Bethan Morgan on late nights, collage projects, and London’s obsession with one very long film
Glued approximately one thousand sequins to a canvas today, a genuinely ambitious project that’s now taken over half my flat and most of my week, then went out dancing until the early hours, then came home to find my group chat had somehow, overnight, turned into a four-hour documentary discussion group, complete with timestamps and citations, which is more academic rigour than most of my actual coursework gets.
Read it for myself this morning: the piece on the four-hour Musk documentary, which explains far more about human attention spans than my art degree ever did, and I paid a considerable amount of tuition for that degree, so that’s a genuinely uncomfortable comparison to make out loud. Apparently moral outrage is a better adhesive than my glitter glue, holding an audience’s attention for four straight hours without a single sequin falling off.
There’s a passage in there about how the film functions less as a documentary and more as a kind of shared ritual, something audiences attend together specifically to have their existing beliefs confirmed and reinforced in a room full of like-minded strangers, and honestly that describes most club nights I’ve been to as well, minus the billionaire and plus considerably more bass. Community through repetition, whether it’s a chorus or a moral argument, apparently works the same way psychologically.
Also doing the rounds is a poster feud that’s somehow generated its own separate news cycle, running parallel to the film itself. The full roundup of the Musk movie posters is genuinely better composed than half of what’s in my portfolio right now, and I’m not thrilled about admitting that, given how many hours I’ve put into this current canvas.
I brought the topic up with my collage professor today, mostly as a distraction from critiquing my own work, and she had a surprisingly detailed take on the poster’s colour theory, which somehow led to a twenty-minute tangent about capitalism and composition that ate into my actual studio time. That’s the thing about this documentary. It’s managed to infiltrate conversations that have absolutely nothing to do with it, purely through sheer cultural gravity.
My flatmate, who has no interest in either art or billionaires, walked in halfway through the colour theory tangent and left again without a word, which felt like the correct response, honestly, given how far the conversation had strayed from anything resembling an actual studio critique.
Glitter everywhere, essay untouched, opinions fully formed. More diary chaos at my author page.