It’s a good thing I was not in that orchestra… or I’d have started snickering at the utter idiocy. It has been said that there is a fine line between genius and madness. I think this proves that there is no line at all between ORT(!) and goddamn stupidity.
Oh well, at least it’s a convenient bathroom break.
If someone wrote a novel in which all the pages in the book were blank, and then went around doing a book tour with readings in bookstores, university campuses, etc, in which the ‘reading’ consisted of the author just flipping through the empty pages, pausing for a few minutes on each page, and saying nothing, while the audience sat around listening to the ‘reading’, and then after this the audience would tell their friends how much they enjoyed this novel, and that the reading was fantastic, I would consider these people to be pretentious.
It’s OK to enjoy sitting around doing nothing and listening to nothing. It’s just that that activity already has a name, and that name is not ‘music’ and not ‘book reading’.
Interesting point. Maybe the definition should be that it’s art if a non-negligible percentage of people would like the piece, if they had access to it.
So, the difference between your masterpiece and a load of feces, both of which you allow no one to see, is that most people would enjoy looking at your masterpiece and no one would enjoy looking at your load of feces.
Just because no one actually sees either does not mean that we can’t distinguish between the two in terms of their art-worthiness.
You need to watch/listen to it a few more times. At about the 20th viewing I was groovin’ to the coughing & yawning.
But I have since graduated and moved on to better pieces. Now I watch paint dry. And listen at the same time.
ETA: “Listening To Paint Dry” ©Le Artiste RedFury 11/07/2011
That sounds a bit better. Likewise, if a piece of art is suddenly buried under, say, the ashes of a volcano, it doesn’t cease to be art in the 2000 years that it’s waiting to be unearthed.
As far as 4’33" not being music, I was only half joking when I said it’s my favorite piece. Part of my daily practice is to close my eyes and actively listen to my environment for a few minutes. I think that it does take on a sort of musicality after a while. But I’m a musician so maybe I just hear it that way.
Here’s another interesting little tidbit from one of our own people:
So there you have it: The art world is decadent and depraved, and one reason people don’t like it is because connections matter more than talent. Which is certainly something people tend to notice.
If Johnny Cage didn’t have connections, who would have noticed him being quiet?
And here’s where your failure to grasp 4’33 lies. When you’re at a performance of 4’33 you’re not listening to nothing. You’re listening to silence, which is not the same thing. Or rather, you’re listening to all the bits of soft ambient sound that make up normal silence. Only you’re giving them the same attention you normally give to the notes of a more traditional piece.
A performance of 4’33 in an anechoic chamber would likely fail.
My sound card isn’t working, so when I watched the video, did I miss anything?
thank you for this - it’s as concise a definition as anything else I’ve seen in this thread.
Here’s one song that pulls it off very well: “They’ve Got a Bomb” by Crass.
I think you’ve hit upon an important point with the idea of expressing something through silence. The idea of silence as a more legitimate expression when juxtaposed with other artistic productions makes sense, but I’d expand the definition from just “part of an album” to part of a whole body of work. Cage didn’t arrive at the idea of 4’33" in a vacuum - it was the endpoint of his long consideration of aesthetics, the role of indeterminacy in art, and notions of that sort.
Unfortunately the sound quality of that video is pretty crappy. There’s a lot of hiss, which washes out of the nuances of the performance.
But the act of listening to silence, and even paying attention to silence, as enjoyable as it is to some people, already has a name: meditation. No reason to call it ‘music’.
This whole 4’33" “performance” is like if an artist invited you to a gallery to see his new artwork, and when people get there, there is nothing in the gallery. Nothing hanging from the walls, nothing on the floors or the ceilings. His ‘concept’ is that all the visitors observing each other move through the room comprise the art piece. That is, the art piece consists of you and all the others in that gallery: looking for art, discussing the lack of anything there, the clothes you’re wearing, etc.
It may be cute if done once, but if this guy became famous and thousands of people would go to galleries around the world to see this art, it would be pretentious, because walking around a room with nothing on the walls, talking to people, and chit-chatting about random stuff already has a name: it’s called a party.
I’ve been watching for a couple of hours and I still feel like a crass hick.
Must have done something wrong. Hmmmm…
He’s on to something.
If the definition of “art” is ‘what gets placed in a gallery’, then those who control access to the placement decisions effectively control what is, or is not, “art”.
Thus, what we get is ‘art’ that is, in effect, a simple according of status to the artist. Whoever has the connections, the clout, or the name recognition to get their work recognized by inclusion into a gallery, is an ‘artist’ and what they place there is ‘art’.
It is, in effect, a part of a larger cultural phenominon - the cult of celebrity. As it turns out, you do not actually need to have any real accomplishments to be a ‘celebrity’ - you can simply be famous for being famous if you are wealthy or shameless enough, at which point everything you do becomes “news”. Likewise, you do not require any real skill or ideas to be an artist. You can simply be accorded the title by those with the power to decide what goes in galleries, at which point whatever you choose to put there becomes ‘art’.
I agree that the debate over whether it is “really” art is sterile. More significantly, to my mind, our current system produces much instantly forgettable and disposable ‘art’ (however defined), with little of worth or lasting value, presumably at te expense of better stuff. This is because, for whatever reason, our system of ‘high’ art has come to value connections over skill - and part of that is the process of denegrating the very notion that ‘art’ has any objective value.
I understand the objection ‘if you think it’s so easy, why don’t you do it?’. However, that objection has no merit if you consider the matter in this light: even if I (or any of us) wanted to have a crumpled bit of paper or a blank canvas placed in a gallery - or even a wonderful masterpiece - we couldn’t do it, any more than we could become famous like Paris Hilton. We lack the connections to accomplish that. The sorry part is that many deserving artists, who foolishly put their energies into creation instead of into cultivating the right contacts, are effectively locked out of the high art world.
Art is whatever people are willing to pay to view, listen to, feel, taste, read …
The reason modern art is the way it is, is because that’s what people will pay to see. I know there are many that wouldn’t pay to see it. In fact a majority of the population wouldn’t pay to see it. The fact is, the majority of the population doesn’t go to art museums at all. They’d rather go to a football game or a bar or a rock concert. All of those are art forms, but they aren’t in museums.
Who goes to museums? The art establishment that everyone seems to think is controlling the definition of art. They are, but not the way people are implying. They are controlling the art, because in order to make money, art museums cater to them.
Many people claim that they would go to museums if they only had the art that they consider to be “real” art, but those museums actually exist, and when is the last time they went? Maybe they went the last time a Monet collection went through town. It would be great if every art museum could always have a Monet collection, but it just can’t happen.
The fact is, modern art is what it is for purely capitalist reasons.
Fascinating.
Now try to focus on the question I actually asked: I consider 4’33" music. What is my pretense?
Well, considering music, unlike art, has a fairly precise definition with elements that are universally agreed upon, and 4’33" completely lacks rhythm, melody or harmony, I’d say you’re pretending to understand what constitutes music.
Nice try, but that’s not even “universally” agreed upon in this thread.
Good choice of words. 
No, the fact that you want to go outside the definition has nothing to do with the definition’s validity. No instruments, voice, rhythm, melody, harmony - no music. Those are the elements of what music is. I can go along with it being an idea or an art piece, but if you’re going to say it’s music, you’d better explain how, since you’re the one making the claim that goes against the definition that’s been established for centuries.