Sean Penn and Naomi Watts from "Fair Game," based on former CIA agent Valerie Plame's book

In a rather provocative and fresh article titled “It’s time to stop this obsession with works of art based on real events” in the Guardian yesterday, William Skidelsky argues, well, what the article’s headline says.

Using films such as The King’s Speech and The Social Network, as well as recent Booker winners and nominees such as Hilary Mantel‘s Wolf Hall, Adam Foulds‘s The Quickening Maze, and even Emma Donoghue‘s Room (which you might say is more inspired by recent events than based-on, but I digress), Skidelsky makes the case that, essentially, the culture has gotten too lazy to come up with original ideas. Not only that, he argues that simply trying to stage manage well-known historical figures and put words into their mouths cannot do for us what real fiction is supposed to do. And our aesthetic judgment is suffering gravely from this.

So why are we so interested in exploring the fictional lives of real-life public figures in our art in the first place? Skidelsky asserts that we have come to expect more information about the private lives of public figures due to a shift in the way these figures are covered in the press. The gossip industry has made a sort of currency out of publishing private moments of well-known figures in our culture. (Though he doesn’t say this, I’d submit that an additional reason we’re so fond of depicting real-life people in film and literature is that we’ve conflated our desire to know more about them with the notion that transparency, especially in government, is the goal of democracy.) A consequence of this–perhaps even unintended–is that writers and filmakers have implicitly accepted this premise foisted on us by tabloid journalism: that the private moments of public figures is fair game and that the public has a right to know about them.

Okay, so there’s a shift away from the purely fictional and toward the real world in art, what’s the big deal? Shouldn’t writers and filmakers make work that reflects this shift in our culture? Here’s where, for my money, Skidelsky’s article gets interesting:

…if interest in a work of art is triggered by a desire to learn about real events, that represents a radical shift in our understanding of art’s purpose. Throughout history, people have turned to art for various reasons, but two consistent ones have been a desire to be entertained or transported and a desire to learn more about what might be called (for want of a better term) the human condition. Yet in a world of docudramas and biopics, another factor enters the picture. Storytelling becomes a kind of lightweight pedagogical aid – almost a branch of investigative journalism. The risk here is that, by being placed at the service of factual knowledge, creativity loses its justification and becomes devalued as a result.

In other words, there are inherent limitations that prevent a true exploration of human experience when we repurpose real-life people for fictional and artistic expression. “If the rise of fact-based fiction creates confusion about the point of art,” says Skidelsky, “the same applies to our criteria for judging it.” Following this logic, we are currently at risk of losing our ability to appreciate the value of truly original works of art.

So, novelists and directors, think hard before you start working on those inevitable books and movies about Gabrielle Giffords.