Thoughts, Comments, Miscellaneous

While I'm still struggling through many of these readings, I've made some notes along the way...

With Cavell's Music Discomposed, all this talk of  'fraudulence' and 'trust' in reference to art just doesn't seem appropriate, as if he thinks every artwork needs to be submitted for Judge Judy's seal of approval.  'Unsuccessful' seems a better term, less harsh and without all the legal connotations.  But when Cavell starts talking about modern composer's feeling they've 'lost their audience', it rings true, having heard many complaints from my own composer friends of the poisonous influence of academia resulting in boring, lifeless 'musical' compositions that are all intellect with little, if any, beauty or feeling involved, written for no one outside the realm of academia.

And then I think of Michael Nyman, who seems a one-trick pony prone to 'phoning it in.'   I recently screened a version of The Man with a Movie Camera featuring Nyman's score (ca. 2003) and several sections were carbon copies of the music he had done twenty-plus years ago for Peter Greenaway's The Falls (ca. 1980).   This is where I do begin to question the 'genuine' intent of some art, where it seems to be an arbitrarily re-hashed version of something that has gone before.  In the case of Nyman, his relentless (and somewhat flatulent) music seems an appropriate accompaniment to Greenaway's absurd and hilarious faux documentary, but it doesn't play as well with Vertov, and if you recognize it from the 1980 Greenaway film, you start to feel cheated and scandalized.  

(The classical music world has its own problems today, including a frozen repertoire and even standard expectations of how each piece in that repertoire is to be performed.   A declining public interest in classical music keeps orchestras locked in to broad and familiar pieces, yet the audience still often lacks familiarity with the material and the ability to discern good performers from atrocious, hence Andrea Bocelli has a career.)

Not that I'm proposing that artists should be re-inventing the wheel at every turn, or trying to make art in a way no one has before, which seems increasingly impossible on a planet of billions;  in my own work I frequently revisit past themes, images, and do some re-pasting of my own (not to mention using found & appropriated footage), and I believe it's a legitimate tactic.   I find the criticism of 'It's been done' pretty weak.  But there are occasions when it does seem that the lack of effort or thought is glaringly obvious.  There are those who will never accept repetition of an artistic idea, or the use of fabricators, or a 'remake', etc.  so you'd better know what you're doing, or at least be able to defend the choice.

So this is where I start to feel really bogged down, and thank god for Susan Sontag.  Ultimately all interpretation is subjective and often reductive.  There is an inclination towards 'definitive' interpretations/versions/translations of works that not only limit the pleasure of experiencing a work 'raw' without preconceptions, but such declarations can be totally off the mark.  Specific examples elude me, but there are plenty of instances in which artists have bemoaned the fact that their work has been completely misinterpreted, sometimes irreversibly so.  At best, we all have to take this business of aesthetic critique far, far more lightly than the academic world seems comfortable with.  We can derive pleasure from discussing and debating the impact & success of a work, bearing in mind that we will always be trying to pin down something which isn't meant to be categorized or defined, but experienced individually.

Sontag is right on the money.  Too often I find art critiques endlessly circular and ultimately meaningless in their frustratingly convoluted path to extrude significant, proclamatory meaning.