Art

Bart:

"You make some interesting observations and points, some I agree with, some I don't. I don't want to know what Trane studied 10 hours a day. I don't think the creative process must be laid bare for all to see. I think he who wants to know should work for the information, like students centuries ago going to monasteries to seek wisdom. Another thing is that I don't want to know everything about how things are made. It's a bit like the extras on a dvd. Knowing to much about how a movie is made can distract you (me) from what that movie is about. The problem is you don't know what information is helpful, and what info isn't."

Doug Wamble:

"Hard to get past the first paragraph, really. Your entire premise is kind of false. I think artists have been at the forefront of utilizing the internet. Where is the evidence for this "stiff resistance?""

"Besides all that, you're making these grand proclamations that aren't really based in anything specific. What is art music? What is boldness of concept? What is confrontational honesty? Do you just know it when you see it?"

Response:

First of all. Thanks for taking the time to attack my half-formed ideas. As I'm still not quite all together, I hope you'll forgive my approach of being somewhat deliberately provocative even when my arguments are not well-formed enough to support the conclusions.

Bart, concerning your idea that the extra information detracts from the whole, that's a very good argument and I have no great answer for it. In fact, I don't think that I want all art to become open in the way I'm suggesting. I think what I'm putting forth is more of a crude first stab at one particular view that I think will become more prominent as a consequence of the way technology is affecting the experience both of art and of life in general.

Secondly, Doug. I don't think that artists have been at the forefront of using the internet. I think if anyone, software developers, computer scientists are way ahead, granted they have an unfair advantage. The things happening in the open source movement are pretty remarkable. That said, I think you guys here (www.mydamnforum.net) are probably among the best examples of artists really taking advantage of technology. Perhaps not as portals for the public to access your individual art, but in the sense of information sharing.

Concerning confrontational honesty, boldness of concept, you are right, I have been horribly vague. These ideas need to be fleshed out. I should point out that they do not come from music. Rather, they come from what I perceive as general characteristics of communication through the internet.

People seem to be captivated by the quality of being exposed. Look at some of the blogs that have commanded millions of hits solely on the basis of the bareness with which people lay out their lives. I think this is one of the defining characteristics of our times and that it will necessarily in some ways become manifest in art. The way in which I envision the manifestation is the loss of the pretension that art springs forth fully formed, the separation of artifact from process. I see people accepting humanness even in higher art in a way that is, in my opinion, new.

Thanks to Bart and Doug Wamble for their thoughts and challenges.

The internet is the new media. This may seem obvious, but for most it has yet to sink in. Surely, for encyclopedic content, the internet's primacy is unchallenged by even the most philistine. But for art, particularly music, the internet and its culture of information sharing have been met with stiff resistance. Among more serious artists, at best the internet has been used to moderate effect as a marketing tool. Only among kitschier musicians is the internet seriously contemplated, engaged.

I should clarify that I am referring in this essay to the mechanisms of distributing and communicating about art, not the intrinsic properties of the art itself. I do not suggest that the future consists of technologically driven concept art produced through artists' dynamic interactions with an audience in cyberspace. I do, however, assert that the internet is the new media. It is not simply a marketing tool; it is the product.

The Business Model is Dead

I will not attempt to hazard a guess at the exact ratio of mp3s that are obtained illegally as compared to those uploaded from CDs or purchased legally on the internet. But I do not feel squeamish about assuming that it is a lot to a little. Still, despite the overwhelming proportion of distribution occurring on the internet, the majority of revenue is still captured in the conventional ways. Record sales. The music industry finds itself in the same position as AOL found itself at the end of the twentieth century. Rather than capture the traffic by distributing the music themselves, artists cede influence over their audience to peer-to-peer file sharing services. It is holding on to dying product, preferring to die slowly rather than quickly. In this essay, I will not address the future business model for music; I believe that the business model and the direction of art, while related, are determined by different sets of factors. Here I will focus on what the growing convergence of technology and art means for art, specifically music, irrespective of the business model.

