Okay, I have officially anticipated an idea used by an actual conceptual artist: see this entry (and note the date), and then read the last paragraph of this entry from Lord Whimsy.
I really should do something other than sit around typing, apparently.
2 comments:
And my screen saver is the famous painting of black cow in a coal mine at midnight.
4'33" is a enormous emperor with no clothes joke on the music and art world.
Re 4'33": I disagree. Okay: it's rather meta...in that it's more a piece about listening to music than music per se...but that's typical enough in 20c art. The point is to listen, firstly - but also, it plays with preconceptions of performance (to me that aspect is quite secondary: the musician sitting down, fiddling with the score, etc.). A key tenet of 20c art is that art is not necessarily inherent in the object but a mode of perception: if you see artistically, what you see is art. That is: if you look at something with an aesthetic eye, you'll be looking for many of the things you might look for in a more traditional work of art: order, symmetry, pattern, texture, interplay of color and of form, etc. I think this might be most obvious in photography: a great photograph is rarely defined by the aesthetic beauty of its subject but by the vision and framing of the photographer.
Similarly: what Cage does is ask the listener to hear sound, as music. What sounds can you hear when you really listen for them? What sort of interactions, rhythmic, pitch, etc., can you perceive among the thrum of the building's air conditioning, the echo of traffic on the street, and the occasional coughing audience member or whispered comment?
But also: yes, a joke. I think excessive self-seriousness is one of the main reasons art is seen as elitist. Duchamp's urinal was all of the above (also, cleverly mounted upside down so you'd reconsider its form) - but also an enormous joke.
Everything truly serious is also screamingly funny. Certainly, life, love, and the like.
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