The rejection of anything results usually of what Jung might refer to as an enantiodromia. Something that turns into its opposite.
I will state that the movement that started off rejecting ‘ entertainment’ now might be relying on it. Not that I have any objection to entertainment.
Entertainment has been given a bad rap. Frankly if it wasn’t entertaining, I wouldn’t bother listening to it, especially twice, and there is much there is really is no reason to bother. It is the lack of superficiality that makes something entertaining to myself and will propose also to others. Dylan understood this aspect and claimed he was nothing but an entertainer. All the great filmmakers have no problem being entertaining.
There is something puritanical by basing ones direction by what one is not going to do. Whether beats, melodies, tones, chords scales, texture. humor, tonality, comprehension. It is absurd to pretend that good music hasn’t been done using these. What is interesting musically is what one does. There is already a history before that already left all the above out. Those who insist on the process of elimination, in the end don’t seem to like music at all. There are these individuals too it must be acknowledged. Psychologically stems from the fear emotions solicit as just something one cannot control. The escape is then toward scientific materialism. Safe but quickly exhausting of sustained interest.
It seems if one is going to use an instrument completely outside the scope of its historical use. Then there is absolutely no reason to us it at all. One then has the opportunity to invent instruments that make those sounds. Otherwise one is resorting to acrobatics which I have always found one of the lower forms of entertainment. Cleverness is one of the easiest things to degenerate into surface.
Too much attention is placed to fulfilling a genre, modern. This is a form of partisanism and outside the surface is conservative in defer all to a group mind. Let us remind our selves of Popper’s observation that the group ego has done more harm than the individual one. There are those who refuse to step outside it boundaries to be themselves. The world has changed tremendously in the last 40 years. How is it the spirit behind it can remain the same.
Music is filled with some wonderful craftsmen who have accomplished much without ever having once to think or experience sound like an artist.
Those that pride themselves on not having to no longer rely on the ear might resemble what Aliester Crowley referred to as a ‘blind person trying to gain sight by becoming blind drunk’.
That postmodern dictum = a work is to be a comment on the field itself is a formula of works to have no interest outside of practitioners. Hence a form of segregation instituted by the very language it attempts to describe.
What I see as a very big problem is that art has been rendered safely ineffective by its practitioners, because that which is attractive, in an old-fashioned sense, is deemed the property of consumer culture.
ReplyDeleteThis is not actually a matter of disdain by the artists for these kinds of ideals and characteristics, but of worship and subservience of the simulations thereof as proffered by mass media.
In the "art" world, it is permitted to make Pop and to call it art, and it is permitted to make obscure, inbred and ineffective things and call it art, but it is NOT permitted to make those things which "the master", big business, "owns", such
as the romantic, the sensual, the grandiose or noble, or the superbly crafted.
Of course, big business doesn't actually "own" these things, but it needs to maintain the illusion that it does. And of course the illusion of ownership is easily maintained with promises of "riches and bitches" and so on.
This has really hit home for me recently, as I deliberately make music which will please my five year old son as well as myself. Although it is in some ways actually the most avant-garde stuff I've ever done, and deeply full of strict and non-mainstream stuff that would tickle an (honest) academic musician pink, it doesn't sound, superficially, like "avant-garde" music is "permitted" to sound: it sounds, quite likely, like "mainstream" music is pretending to sound (but rarely ever can, as the mainstream has been too much a collection of relics in a hall of infinite mirrors for so long).
Of course these are really just observations, not complaints, because if a person is driven to create something, they can't really do anything but create it, and let the chips fall where they may.