Adam Curtis with an endorsement of narrative

Here is Adam Curtis,  in an interview, putting forth an endorsement of narrative, as well as expressing some sort of dislike for of what he calls 'the art lot'

"You need a story to tell us. There was a very good piece in The New York Times about Obama recently, which was saying that his real problem is that he hasn’t got a story to tell people. A narrative. People need big stories, as a journalist I know this. You need to say upfront: “This is the story.” 

"A lot of the art lot just think it’s enough to put things next to each other without commenting. I think that’s lazy. I think that you have to put things in a context and make sense of it and then it becomes like a rich novel with digressions."  

-When you say “the art lot,” who are you talking about?
People who make art! For some unknown reason they’ve decided they like me and I’m always incredibly rude to them. This goes back to my fear of Chris Marker, that there’s another way of portraying the world, which I don’t understand because I have a deep, almost nerdy, desire to explain. To fill up every space I can with me yakking, right? Or deliberately putting things together to say something. Which is the journalist. Which is what I am. Whereas the art lot have another way of portraying the world, which they would call ambiguous because they say the world is ambiguous. I understand it, but I would never know how to do it. 

-But they also have a problem with narrative.
They don’t do narrative. They say that narrative is a prison because it constricts you and it leads you to one way of thinking and people like me go too much like that and tell you what to think. Whereas what they do is they allow you space to think. Now, of course, as a journalist I go, “Come on!” But actually they’re probably right. The liberal in me is going, “Well, we can both coexist,” but for the moment they’ve taken a liking to me. They’re a fickle lot and they’ll probably go off me tomorrow. I don’t know what I’m going to talk to Frieze about. Not about art. The BFI have asked me to do a thing live as well in January or February, which I might do. They came to me and said, “Could you do your blog live on stage?” Do you think that’s a good idea? 

. . . The other thing I learnt from the art lot is that really slowed-down footage is great.

Idea from presentation leading on to enquiry for my extended essay

In my presentation I wanted to touch on the connection between satire and illustrations produced utilising the form and language of maps.  I was worried about the idea that obvious surface exploration of the absurdities of maps, can miss opportunities for a deeper utilisation of the satirical function.

 I ran out of time to make this point on the day, but for my preparations I wrote down this  statement;

"For me this is one trouble for artists or Illustrators; the absurd can not easily be utilised in order to highlight any greater truth because in our time it can already be understood in plain sight and to an extent is excepted as normal. Exposing such absurdities often only highlights what our world is already limited to, It hits the brick wall of this simple and expected absurd of our times, satire can no longer surprise and shock as it maybe once could, no light can shine past to greater truths."

This is what I wrote,  it's a bit out of context and rubbish I'm not going to include it in my final essay;

A classical view of satire would be that it is a set of tools utilised within the arts in order to hold up to ridicule vices, abuses and the shortcomings of institutions or individuals who may be held to be responsible for negative or corrupt social practice. The aim of satire we would assume is to bring about improvement. A point to consider however as stated by Northrop Frye  is that "in satire, irony is militant." This "militant irony" (or sarcasm) often professes to approve (or at least accept as natural) the very things the satirist actually wishes to attack. With reference to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’  I want to explore the view that all products and working methods of artists and image-makers is inescapably co-opted into the mainstream. It has come to be seen that any intentions that the creative practitioners might of had to break free from or to satirise the mainstream is irrelevant to a process of total assimilation, aided by the powerful force of free-market capitalism.

In light of this view, I will argue that satire need not only be seen to act as a cyclical device of a self-regulating establishment. It is on a secondary level I want to identify the ability of satire to expose new ways of looking and thinking into places the artist and the audience have not predicted. If the tools of satire on the first level exist in the realm of cynicism; irony and sarcasm I would also identify that on a deeper level parody, exaggeration, juxtaposition, analogy and comparison are utilised. I intend to make the argument that these secondary tools can operate covertly masked within the trojan horse of the primary function of satire. Utilising patternmaking and abstraction at the level of aesthetic form, language and narrative these secondary functions can suggest;  ‘Have you ever looked at things this way’ alongside and perhaps subliminal to the primary and negated function of satire; ‘Look at this wrong thing this way, its wrong’

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The work Saul Steinberg would be a good example of the type of practice I am trying to propose in this statement "covertly masked within the trojan horse of the primary function of satire". Steinberg is  very definitely a ‘Have you ever looked at things this way?’  type of artist.