To directly contradict utter nonsense stated in this thread I am stating full out, with no equivocation, all magic is based on lies, all magic is a con, and people who get angry at the techniques used to fool them have over-rated their own ability to understand how magic is done and get angry when they have been fooled by something simple. They will always rant and rave about the magician using unfair techniques even though the rules are absolutely clear: There are no rules! And if you believe that magicians themselves believe in some kind of restrictions in technique and only some elite magical techniques then you have been lied to and fooled once again. The greatest skill required of a magician is to lie convincingly with conviction.
Next let us address the absolute nonsense about the art of magic being somehow diluted and ruined by cheap video tricks and CGI. Magic has used these techniques before those technologies were invented, shadow boxes and still photography manipulation were used to entertain audiences. Here wikipedia describes Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès, a pioneer filmmaker first as an illusionist. He used motion picture camera tricks to create magic on screen. And there may have been a few people fooled at first but it didn’t destroy the field of magic or ruin people’s ability to enjoy it. By the time Windsor McKay developed modern animation the audience was so aware of camera trickery already known they would not accept that he had one anything but trace the motion picture images of actual people and animals to produce his films, so he resorted to showing an animated dinosaur because it couldn’t have been filmed first. Camera magic has been used over and over again since it became possible to do. And guess what? It only fools small children, and that for only a brief time. It hasn’t filled the magic industry with such fakery, not any more now than ever before because the technique is obvious. And it used over and over again with controversy because it’s what we expect to see on TV, at the movies, on our phones, PCs, and even billboards. So why has the profession of magician disappeared from that competition. Very simply because it doesn’t produce entertaining magic. There is no need for magic police to start enforcing magic laws to suit the tastes of some who only want to see magic done in certain ways.
Don’t watch magic if you are going to get angry at a magician for fulfilling his responsibility to fool you. Getting fooled doesn’t make you a fool, thinking you are too smart to get fooled by the simplest magic tricks does tend to make you look like a fool though.
I’d like to chip in here, as I’m a big fan of magic.
I think ‘sleight of hand’ (e.g. card tricks) is both wonderful entertainment and a great skill. (See Shin Lim.)
I think good patter and misdirection are fun. (See Jandro.)
(I don’t like stooges or camera tricks, but I realise that a huge illusion e.g. making an elephant disappear, may involve them.)
I enjoy ‘Penn + Teller: Fool us’ immensely, because you have two world-class magicians who are not easily fooled (and when they are they obviously relish it!)
Finally I’ve been lucky enough to be invited onto Derren Brown’s show (for a chess illusion.)
Now I knew there were literally only 3 ways for him to perform the chess magic (and it soon became clear to the chess players involved which one he was using.)
Nevertheless he needed an extremely good memory to pull it all off - and he did the whole thing in one continuous two hour camera take with no mistakes!
Then he did an excellent ‘sleight of hand’ switch. I knew it was coming, watched him like a hawk - and still didn’t see him do it!
Finally, when filming was finished, an assistant told Derren his car was ready. Instead of shooting off, he came over to us chess players, thanked us and signed autographs.
Top class behaviour throughout.
I’d have to agree with those that found the elevated stage trick by Jandro to be not much of a magic trick at all but more of a riddle acted out. There was no skill involved or clever mechanics. Just more of a “gotcha” moment when explained.
Would you think I was just as genius if I performed the same trick with no blind people involved and then when the observers were asked if they saw any people leave the stage they said “no” because “gotcha!” they were never people to begin with! I used a bunch of monkey dressed up as people on the platform. None of the observers saw any PEOPLE leave, just monkeys.
What are those rules and who enforces them? Magic is either entertaining or not. The rules are that you don’t make money or increase your audience with lame magic. It has nothing to do with any other rules. Remember, it is to the advantage of magicians to claim they don’t use certain techniques, but magicians are liars. When I see a show like Penn&Teller’s Fool Us where they have established rules for the show and a method of enforcing them and I expect they would be exposed if they didn’t follow those rules. But I don’t believe Penn&Teller when they tell me they would never use a stooge in an act because they are liars. I think they do eschew cheap tricks in their acts, but it wouldn’t shock me if it turned out they use stooges.
And finally I’ll say that Jandro is a brilliant magician who fooled Penn&Teller under a stringent set of rules. That is much harder to do than the regular practice of magic which is unrestricted. And he did what a good magician does when confronted with restricting rules, he finds a loophole in the rules and takes advantage of that, and he knows that if we rely on rules to control magic we are easier to fool.
I can read the thread, too, and what I’m reading is that every single person arguing with you has stated explicitly that all magic is based on lies. You’re contradicting nobody.
