Geisha more than pretty

I have read a few reviews of ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ which basically describe the film as pretty, but lacking substance. I have to disagree here. What I think has happened is something we have seen in the various fields of art for some time. Cubism, for example, was to a certain degree a reaction to the advent of photography. Why bother to paint something exactly as it is when you can just take a picture? There were other factors of course, but artists like Picasso and Brach were no longer interested in painting lovely, pretty things, and became drawn to what initially appear to be grotesque distortions of the world.
Art that was pretty was for a time looked down upon, as though a serious artist would not lower himself to the mundanity of beautiful brush strokes. Have we perhaps accepted this as a kind of truth in the art world? Paintings which are shocking and raw and “ugly” have more artistic value? It reminds me of Charlize Theron’s Oscar for ‘Monster.’ She is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful and talented actresses, and I wonder how much attention she received because she was made up to be unattractive in the film. She must be doing something right if she is so ugly. Or so it would seem.
I am not at all saying it is wrong to see the artistic value in raw, ‘real,’ even grotesque art: I simply suggest that it is not necessarily so.
‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ is indeed pretty, but I found much more to it than that. It’s like the old saying “Not all that glitters is gold” – indeed, but just because it glitters, doesn’t mean it’s not.