disaster.
Sometimes, though, they're wrong.
One of the most famous tales of no-constraint filmmaking is Michael Cimino's Heavens Gate. It was destroyed by critics in its two hours and twenty-nine minute release version. It was continually held up as the perfect example of no-constraint art and how it fails.
About ten years ago, I saw the Director's Cut, which is three hours and thirty-nine minutes long. In high resolution, on a large OLED television. I watched it in one sitting.
It's a masterpiece.
It's beautiful, it's poignant, and it hits you in the gut repeatedly. It's an incredible film.
In music, The Beatles had an unlimited budget for every album from Sgt. Pepper onwards. Sure, they're the Beatles, but the quality of their output didn't drop even when they were printing money.
There are a ton of counter-examples, of course, but my point is that some of the most powerful art IS created without essentially any constraints, and our belief that it can't, by definition, be any good is misleading at best and harmful to our understanding of art at worst.
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