Talent On Strike
Art is wasted on the youth of today.
Granted, there is plenty of interest in so-called "art" among youth; there is nary an adolescent who hasn't tried their hand at writing music or drawing or painting. I myself can shamefully admit that I went through that phase when one invariably gravitated to those people who could so masterfully draw the characters from Pokemon and Dragonball Z, and those were the people with the talent. The people who could scratch a pen on paper and produce what we never realized was actually a contorted, distasteful representation of the human form (I believe the standard terminology is anime).
As a composer living in the bedlam of adolescence, I have realized that those with talent are extremely rare, and people are in love with the idea of being one of those rare gems. My goal isn't to show off how much talent I think I have, but as a person with an arguably decent repertory of musical cognizance, I think the primer knowledge of artistic achievement is abandoned by those seeking to become more artistically astute. We have gone down that dangerously delusional path of waiting to be "inspired" to write music or create a work of art. Music theory, form and technique are trampled by peoples' need to liberate that inner artist they often don't have.
The aspiring composers of today must realize that "inspiration" is simply a flaky facade for those who are too lazy to learn how to write music properly. I am so thoroughly irked by the fact that people openly flout the rules (yes, rules!) for writing music. Terms such as exposition, recapitulation, modulation and meter are unheard of in aspiring composers, and their counterparts in the visual arts are equally ignored. No one wants to hear about scales or form or modes. Just write down a ridiculous, overused chord progression (G-C-Em-D-G among others), and then sing in a raspy voice. You're an instant musician, no water needed.
November 11th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
I hate rap...
November 11th, 2007 at 9:38 pm
You forgot to mention one group of people in your scathing litany of humanity's artistic wrongs. This isn't quite in the art realm, but. You know what I don't like? People who, after learning a handful of phrases, claim to be able to speak a certain language. I could be one of those people, but I avoid it at all costs. I studied Japanese for four years, and that's what I tell people. I do NOT tell them that I can speak Japanese because, compared to hardworking scholars of the language, I CAN'T. I don't even say I can speak Spanish, though I can certainly scrape by. And Chinese? I'm still a linguistic embryo. I can only claim to be bilingual with English and Portuguese, yet have to put up patiently with friends who want to sound cultured and brag about speaking languages that they can't really speak. URGH.
November 12th, 2007 at 12:09 am
@Steph, along those lines, I can't stand those people who think they're the ultimate authority on culture after spending about a week in another country. It's happened to certain people who went on that Spain trip in 8th grade. Their eyes were suddenly opened to the vastness of the world after visiting one country for a week, albeit on a preprogrammed tour package which invariably fails to depict the true nature of a country. And then they come back and lash out at people like us who have actually lived in another country, and try to call us culturally ignorant. *scoffs*
It would be a happier world for children if the parents had to eat the spinach. (Groucho Marx quote, I have no idea why it popped into my head.)
November 12th, 2007 at 10:47 am
YES, that drives me crazy too.
I tried directing more traffic to your site by posting a link on mine. However, I only get about 3 hits/week, so I'm afraid it won't help much.
November 12th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
I do however love your unbiased views on the world. Thank you.
November 13th, 2007 at 3:34 am
I wholeheartedly agree.
Too often today, as exemplified in postmodernism, art trades skill for "originality". But "artists" fail to grasp that original doesn't always translate to good. Usually, artists decide that simplicity is original.
We are presented with blank canvasses and are challenged to ask ourselves what art really is. Artists answer it for themselves, rambling about public and the artists intentions. But no, they are wrong. Someone labeling something as art means nothing. There are many things people claim as art that I would argue is not. Art is objective beauty. Our society has forgetting what beauty is, and taken it away from art. We replaced it with personal commentary by the artists through whatever obscure and forced messages they tag it with.
Real art stands alone, radiates it's own form of beauty, inspires awe, and is immortal. It is an ideal that is reachable, but our society has redefined it so that anyone can reach this new version, a lesser, uglier, shallower version, that we are told is just as profound. Yet one only needs to see the creative monoliths inspired only a century or so earlier to realize that we have faltered so far.
A lot of music today (mostly pop music) is formulaic, shallow, and forgettable. Creativity and skill are discarded to just plug some variables into a safe equation for a good sounding sound.
By discarding skill, we lose the drive to apply creativity. With that loss we create forced inspiration, that is, a nice sounding explanation of the work, after it is done. With the loss of creativity and skill we lose beauty. I define beauty as something that inspires awe, something that grasps you at first sight or sound, and makes you contemplate it for a good while afterwards.
I wouldn't be surprised if in 100 years, if society continues in this entropic decay of our aesthetic standards, we will be listening and looking at audio and visual static for entertainment and "enlightenment".
(and thus ends my rant on postmodernism)
November 13th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
@Terence, I might say that your figure of 100 years is awfully generous. I'd give it 60 at best. Your definition of beauty/art is very good, although then we must decide what awe is: is there any objective way to measure it?
@Seth, I'll assume sarcasm there
November 13th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Well I think we all know awe when we feel it. There's a very noticeable biological response: goosebumps, hair-on-the-limbs-moved, and all of the idioms we use to describe fright. That isn't necessarily a requirement, but when we feel that, we know something has caught our interest.