Now here’s where everybody is disagreeing with you. Of course there’s rules. They are unspoken, unwritten, hazy, full of exceptions, and can be broken by something good enough, but there are definitely rules.
All art has rules. The modernists broke all the rules of prose. Some like James Joyce are revered for doing so. Many, many others have been rightfully forgotten. The cubists broke all the rules of formal painting. Some… Many, many others. Same goes for architecture, various types of music, movies, any art you could name. Arts have moved on in most ways from a century ago, but experimentalists and iconoclasts still take their chances when they slash at the mainstream. Andy Warhol is still famed for great art but nobody sits through his eight-hour movies of nothingness.
Has this happened to magic? Many times. Magic keeps having ups and downs. The down periods historically came when people stopped believing in the lies. It’s all done with mirrors. It’s just camera tricks. There are stooges in the theater. The audience always decides where the lines are. That’s the first rule, the one that can never be broken.
I’m sure you meant something else when you said magicians didn’t lie, I thought it should be cleared up though.
That is a wonderful job of legerdemain in itself. You define exactly what it means not to have rules by imagining they exist but are then ignored and routinely broken.
Yes, the rule of the marketplace. It’s not a rule imposed on magicians in regard to the techniques they use, or even to practice lame magic. Magicians won’t fool people and won’t make money if that is their pursuit when they fail to entertain. The most skilled masters of prestidigitation using the greatest ability of physical dexterity and carefully planned and rehearsed deceptions are ruled out of the marketplace if they are boring.
True, I misunderstood how you were using “lie” but after I realized my mistake I corrected myself. What I’ve consistently wanted to do is disagree strongly with the way you are making your argument. As @ParallelLines said, “Okay, in that case, we are basically arguing semantics.”
This last post finally concedes that the audience draws the lines. I’m calling the lines “rules,” you don’t like that term. I’m conceding that anything goes in art, but that runs the risk of limiting your audience or even making it disappear. Art is a more encompassing term than entertainment, IMO. Do mentalists entertain? Certainly, for some. But they limit their audience by violating the rules. I think you agree with that although your post on them was ambiguous.
Mentalists are occasionally entertaining in their repartee, in a way that doesn’t actually require the illusion of mentalism. Otherwise it usually seems absurd to me, but I know that not everyone has the interest in how magic is performed as I do and if a mentalism act can still produce that moment of wonder when something magical seems to have happened then I can’t say it’s not magic.
I think an important phrase is being left out of this recent argument although it did occur once literally 20 years ago.
“Suspension of disbelief”
Illusion, like most fiction, depends on the willingness of the audience/reader/listener to believe a lie for the sake of enjoying the emotional effect of the fiction.
But degree to which an individual is willing to suspend disbelief is an entirely subjective individual choice, not to be gainsaid by anyone else. De gustibus non est disputandum. If one person chooses to withhold suspension of disbelief for High Fantasy, or ghost stories, or illusions with confederates or camera tricks, that’s not arguable or wrong.
What’s fundamentally necessary for a magic trick to work is that the audience can’t see an easy way to do it. If it looks impossible, that’s a trick that works. If the audience can see that it’s legerdemain, but the legerdemain is (or at least appears to be) sufficiently difficult, that works, too. But if the audience looks at the trick and says “That’s easy!”, then the trick doesn’t work at all. And what’s key here is that the trick doesn’t work, even if the easy method the audience saw wasn’t correct.
If camera tricks are allowed, then everyone ever watching any televised magic act will always say “That’s easy; it’s just camera tricks”, even if it’s not, and every show thus fails. The only way to prevent this reaction is for magicians to have a strong code that absolutely prohibits the use of camera tricks, and for the existence of this code to be widely known.
I am a big fan of magic, of Penn & Teller, of Fool Us, of Penn’s Sunday School, and of Jandro.
But I think that Jandro’s blind-folks-as-stooges trick plays fast and loose with the spirit of the implied agreement between performer and viewer.
Rather than list my reasons - all of which have already been stated in this thread - let’s try this thought experiment.
Imagine that the same trick was performed for P & T by an unknown performer (and not by someone whose very name , when mentioned, gives Penn goosebumps). They would be fooled, of course, but I am pretty certain that Penn (at least) would be mighty miffed at the type of deception that was practiced on him. He would view it not as a demonstration of skill but a violation of the code. Within the sphere of “Fool Us”, this was a cheat.
Agreed. I think Jandro has been accorded special status within the show, and it’s expected his methods will be outside the usual box. A way of spicing up the show just a bit, without (in my opinion) entirely jumping the shark.
There’s more than one reason magicians don’t reveal how their magic acts work but one of the big ones is the complaints from people who are fooled by something they consider too simple.
