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.