For a long time, technology facilitated the dominance of music as commodity. Specialization of labor, mass media in the form of television and radio supported the model. Find a niche product for a niche market. Put it in a clearly labeled box. Sell it through the appropriate channels. The pressure on artists has been to define themselves as narrowly as possible. What television and radio did to make us stupider, however, the internet is beginning to reverse, allowing us at least the option of choosing a more intelligent course. With access to billions of sources of content, rather than a few tailored to the lowest common dominator, the discriminating audience, however small, can find the deeper good. Additionally, from the artists' perspective, the internet provides an unprecedented opportunity for growth through more robust communication.

Sure, one can point to the videos of pandas making hand-farts while playing the flute that dominate Youtube as an indicator of the 'internet culture.' But these are distractions. The existence of inanity on the web has no bearing on its potential as a medium for art. Plenty of people wrote stupid things down on paper in the past. This would never be taken seriously as a condemnation of books. The internet has brought the world information sharing, both in and out of academia, in a way that has never been seen before. It spawned the open source movement: collectives of software developers collaborating with no profit motive to accomplish some of the greatest feats in software engineering. Think of the Linux operating system, which is dominant in the cloud, powering the majority of most people's computing experience, whether they realize it or not.

Myspace is not the Answer

Musicians suffer from a variation on Stockholm Syndrome. They've been liberated. The record companies are dead. And while the internet has yet to produce a great business model to replace them, the channels of distribution, the capacity to share knowledge, method, process, and product are all there. What is our response?

“Well, it's comfortable in the box.”
“We've learned how to market ourselves, this is how it's done.”

In the presence of a technology that allows us to share everything, the entire creative process, where do we go? MySpace. We express who we are as artists through a short, self-congratulatory bio, a list of influences, and who our “Top Friends” are. Some are so enthralled with MySpace that they forego the luxury of an independent website.

Other musicians flock to the Dynamod web portal. Here the information from a MySpace page is thrown into a Flash application. In a world driven by text and search, musicians post unsearchable content. This is not only a failure to realize the internet's power in exposing the artistic process, it is also bad marketing.

Open Source Art

What is the alternative? Now I stumble onto more nuanced ground. Some people are instrumentalists and that is all they want to be. They make records, polish them, sell them. They do not like to talk about what they do, share the process by which they do it, or explore where it is that they are heading. From the internet they seek only a means to advertise where they play, what they are selling and a way to let prospective employers know how to contact them. In these cases, MySpace is fine, forget everything I said.

Select others have sufficient fame that they share more than records and dates even if not through their own channels. Interviews are published on journalistic web sites. For them the need to embrace the new order is not as urgent, but still beneficial.

For the rest of us, the internet presents the opportunity to be artists in the way that we, as musicians, have always understood it, not the way record labels and the business model have shaped us. Coltrane's music, Bird's music, Miles's music, were always about the process. The artifact was secondary. It was a glimpse, a snapshot. To Columbia records, Kind of Blue was Miles' crowning achievement, Bitches Brew another milestone. To Impulse, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme was his defining achievement, Crescent another burst of creativity. To those of us who know better, these were gems along a bigger path. We love the records, but we care about the path. Who, in possession of a bootlegged Bird record prizes it less than its official counterpart? We cherish the raw. The development of the idea. The snapshots along the way are great, but the path captivates us.

Our moment has arrived. The internet is the new media. Radio was great for selling records. Television was great for selling records. The internet is great for sharing everything. The process can now be exposed. Imagine having access to John Coltrane's mind when he was practicing ten hours per day. Imagine knowing exactly what he was practicing, what he was reaching for.

For some, this proposition might seem scary. Not having to explain what it is that we do makes it easy not to have anything to explain. How can one pass off mindless harmonic super-impositions in the absence of a deeper concept as intellectual art if expected to explain what it is that they are doing.

