Believe this: Centaur for the Arts is dedicated to defending all crises' that face the arts, and, in the opinion of his creators, today's popular cinema faces a severe challenge to its legitimacy as an art form. This challenge comes in the form of Hollywood's cookie-cutter approach to producing films that eschew invention and originality for convention and stagnation. But Centaur for the Arts does not suggest a positive alternative to the paucity of new ideas in popular entertainment. Quite the opposite: this comic strip embraces what Jean Baudrillard calls "the deepening of negative conditions" by taking the cookie-cutter approach to an absolute extreme.
Briefly, here's the method behind our madness: we take an upcoming popular film, watch nothing of it beyond its 30-second trailer, and reduce it down to the following, always recurring, bare minimum:
1. protagonist (CFTA)
2. antagonist/comic relief (always Martin Lawrence)
3. conflict (with "the Arts" substituted as the direct object)
4. breasts
We feel that, 99 times out of 100, we can say in nine panels with a skeletal framework exactly what most films take 2 hours and 10 dollars of your money to say.
And we also think the Centaur's tiny human penis is really funny. Hope you enjoy it (the comic strip, not the tiny human penis).
Robert Albanese and Gavin Castleton, October 2004

back