Saturday 26th December 2015
Shia LaBeouf has a very complicated relationship with the art world. The actor, probably best known for his roles in the Transformers series and the latest (and arguably worst) iteration of the Indiana Jones series, has been struggling with what he regards as his fall from grace, although there may be some debate among film critics as to whether or not this term really applies. He's been running a series of performance art pieces ever since then, with a wildly varying degree of success in the public and critical perception.
His latest project is apparently a performance art piece, although the performances in question aren't exactly new ones. Instead, LaBeouf spent three solid days in a movie theatre, watching all of the movies he's ever performed in in a giant marathon session. Anyone was welcome to join him for free in the theatre for the entire performance of his collected works, which total a rather surprising 58 straight hours of film. Yes, there were no breaks whatsoever. To cap it all off, the entire thing was livestreamed - but not the movies, rather the stream was focused on LaBeouf himself, so the entire world could watch his reactions (as you can see from the photo we used here, courtesy of NewHive). The entire thing was wrapped under the Twitter hashtag #ALLMYMOVIES, reminiscent of his #IAMSORRY project from earlier this year.
So the real question, of course, is whether or not this is really art. It could be, depending on how you feel about his movies and his general Hollywood presence as a celebrity, or it could be regarded as a juvenile attempt to stay relevant in an industry where he is being taken less and less seriously as an actor. We actually can't decide how we feel about it, to be completely honest. It sort of conjures up memories of Joaquin Phoenix's bizarre concept work for the Casey Affleck film 'I'm Still Here', which chronicled Phoenix's supposed (yet faked) retirement from acting to take up a rap career. But until someone jumps out of the woodwork to shout BOO, we're not entirely sure which way the whole Shia situation could go.
Regardless, we're going to give him what he wants in our next post, as we take a slightly more lighthearted tone than usual in our last Artist Spotlight of the year, in which we'll be examining the merits and pitfalls of the artistic career of Shia LaBeouf.
Posted on December 26th 2015 on 02:38pm