I lose concentration very easily, and my mind wanders all over the place. But when something sticks in my mind for a while then I know that it is something worth thinking about. I think good art carries a sort of self significance to it. You know it matters when you observe it.
November 13th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
a little Phil. but you do have a lot of good stuff.
November 14th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
@Terence, I suppose it was just my scientific side talking there. What can I say, I like precise numeric values. However, there are pieces of music that are memorable and significant to me, but that others cast out as noise. I greatly like Charles Ives' later works, but a lot of people absolutely hate it because most of it lacks a true tonal center. I still consider Ives' works to be art because he still had profound musical knowledge of the classical methods of composition; he was consciously breaking certain musical rules, not ignorantly writing down random notes.
November 15th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
I haven't heard of of Charles Ives before, so I listened to some samples of his work on Amazon. I think his pieces are great. It's dissonance is definitely skillfully placed.
I think the theme here is that we all know a good song when we hear it, regardless of what rules or genre it follows. I think "acquired tastes", when it comes to art, is usually a bad sign. If we need to force ourselves to like a new style of art or music, then we need to reexamine the emphasis we give to cultural perception of beauty versus our own perception of it.
November 16th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Phil was an "acquired taste".
haw haw haw
Ok so just to make the number of comments you have a nice round figure of five million, I'll add more input. I am going to say something about art. And something about "art elements".
When you have a box of bike parts, you do not have a bike. When you have a canvas or piece of music with art elements, you do not necessarily have art. In the realm of visual arts, you have elements like implied line, hue, contrast, texture, movement, etc. The way in which these bits and pieces are put together may or may not produce a pleasing or functional end effect. I will talk more about this in a second (pleasing vs functional).
First, I also would like to ask if any of you make the distinction between "art" and "artWORK". I do, but I don't feel like elaborating here because you probably already get the idea.
Back to functional (or rational, useful, logically meaningful) versus aesthetically pleasing art pieces.
Psychological research - you knew this was coming - shows that providing a logical explanation of why one likes something causes the level of liking to decrease. When we don't allow the explanation, "I just like it, " or "it just tastes good" to suffice, but rather force ourselves to generate some practical reason for liking something (The shades complement my couch, draw the eye around the room, blah blah blah) then we end up being less satisfied with the object. I should clarify this - when the object is something "aesthetic", not something we plan on using. When it's something we need to use (a car, a college education) then increased rational deliberation before decision-making is a good idea
I'll get you references for this later, I have to go work in the lab now.
November 17th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
B-but...but I was one of those people who drew Pokemon...That was my life 4th through 6th grade. And then I turned into a Zelda nerd and started watching Cowboy Bebop on Adult Swim and it all went downhill from there (from your perspective, at least).
As much as I hate talentless hacks, though, I can't help but feel that you are still trying to make yourself sound so grandiose compared to those around you. Even the words you use to describe yourself (" a person with an arguably decent repertory of musical cognizance") still smack of innate superiority, despite your pleas to the contrary. I would ask you what works of art you think you have created, musically, artistically, whatever. And since when were there ever "rules" in music? There aren't any that I was aware of. Ideally, everyone stays on the same measure and plays in the same key with the same time signature as the rest of the band, but if you want to write some crazy piece where that doesn't happen, there's nothing stopping you. That doesn't mean anyone will like it or pay money to hear it, but that doesn't make it musically illegal either. Something as subjective as art or music (or any artistic form in general)...I hate seeing things constantly analyzed as to whether they're "art" or not. My tastes are becoming more and more broad as time goes on, so seeing this sort of talk disappoints me.
[Also, you and the film critic from the Beacon would get along great. He pans any anime that comes his way. (I want to assassinate him for his comments regarding "Spirited Away" and "Howl's Moving Castle" in particular...if you hate Hayao Miyazaki, I can't possibly like you. That's one of my rules.) It annoys me to no end that there's never that sort of stigma with American animated films, or even French or British ones. (And don't tell me you hate French animated films too, because I love "The Triplets of Belleville"...)]
...This is probably a bad time to tell you that I've got this burning desire to start a rock band...I want it to be a crazy sort of fusion band though, incorporating all these elements from all these genres. It would be AWESOME. And I want to play keyboard/piano and clarinet and sax and other weird crap...I still need to learn banjo, and I want a shamisen so badly right now.
November 18th, 2007 at 12:10 am
@Lily, I wasn't trying to make myself sound superior. I'm sure you can admit that you are a talented clarinetist, and likewise I think that I am somewhat learned in music theory and the like. Perhaps I was thinking of myself compared to people in band, although those people make rappers seem like musicians (if that's possible).
I'm not sure how "rock"-ish a band you would start would be. Rock, when I hear it, is a term depicting musical inferiority. I'm sure your band wouldn't sound bad like most rock does, because you actually know what you're doing musically. The fact that you have had musical training precludes any possibility of your having a typical rock band.
I do like anime films, if anything for the awesome music. I'm just frustrated that it's the art form du jour of anyone who wants to draw something, because there are so few people who can draw it well, and those are the people getting all the money to make films like Spirited Away. The whole point of the post was to make light of how people skip the fundamentals of art-making and try to make art. It makes no sense. I wouldn't try to integrate a quadratic function without learning integral calculus. Like math, art needs to have a prescribed order to it in order to be called art.