I remind myself of the whole baby Mozart thing. Sure, to a lot of us much of Mozart is a bit fluffy-wedding-cakey. But for some reason studies find (or do they? I haven’t examined them — it could just be marketing) that listening to Mozart helps babies become smarter later in life. Why judge art? We know what we like, but do we have any idea what anyone else will respond to?

In a way, we’re all just humans running around trying to connect with each other and our surroundings. I loved the commentary at the Louvre. I loved it even more when my friend’s older sister told me what she thought the paintings meant. That said, I’m not comfortable with anyone one individual deciding what art is. Maybe it’s my contrary nature, but if an artist choses to put their heart and soul and mind into producing something they feel expresses their innermost self, isn’t that enough?

It doesn’t surprise me that I’m hurling arguments in every direction like a dog shaking off water. I guess what I really want to say is: why does it all have to be so heady?

Art can be experienced on multiple levels – the purely subjective, and the contextual. For example, Duchamp’s toilet in the SFMOMA is a piece of art precisely because it appears outside of its natural context. It makes me think about the connections that led to its being placed in the museum, and the relationship between purposeful design and function. Duchamp’s toilet in my bathroom, on the other hand, would have an entirely different purpose, connected to elimination rather than rumination. Without knowing very much about Duchamp or the context in which he practiced, the appearance of his work in the museum has its intended effect (at least on me).

In that sense, art is a disruption of one’s routine thinking process. To me, John Cage is diruptive in an unpleasant, if harmless way, but to the music nerd, it’s a disruption leading to new patterns. In that sense, much art can be relative – just because it has different indended audiences doesn’t make it any more or less “art”.

I probably have a lot more to say on this topic, and one of these days I will…

PS: How did the Xena/Buffy argument end? Has it ended?

Or to put it in lowbrow terms, that school of music was all about intellectual masturbation.

BTW–the Anonymous comment was me, just in case it wasn’t obvious from 20th century music geekery + bridge fanboyness + knows who Seppo is.

I knew I shouldn’t have thrown in that modern art paragraph in at the last second. Of course I’m aware that context matters a lot. A lot of it is incomprehensible to the average viewer/listener precisely because they are not the intended audience – it is making a theoretical point to other people enmeshed in an intellectual debate. And I guess my question, which I didn’t think through clearly before posting, is when do such entries in a debate become academic theorizing and/or criticism rather than art? It’s almost as if Schoenberg created twelve-tone music as a thought experiment in an academic debate rather than as an artistic statement.

That being said, I do find the context of modern art to be fascinating – I had a membership at SFMOMA for several years (and now at MOMA) precisely because I wanted to better understand these pieces of work, and the only way to do so was to make myself repeatedly go and experience it on a regular basis and see a lot of it so I could understand the ecosystems in which the artists were operating.

I completely agree–the concept of twelve tone music is pretty interesting (make an arbitrarily ordered scale, and build music out of that), but in practice, it is often unlistenable.

Reminds me of that wag–’What’s Schoenberg’s most melodious creation?’ ‘Alban Berg’ (yeah, serious musical geek joke).

But in regards to craft vs. connection–I have found that some modern art seems to be lacking in craft to my eye. My personal litmus test is, “Would I trust this guy to install a kitchen for me?” For instance, I remember seeing a sculpture that looked like 2x4s nailed together (badly), with nails sticking out, and painted with house paint (sloppily). While you might argue that this was the artist’s intent, it would fail my test. However, granite countertops built by Isamu Noguchi would be another thing entirely [grin].

Seppo’s point about context and understanding of the field is pretty important, and it could be extended to the engineering analogy you mentioned–’elegant structural solutions’ or ‘elegant proofs,’ to include another field. And some engineering can be appreciated on multiple levels–a layman can appreciate the aesthetics and grandeur of the Golden Gate or Hell’s Gate bridges. But that ties back to the fact that in those cases, a connection is being made.

When we went to the Louvre, there was a specific level of enjoyment we got from looking at the various paintings, but it was very much in the vein of admiring the craft of it.

When we got the audio tour, however, that understanding was magnified tremendously, because an understanding of the context was applied. We now knew why the piece was created, what the artist’s intention was, etc. in as much as anyone knows definitively.

But the painting itself is only a painting, and without an understanding of that context, largely meaningless. Maybe the symbolism of the piece was more obvious to the average viewer at the time, but certainly not today.

I mean, when you sing, the audience responds on a variety of different levels, right? Some people hear the technical achievement, and stop there. Some people understand the ideosyncracies of the process of singing, and can parse more emotion from the performance than others. Even still, others understand the intention and context of the original composition, how your performance of it in a different venue, in a different time, might alter its meaning, and what sort of interpretation each singer brings to the performance, and how that personal contribution affects the whole.

Someone else might just think it sounds pretty.

I don’t really have any point to make, though.