Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
That's "minimalism" taken to an extreme.I remember some years back having a tutor express the concept of art, he implied that you could hang a picture frame on a wall and call it art. It's not the frame that was the art but the fact that you would have within the frame something of absolute pure clarity, or technically "Nothing" which is what art can be about.
We have the same thing in music. In 1952 John Cage, the patriarch of the minimalist movement in music, composed a piece titled 4'33". It is three "movements" whose timing totals four minutes thirty-three seconds. There is not a single note or other sound in any of them. It has been "performed" live and you can buy a "recording" of it. As annoying as this ultra-minimalism may be, we can take comfort in the fact that only one example of it can be produced in any medium.
Trisha Brown, one of the stars of modern ballet in the USA, choreographed a dance that had no music. We saw it about twenty years ago when a certain accursed type of wristwatch was in vogue, and that part of the program happened to start at 8:57pm. Three minutes into it there was a chorus of electronic bleeps from the audience, followed by giggles. She just rolled with it and considered it part of the performance.
As a musician I have always adopted the point of view that an artist must communicate with his audience/reader/viewer/listener/patron/whatever. Otherwise what he is doing is simply not art, or at the most charitable, a failed attempt at creating art. This communication can be oral, written, visual, aural, sensory, conscious, unconscious, individual, societal, immediate or deferred, but it must take place. One sure way to tell that communication has taken place is that it evoked a reaction.It can be implied that an artist might sometimes feel a pawn or vessel to other people's interpretations of art, when they see a feat before them they either complain that it's not complete if it's their own or are astonished at an accomplishment they didn't feel they could complete. It therefore generates the notion that the artist is potentially just fullfilling some role within causality, playing a part and not actually doing what art is truly about having the Freedom of Expression.
Considering the posts on the science boards, I'm not sure what you were expecting.Dear people, posts in this thread are pretty embarrassing for a science forum.
All dictionaries still define art as having either "beauty or exceptional significance."Art has transcended 'beauty' and all its ideals more than a hundred years ago.
The former is fairly common on this website. The latter is in somewhat shorter supply.I demand inquisitive minds and historical perspective.
I would never have guessed. My compliments! You are a master linguist. I wish my Spanish or Chinese were half as good as your English.I'm sure, I make many mistakes while writing and speaking in English. It's my second language and I never visited or lived in an English speaking country.
We're living through a Paradigm Shift, the sixth one in my own model of history:It's also scary, because it means we need a fundamental change; a revolution in social sciences regarding artistic productions of any kind.
- 1. Agriculture. Hunting and gathering gave way to permanent settlements; rival tribes merged into larger groups so we were no longer living among people we had trusted and cared for since birth; the surplus generated by economies of scale resulted in goods and services not necessary for survival.
- 2. Civilization. We had to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with anonymous strangers; division of labor resulted in full-time professional artists, teachers, etc.; larger populations required hierarchical government and business record-keeping.
- 3. Bronze metallurgy. A qualitative improvement in the artifacts supporting life; the first "weapons of mass destruction"; record-keeping evolved into written language; the new technologies made a qualitative improvement in the intricacy, durability and variety of art.
- 4. Iron metallurgy. Another qualitative improvement in artifacts; even the "barbarian" tribes could make their own weapons; the "classic" civilizations; art and architecture that still stands; the codex (flat-bound two-sided paper) revolutionized writing and the art of illustration.
- 5. Industry. The conversion of chemical energy into kinetic energy leveraged the productivity of human labor, ultimately freeing 99% of the population from "careers" in food production and distribution; an explosion of science and culture with so many people now available to specialize in it; leisure time; surplus income; transportation technology allowing people to travel more than a few miles from home during their lifetimes; the printing press and universal literacy; massive reproduction of art objects; popular culture as a legitimate source of art.
- 6. Electronics. Communication free from the control of governments, transcending national and cultural boundaries; the first stirrings of a single global "community" of humans; professionally composed and recorded music available instantly everywhere; similar advances in the other arts, including the ability of very small communities not in geographic proximity to share their own unique preferences and talents.
The Paleolithic Era lasted for several million years. The Agricultural Revolution took several thousand years to spread to all corners of the earth. The Bronze Age and the Iron Age were each a couple of millennia, and the Industrial Revolution is several hundred years old.Well, I don't know. It's already the turn of the century. And nothing yet.
Be patient. The Electronic Age began in the middle of the 19th century with the telegraph, but arguably was kicked into high gear by television in the 1940s, and then into overdrive by the third-generation integrated-circuit computer in the 1960s. The internet has only been in existence for a couple of decades. It will take a little longer before all of its effects are felt.
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