Still, any resistance to the new media is futile. The old media is disappearing. The live concert is not going anywhere, but the mass audience is in the cloud. The CD is done. It will probably not be sufficient in this world to share nothing besides a business card with several attached mp3s. An artist must also be a thinker, a writer.

Great art is always of its time. Bach, Dostoevsky, Picasso, Miles. I believe that in this time, the creative process must be laid bare. How else can we reflect the times in which we live? Jazz, without the trite attempts to commercialize, has been perfectly suited to benefit from this paradigm shift for at least sixty years. Instead, the territory is ceded to Indie rock musicians who have managed to be more savvy and demonstrate themselves more literate in spite of the intellectualism associated with jazz. Art music will become the dominion of ideas again. The highest art in this age will be characterized not by the illusion of perfection or the air of intellectualism but by boldness of concept and an almost confrontational honesty.

Keeping this public record of my thoughts and experiences has forced me to consider the issue of anonymity. Originally, instinctively, I posted anonymously. The more prudent route. Eventually, two things inclined me to reconsider this choice. First of all, several discussions with friends lead me to wonder whether anonymity or exposure presents a greater obstacle to honesty. Also, as my ability to play the saxophone and compose music resurfaces, I have thought about the role that these writings, thoughts, experiences have in my art.

Honesty

Issues concerning anonymity and honesty occur to me along along two dimensions. The first is the conflict of interest. Situations in which one's public association with writing could affect what is written. The second is accountability. By having to put one's name on an argument, a writer must carefully consider what is written. Perhaps this extra validation serves a purpose besides to create conflicts of interest, forcing the writer to refine an argument, making sure that he/she will be able to defend it.

Faceless writing removes many conflicts of interest. Firstly, it affords a writer the ability to put aside his reputation. Without fear of exposure, a writer needs not fear the specter of association with any particular thought or view. Everything is on the table.

Equally important, in more personal writing, anonymity removes the incentive to lie for vanity's sake, underplaying shortcomings, overplaying achievements. The writer can lay bare his life, knowing that he/she isn't going to gain or suffer in life for having depicted himself/herself in any particular way.

On the other hand, an exposed writer can benefit from the added scrutiny that accompanies taking credit for one's work. Having his/her identity tied to his/her writing could actually serve to keep a writer honest. In the absence of any consequences for flawed arguments, to what standard is a writer held? Exposure and the accountability it entails could force a writer to refine arguments, trim the fat off of unnecessarily heavy-handed or offensive offerings.

This raises the issue of omission. There are times when exposure and the prudence it requires push a writer to withhold an argument, point, or even an entire paper. Three questions need to be asked. How damaging are these omissions? Are the sorts of things that would be omitted better left unsaid? If these omissions compromise the work, is the effect damaging enough to override the benefits of exposure?

I think the answers to these questions are highly dependent on context. A writer in a country with a stifling lack of freedom might find it impossible to write in the open without sacrificing everything he/she has to say. In other situations, it is conceivable that one might unnecessarily aggressively attack an idea or person when not filtered by some degree of judgement. As concerns my writing about art, for example, I think the things I could say that might compromise me are probably better left unsaid, not necessary to assert my ideas.

Art

On a more personal note, as concerns my own identity, I face a consideration external to my writing. As a saxophonist and composer, I necessarily lay bare who I am to some degree. As an artist, I believe strongly in the openness of the artistic process. Especially in jazz where process triumphs over artifact, I believe that the process and all that inform it are relevant to the experience of the art. To that end, my writings, both on and off the topic of art, inform my art. Even if hiding my writings were to present no obstacle to their honesty, would it compromise the honesty of my art?

After much consideration, and with even greater ambivalence, I have decided to incorporate the former home of my writings, spinachcrazyhotel.com, into my artist site under a Writing section.

Today I was walking near my hotel, pondering my goal in writing. Naturally, I thought along the lines of “what overarching idea am I trying to capture?” I thought about what criticisms one might rightly raise about the consistency of my entries and their relationship to one another. Alighting on the topic of contradiction, I asked myself three questions.

