Play By the Rules, and College Kids Just Might Watch Your Movies

I'm really interested in the "rules" of mainstream media, of how to make art that sells, and Memento is the perfect example of this. While artists want to make something that is groundbreaking and new, that art also has to be recognizable. For example, a ten-minute video of a field, of grasses rustling in the breeze, might be incredibly poetic in its own right, but it is too dissimilar from modern mainstream cinema to sell many tickets. Christopher Nolan walks the line well between avant garde and mainstream movie with the form of Memento. He employs popular tropes, like Natalie, our dark and mysterious femme fatale, which are fitting with what we expect from a movie. By combining aspects of typical movies with his clever backwards-forwards-black-and-white-color idea, he creates a movie that people consider to be a work of genius.
I'm not saying that it's not a good film, or a good idea, making the audience confused as if we ourselves had lost our memories. I'm just saying that it's interesting that for something to be considered "good art," it has to be recognizable and clearly informed by past works. If something is so avant garde that it does not draw from any reality that we can recognize, then it is written off as unintelligible babble. But I wonder why we think this way. It all has to do with power. Those who have already made successful movies have money, which allows them to control a lot of things, including the media, and including the funds for the next big movie. All of this influences the way we think. Those in power have a lot of vested interest in maintaining the status quo so that they can remain in power, and often we are influenced into thinking that we like something that we really don't. Genius, unfortunately, can only exist if it is recognized as such by large groups of people. And people are impressionable.