Yes.... My 88 years experience .shows me that initial pleasure one gets from any thing does not remain at that initial intensity,diminishes with time ,yet may return after it's long forgotten. ________________________________ From: William Conger <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 7:48 AM Subject: Re: redundancy How do you know that? Just by asking yourself, I presume. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: ARMANDO BAEZA <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, March 30, 2012 9:40:46 AM Subject: Re: redundancy the short answer, I don't know of any thing that does not have tediousness built in to it, that our minds eventually sense it. AB ________________________________ From: john m <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 11:39 PM Subject: redundancy This post will include some sweeping generalizations, but they seem to me largely justified in order to present the problem. I haven't found Wilemski's definition yet, but I have been thinking a lot about this three-phase life cycle of artforms as I understood it from William's explanation in this post: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg09259.html The three-phase progression from "original" (unrecognized innovation) through "derivative" ("high" period, innovative common practice) to "redundant" (post-modern, self-referential, academic) seems to me largely valid in relation to several artforms that have been born during the last 100 years or so. For example, it would seem to me that popular music has progressed through the following phases: it emerged from vernacular forms (folksong and its various derivations) and light art song (musical theatre etc.) in the first half of the 20th century; had its "high" derivative phase in about 1965-1985, getting increasingly "post-modern" in respect to its own history during the 80's-90's, culminating in sampling culture and "post-rock"; and is now widely held to have reached redundancy, where most new music is just pastiche, nostalgia and discussion of the form's history. (Pick up any issue of The Wire from the last 10 years and you'll see what I mean) Jazz ran a similar parallel course, originating from certain imported African and European forms, had its heyday in the 40's-50's and had reached post-modernity and redundancy by the late 70's. So-called classical composition has been redundant since the mid-60's really, but the institutions are so powerful that it's being kept alive regardless (and the same goes for jazz). So, now what? Nostalgia in the manner of Rachmaninov or the neoclassicists (or the endless horde of "trad jazz" outfits) is an obvious but somehow intuitively invalid option. Some rare artists continue to find ways to "back up" to earlier forms, mashing up their influences into original forms in search of previously unexplored territory, creating syntheses while avoiding pastiche; some give up; most don't even notice and keep on churning out redundant stuff (and financial reasons probably enter into that as well). This last phase might always give birth to something original, but we'll only know in another 50 years or so. What about the visual arts? Loads of movements have sprouted up and died, some giving birth to others, some remaining mere footnotes in history. The last big thing was conceptual art, which remains dominant despite having progressed to redundancy almost immediately. But painting, which has been officially pronounced dead every ten years or so, refuses to die: and that would seem to give some hope for the other arts as well. My faith in painting is constantly reinforced - last time just this week - by younger artists who continue to produce strong autonomous work in that medium, without any conceptual or academic/historical frameworks (whereas almost all new music I hear produces just the opposite effect). I don't think this is a question of taste either; it's certainly not a question of nostalgia in my case because I wasn't even born when the "real stuff" was going down. (I don't know about the universal applicability of this idea because I don't follow all the arts with equal interest. Cinema seems to be doing well, but I have no idea about contemporary dance or sculpture or even literature really - I could count the post-1960's fiction I've read with the fingers of one hand. Modern poetry in my language has been redundant for a good while, but I don't really keep up with the English-language stuff) I guess the question is: can an artform actually run its course and die? Can it be objectively "impossible" or "invalid" to persist with a "dead" artform, or is this itself just an invalid ideological or historicist point of view that can be justifiably shrugged off? Is 99% of everything always redundant and what's worth keeping is just the work of isolated individuals of genius, towering above history? Even so, it would seem to me that artforms go through these fertile periods, maybe a decade, maybe just a couple of months in some cases, and the final period always seems to be this barren and academic picking through the wreckage. Of course it's not a problem for the audience - there's enough art to last until the sun goes out already - but I think a practicing artist will have to either engage with this problem, or come up with some way to circumvent it.
