L'art pour l'art

[elektro80]

yet another url
http://www.mu6.com/einstein.html

[elektro80]

You might really enjoy this one
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether

[elektro80]

Try this abstract:
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/699745.html

[elektro80]

Robert, check your mail..

[elektro80]

[elektro80]

[elektro80]

Hagen has this nice one about Fuller: http://www.whagen.de/publications/GetanzteFotografie/FullerShock.htm

Sorry guys, I am back to art again..

[bachus]

[bachus]

[bachus]

[elektro80]

I have a decent understanding of the history of the relativity theory. As I said, Hagen is going a bit too far. The concept of an aether is however a part of modern science history. Back then this was not as ridicolous as we think now.

I am tempted to quote Walter Benjamin again


Walter Benjamin
On the Concept of History

[bachus]

[elektro80]

I think you will find Art ( and Philosophy ) and the Ultimate Aims of Human Life by Raymond Tallis to be of interest. He isn´t really selling his ideas totally convincing here, but the text is entertaining and quite good.

[bachus]

[elektro80]

Hmm, no online links to this paper. You guys gotta buy the october arty farty issue of Philosophy Now.

[elektro80]

I am glad you enjoyed the Tallis text thingie. There are indeed some gems in there.

[bachus]

It was more than enjoyable. The idea that art is how we experience our experiences was new to me. I’m still working through the ramifications of that concept. I do want to put a caveat of scope on that. I’d rather say that in one of its functional modes art is a way for us to experience our experiences.


Edit:

It may be the most "important."

[dewdrop_world]

Hope it's okay to post something in this thread that does not directly concern German philosophy

Anyway, I've suggested elsewhere (I don't recall which thread) that I don't see a necessary dichotomy between l'art pour l'art and... what was the term Hindemith used?... utilitarian music (I probably got that wrong).

Or, to be more precise, I think composers and other types of artists often imagine a false dichotomy between "artistic integrity" (which is often wrapped up with ideas of "authenticity" which might not be well theorized) on the one hand and "selling out" on the other. At least, some of the replies to my earlier remarks on the subject could be summarized as, "Well, I don't know how the audience is going to react -- all I know is my own response -- so I can only be true to myself and hope for the best with the audience." Not quite what I was trying to say.

Traditional communication theory, applied to western music, posits three "actors": composer, performer and listener. Maybe sometimes "listener" is stated as "audience," but it seems most common in the West to conceive of an individual receiver.

In grad school, with the help of some very clever fellow students, I found myself beginning to think about the limits of this conception. Specifically, it doesn't happen in a vacuum. People gather in a space to hear music (again, this is a Western-biased discussion) -- it's a social space with communal etiquette and rituals.

Very seldom in discussions of this sort do we talk about the expectations imposed on a composer by the social space of the concert hall. Composers want to retain a sense of autonomy, which I think is to some degree a fantasy, and I think ideas like l'art pour l'art help to justify among composers a certain denial of the social nature of the relationships involved.

What I've been considering lately is, as an alternative to tuning in to myself (a retreat from the social aspect) or tuning into "the audience" (which to me is an easy way out), to tune into a social situation and conceive of sounds that might be surprising but still contribute positively to the environment.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to write a new piece for the 8th anniversary celebration of the meditation community where I go on Thursday nights. Perfect opportunity! What is the space like? What is appropriate to the space? Can I do something that is not just a copy of the kind of new-age crap usually found in such places?

I ended up doing a lot of granular synthesis on source material from a Chinese flute. It's kind of "space music"-ish but several people told me that they'd heard music like my piece, but mine was quite different from what they knew before.

http://www.dewdrop-world.net/audio/sangha-flower.mp3

I don't think of this as "art pour l'art," but neither is it a capitulation to (imagined) audience demands. It's a choice to participate in a social setting, rather than conceive of artistic honesty as an assertion of individuality.

I'm probably unfairly caricaturing other composers' positions, but it's hard not to do so because so few art-music composers talk about any spaces other than the concert hall -- and even in the concert hall, they commonly bleed the social out of it by focusing on individuals. The loss of a sense of ritual spaces is a massive loss for musicians.

Clubs are another social space, with some ritual elements, but the expectations imposed on club musicians are also not well-discussed!

James

[elektro80]

Hey James, good post!

[Antimon]