Art v. Entertainment round 2

you wrote:

Firstly, I've thought alot about that your art/entertainment thing, and I'm really uncomfortable with it. For a variety of reasons, but mostly because of the bias issue. (I don't like musical theater, therefore I don't disagree with your take on it, but I don't necessarily think we're right, ...) More about that later.

I think you hit the nail on the head with the comment about how Bach et al are *what they are* because they are intentionally ambitious. You also say they are genre breaking, and I think that was true, but I think it is no longer as useful way to look at art. I also wouldn't agree that Bach and the first V.U. lp are Art without entertainment. They were ambitious, and they were pushing what their participants would find acceptable, but they were still operating clearly with the goal of pleasing their intended audience. Bach releasing John Cage's 4 minutes of silence would have been more art than entertainment.

I think more than ever I am getting tired of mediocrity and maybe the entertainment angle is my way of trying to define it- I would think for the audience I am looking for musical theater would be a benchmark of badness, not even in a Showgirls sort of way, just bad. (you would think it was apparent after the "everyone had aids" song in Team America.) I am perfectly happy at this point to make these broad statements, and would also be happy to be proven wrong.

You may be right about the genre-breaking, though I would guess that VU is a good example of that still- the audience for that was pretty small, but the staying power of the music... Maybe the lesson is, you can't be genre-breaking because you'll be meeting the expectations of some audience, even if that audience is very small. Looking at work like that would be wrong then in that it lets you think of yourself as some sort of pioneer, like the rest of the world will catch up with you at some point, when it might be the case that your work is just bad. I mean, VU's work got more accessable as the third and fourth albums rolled around, and Lou Reed's stuff is basically straight-up pop music.

But I think the main point of this is to consider the accessibility of the work, while challenging the intended audience with something...

you also wrote:

An interesting quote, from an Artist:

My mother, who was poor, never bought objects, she bought symbols. She used to save up to buy something hideous to put in the best parlor. What she bought was factory-made and beyond her purse. If she had ever been able to see it in its own right, she could never have spent money on it. She couldn't see it, nor could any of the neighbors dragged into admire it.

--Geanette Winterson

This quote seems to have a similar problem to what you're proposing. the "it" she talks about in the line "She couldn't see it..." implies that things have an it-ness to them which transcends cultural differences, and I'm not sure such a thing exists.

I could be misunderstanding you, so yeah. Incidentally I do feel like you've hit on some of the other things that are important to me in what I do, specifically the idea of challenging preconceived notions, and the importance of being ambitious in art making.

Don't mean this to be negative, just something I've been thinking about.

If you chose Winterson because of her snootiness, well played. I know there's a danger of coming off as an asshole with these kind of statements, and part of it a lingering unease with people using things like the theater as some sort of cultural currency, and how easy it is to see through that, but... again, I think if there's another way to look at this, let me know. Maybe it isn't worth the effort, but I think defining it in some way will help us out. I'm reminded of Matt Cole's friend, the one really, really into his accapella group, and how Matt never could say anything to him about how really, really lame accapella is as a genre. If someone really repsonds to something, who am I to shit on it? But I don't have to like it...