What contradictions can already be found between the few paltry offerings I’ve already put forth?

Why should I care about these contradictions / what exactly is the problem they pose?

More generally, are contradictions unavoidable, and if so, under what circumstances do they simply reflect an ability to entertain two opposing thoughts rather than an inability to form cogent ideas?

As a starting point, let’s consider the notion of ideas that are consistent. In mathematics any two true statements are consistent because they flow from the same set of axioms. And all the axioms in any mathematical system must not contradict each other. As concerns almost anything else that we talk about, however, no one can honestly claim to have derived their ideas on wide-ranging subjects all from the same set of consistent axioms. Especially as concerns values we hold, it’s easily proven that we do not.

Take for example value of equal opportunity and the value of limiting the human population. It seems sensible that one can value both these things simultaneously. But, as concerns welfare, providing financial rewards for having more children encourages more births. Also, not providing additional financial assistance to mothers with more children denies those children the same opportunities afforded to those born into smaller families. These values invariably clash, forcing one to choose a point, somewhat arbitrarily, where one favors one over the other. Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising.

The only way one could expect these ideas to be consistent is if one was derived directly from the other, in the way that any mathematical proof concerning the natural numbers can be derived entirely from the definition of a natural number. This level of rigor is neither possible nor preferable outside of mathematics, especially as concerns such topics as the arts. How can we derive a system of thought from a single definition when none of the things we are trying to talk about can be succinctly and completely defined in a way that will satisfy anyone who considers them worth talking about?

One could perform verbal gymnastics in a vain attempt to produce a contrived method of deriving absolute truths in the philosophical realm, but even then those ‘truths’ could only be expressed in natural languages, which are inherently inconsistent if sufficiently expressive to capture the sorts of ideas we’re talking about. The idea of finding any objective truth as concerns anything human should be considered dead. Several pragmatic questions then arise. If no thoughts can truly be considered to be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in an absolute sense, on what basis are we to judge these arguments? If truth cannot be found, why do we bother thinking, writing, and arguing?

Surely, this lack of an ideal of perfection to which we can aspire doesn’t sit well with many people. The idea of a right way to live, the right kind of society, or rightness in the arts is comforting. It makes for an easy time ascribing meaning to one’s life. One only needs only to swallow one single lie and suddenly all questions of purpose evaporate. By this method, even the secular can capture the comfort of religion through embracing a similarly irrational dogma. Perhaps this is a better life choice: to make the irrational choice to believe that the human world can be organized rationally rather than the rational choice to accept that it is irrational and unsolvable. Here I make a case for the latter approach.

Returning to the questions posed above, what is the point of writing if all ideas are inherently contradictory and unprovable? I pose the analogy of building a house. There is no ‘right’ house. There are many different guiding principles in architecture which too, like various axioms from which an argument is constructed, will invariably clash in some situation or another. This doesn’t stop people from building houses. Rather than expect to discover profound truth on any matter , I suggest that we reconcile ourselves to the futility of this goal, focusing instead on exploring new and challenging ideas, appreciating their elegance or identifying their problems without considering the possibility of attributing truth.

Taken literally, the idea of a philosophical proof is inherently flawed. Even the most convincing and elegant proofs hardly represent truths. “Cogito, ergo sum.” This is not a proof. We have no definition for thought or existence, nor can we. And if we independently defined truth and existence, we could probably use one to disprove the existence of the other.

Returning to questions posed earlier, “If no thoughts can truly be considered to be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in an absolute sense, on what basis are we to judge these arguments? If truth cannot be found, why do we bother thinking, writing, and arguing?”

I have the following response: in the interest of developing, exploring and satisfying curious minds, we can evaluate the validity of arguments not on their truth content, but on the subtlety of their flaws. Descartes proof of his existence is not ‘true.’ But to challenge it, one must break down many assumptions that ground most other human thoughts. How many people would normally argue either that they do not exist or that they do not think? Similarly, arguments concerning the arts that refuse to go down easily warrant our consideration. By this standard, the poorest arguments are those which merely insist that a particular truth exists.

