Keith,
You deny the experience of one of the greatest
entrepreneurs of his day Charles Ives. Ives was a superlative
businessman who earned millions and set the stage for the modern business of
Insurance in the US. At the same time he was the most advanced
composer of his day as well. He finally came to the conclusion
that no composer worth his salt COULD write for money. He
said that the audiences had lace on their underwear and couldn't take a good
chord on the chin. That the only option for a serious musician
who knew his craft was to choose to write garbage or to make a living some other
way and write what the muse dictated.
What we we may be dealing with here Keith is
the issue of the truths of one art being transfired to another and you coming up
with a lie. However serious poets don't make a living selling
their poems either for the very educational reasons you decry.
I think the blockhead was Dr. Johnson in your statement. Too much
Newtonian science and too little metaphysics that gave Newton balance to
understand that he didn't know everything on the
planet.
Is Dr. Johnson Samuel Johnson? If
so, he did a good thing in developing the dictionary but his
provenciality is one of the root causes in the problems that we have with
English today. He began but many of the ways he
began have turned out to be blind alleys or even negative.
However should he not have begun since English does not fit
Latin? His Dictionary was useful in an immediate
way but it also was limiting of the language in a
ultimate sense. But that's a different post.
English composers have had a terrible time making
money with their music and have had to make their living in other ways
just as have we. On the other hand the Italian people have a strong
sense of what their lives are about aesthetically and such a feeling is always a
shock to people like my daughter who just came home from a visit
to Umbria. She wanted to move their
immediately. She couldn't believe the beauty and the wonderful
people inspite of the fact that they don't like Americans much at this
time. So in Italy you could make a living composing, writing,
sculpting and painting once. Whether that is still true today is
another issue.
It isn't because Art is dead but because
people live more in the past as the past is written down.
Living in the past creates a problem for the present and the education of the
present. In that sense, the whole of Art can be used as the English
you describe are using TV. Especially old comfortable Art no matter
how wonderful it is. Remember the guys who slashed the Guernica
and broke both the Pieta and the David, were poor out of work
artists. Too much old Art can drown the
present.
The other problem is Entertainment. The
traditional solution of Augustus to create the public killing field and drown
the public's woes in entertainment is still carried on in the West in the
Television. But Entertainment is the vulgar form of art and
art at its most banal although murderous at times.
Everyone dies but everyone is not capable of creating
greatness. The audience can be an audience of dummies or
an audience of masterful people conscious because they too can do the art
and know its language. The game of art is producing the
winner who can MAKE an audience out of the other artists whether professional or
amateur through sheer greatness. Actors still do that in
Greenwich Village in the bars where they perform scenes for each other
for rounds of drinks.
Economics as an indicator of art is such a collosal
failure that I find it bizarre that you still hang to such an out of date
failed idea. It makes all of your observations suspect
in my mind. But of course that is too easy a way out for
me. But it does make you a challenge.
Its good I like you. Perhaps we could use that as a metaphor
for the significance of "like" in all interactions including the observation of
the three forms of contemporary Art. Vulgar, common
and complex.
REH
|
- [Futurework] Enslaved by Free Trade? Keith Hudson
- Re: [Futurework] Enslaved by Free Trade? Ray Evans Harrell
- [Futurework] Classical Music in Enlgand (was: E... Keith Hudson
- [Futurework] Re: Classical Music in Enlgand... Ray Evans Harrell
- [Futurework] Re: Classical Music in Enl... Keith Hudson
- Ray Evans Harrell