Right after I promised myself to start blogging more, I decided to move. So packing has been taking up time that...well, in all honesty, still wouldn't necessarily be spent blogging. I'm still working on my piece for Absurd Records (who knew that hundreds of overdubs could be time-consuming?), and now I'll be doing music for a video game, in addition to my duties with Barn Owl and ThRiLLpiLLow. So blogging is a distant 14th. Anyway, I was looking over Phil Freeman's Running The Voodoo Down blog yesterday and came across this book:
The press release reads:
Modern art is a mass phenomenon. Conceptual artists like Damien Hirst
enjoy celebrity status. Works by 20th century abstract artists like
Mark Rothko are selling for record breaking sums, while the millions
commanded by works by Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon make headline news.
However,
while the general public has no trouble embracing avant garde and
experimental art, there is, by contrast, mass resistance to avant garde
and experimental music, although both were born at the same time under
similar circumstances - and despite the fact that from Schoenberg and
Kandinsky onwards, musicians and artists have made repeated efforts to
establish a "synaesthesia" between their two media.
This book
examines the parallel histories of modern art and modern music and
examines why one is embraced and understood and the other ignored,
derided or regarded with bewilderment, as noisy, random nonsense
perpetrated by, and listened to by the inexplicably crazed. It draws on
interviews and often highly amusing anecdotal evidence in order to find
answers to the question: Why do people get Rothko and not Stockhausen?
I have several problems with this, all of which I will catalog right now in excruciating detail. Heh, no, I'm kidding. Just irritating detail. Anytime a critic accuses "people" of "not getting" art my first reaction (well, third; my first impulse is to crank call them, and my second impulse is to concoct an Annie Hall-type scenario in which Stockhausen confronts Stubbs in person) is, "You elitist jagweed!" The most obvious contradiction -- unless Stubbs (or whoever wrote his press release) really believes that a handful of millionaire art collectors constitutes the "general public" -- is, since when does the sale of artwork for "record breaking sums" constitute "mass acceptance" of said artwork? If sale and auction prices are what he's basing everything on, then, by Stubbs' logic, the fact that Sun Ra's original vinyl Saturn records routinely go for anywhere between $100 and $1000 means that the "general public" "gets" Sun Ra. Done and done.
Of course, it's a little dangerous and/or mind-numbingly silly to conflate the purchase of work with "getting" it. So does the person who bought a Rothko work "get" Rothko? How do we know? Who decides? For that matter, how is Stubbs determining that "people" don't "get" Stockhausen? What unit of measurement determines...um...getocity?
I desperately hope this book isn't the latest in a series of "Hey MAN, this music is TOO HEAVY for JOHN Q. SQUARESVILLE to DIG!" There are far too many examples to list that contradict the notion that there has been mass rejection of "experimental" music (which is a pointless term, as all music is experimental): Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, let's say, Radiohead, and the emergence and dominance of hip-hop all should serve as the final nail in the coffin of the "people don't like 'out-there' or 'far-out' music" argument once and for all. If he's keeping his focus narrowed on European composers like Stockhausen, it begs the question, at what point was Stockhausen's music promoted and given the degree of visibility that would allow the "general public" to be aware of it? Or did the "general public" somehow reject Stockhausen's work without being aware of its existence (aka, "And where are the fries I did not ask for?! You guys need to anticipate me!")?
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