At 17:00 10/01/2004 -0500, you wrote:
I have begging (grants) to do in order to make things happen. That is what the world has come to for me.
But Keith, all I can say is that you take two steps forward and one step back. These ideas are banal and ordinary. Your comments about the Impressionist are wrong. Most impressionists died poor. Van Gogh sold one painting. They would have loved to have sold their work but most of the works bought by the wealthy were bought for a song and sold high, like their idea of the perfect stocks. That does not speak for the meaning or reason for art but for the way in which the market works and how it brutalizes the creative.
I don't like your constant tone of patronisation. I didn't say that Van Gogh was a con-artist. It was just about after his time that investment- and status-art became predominant and totally messed up the whole art scene.
As for the rest of what you've written, though, we will always disagree about music. I think that good art and bad art have become inextricably intermingled, but that the whole scene of the arts has become embroiled in middle-class status-seeking. I only used the article about John Cage as an example for my broader economic thesis for the importance of status signalling in society -- by way of what we buy or what functions we attend.
'Serious' music and 'serious' art have now gone past their sell-by dates. Most of the orchestras, ballet companies and opera companies are dying. Does this not tell you something a little more fundamental about where 'serious' composers have been taking us (or trying to take us)? In the world of music, popular music, crude though it may be, is a great deal nearer what music is really about -- the melody of singing and the rhythm of dancing -- than almost anything that is written by the Taveners or Birtwhistles of this world. Delightful though brief snatches of their works may be, the most of it just leaves people cold and confused, as it does me -- and I played four musical instruments in childhood, none of them very well (although I could manage some of Chopin's Studies) so I'm not entirely ignorant about music. Thank goodness there are people still in between whose music can register with ordinary people -- Bernstein and Lloyd Webber, for example.
You're in a much more serious musical camp than me and, in the way that you describe it, I simply don't understand it. I don't call myself terribly musical even though, wearing my other business hat, I have sold music to over 4,000 musical directors, choral and orchestral, all over the world, most of them in America, and have had to deal with all sorts of technical questions and enquiries from a few hundred of them over the years. So I'm not entirely ignorant of what is going on even though I'm not a great fan of anything that's been composed since Elgar and Holst. Just as 'serious' art died with the Impressionists, so did 'serious' music die with, say Elgar. This is not to say that a great deal of very enjoyable music and art will not continue to be produced but their worthwhileness is inversely proportional to the number of words written about them.
Music and art will never die, but they are a great deal less pretentious and status-ridden than is said about them currently.
KH
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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