Think of the smartest dog you know. Let’s call him/her Einstein. Now the dumbest. This one we’ll name George. Perhaps Einstein knows how to do more than a hundred tricks. He can smell the difference between a treat and a something he ought not to eat. Perhaps he can figure out the difference between ’sit, then roll over’ and ‘roll over, then sit.’ But that’s probably pushing it. George, on the other hand, isn’t so gifted. He’ll drink water laced with pine sol and will only respond to one command before forgetting that he should be paying attention, at which point he goes running after his tail.

Einstein is a whole lot smarter than George, right? That’s a matter of perspective. Inside the dog community, I’m sure they’d agree with that assessment. But in a room full of humans, dogs, beetles and whatever else Noah managed to save, Einstein and George might not look so different from one another. If you lined the animals up by intelligence, dumbest on the right, smartest on the left, Einstein would probably find himself standing right next to George, to the right of all the pigs, monkeys and men but left of all the beetles skunks and hamsters.

As the smartest animals on the planet (if you’re really confident that we outclass seafaring mammals), we often overplay the differences between human intelligences. It’s easy to make that mistake. We have no neighbor to the left. I think this mistake is most evident in the deification of individuals of ‘genius.’ Bach, Newton, Mozart, Dostoevsky, Charlie Parker, Einstein all engender an aura of perfection and immortality.

As concerns the sciences, this reverence is usually harmless. Reverence for Newton might have delayed many scientists from casting aside the notion of absolute time in favor of Einstein’s relativity, but the concession was going to be made whether people felt queasy about it or not. The presence of incontrovertible truths that tower above the scientists who discover them keep any hero-worship in check.

However, as concerns art, deification has a tendency to get out of control. The glorification of the individual leads some to an unconditional acceptance of the life’s works of their chosen heroes. This has the danger of promoting an unthinking complacency that stymies creativity. Of course one should study the works of the masters. And some degree of emulation is healthy. But does someone need to play every note of every Charlie Parker solo and commit it to memory in order to become a great jazz musician? Should the chief virtue of an artist be the ability to perfectly produce a work that seems like it might have been drawn by Picasso?

The question we need to ask ourselves is why we’re studying the masters. Is it because we want to know what they figured out on their quest so that it might aid us on our own? Or is it that we elevate the masters in a religious way, treating their accomplishments as the end itself. This, I contend would be the same as substituting the work of great physicists for the field of physics. Imagine academies full of scientists who did nothing but study the life’s works of their predecessors, seeking to understand every idea and theory each master wrote, however mistaken the majority of them may be. More importantly, imagine that they thought the entire field of physics, all that was worth knowing, was contained in the work of those giants who came before them.

In art, the argument made by the staunchest traditionalists is that one needs not be original to be good. I think this statement contains some truth. Nothing that I’ve ever found worth studying sprang from a vacuum. And I’d sooner pay attention to art that is rooted in a tradition but unoriginal than art that is original for no other reason than its lack of influences. That said, the study of masters should be a means to an end. It’s important that we step back and realize that even the most accomplished geniuses in any field are analogous to really fantastically smart dogs. If we seek communion with something greater than individual humanity – some kind of truth that transcends our individual existence, we should set our sights on something greater than the people who’ve done it well in the past. We should be chasing what they were chasing, not chasing them.

A lot of artists suggest that “we are nothing but the sum of our influences.” That might be true if we include as “influences” all the sensory input, both artistic and not, that a human encounters of his lifetime. But in the sense that they mean it, this can’t be true. I suggest the more modest alternative, “we are nothing if we are devoid of influences.” As concerns accomplished art – forgive this metaphor – I have to believe that we are linearly independent. There’s more to art than a well-chosen cocktail of influences, mixed in a sufficiently talented vessel.