Quote:
Originally Posted by nandoanalog  All the music in the world is "commercial".... Music was invented to be shown. So, it is "commercial".
All music is "art" |
I'm not sure I follow your logic here. Commerce implies a mercantile/trading/financial aspect that I don't believe is inherent in music or anything else just because it's supposedly designed to be communicated.
As for the statement that all music is art, what is this supposed to mean? It tells us nothing unless you give some indication of what you mean by 'art'.
Is art something produced? Well, my body produces strange smells a lot of the time, but I'm not sure I consider them art.
Is art something that has to be
consciously produced, by human hands? Well, what if I sit on a factory production line putting lids on tins of Campbell's Soup all day? Am I an artist? Is the Campbell's Soup art? Isn't there an aesthetic difference between a tin of Campbell's Soup and an Andy Warhol print of one?
Is art something beautiful, then? Well, what about ugly-beautiful stuff by any of the truly influential composers from about Debussy onwards? (Even Beethoven was seen as a rebel in hsi time.) What about a Warhol print of the assassination of John F Kennedy? What about Hendrix's screaming version of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at Woodstock? Aren't they all art?
Does something have to reveal true emotion to be art, then? Why? I'm not sure Andy Warhol would have been convinced. How can a recording of some musical notes reveal emotion anyway? How can we know what an artist's actual feelings are? Are we just supposed to look for signs of emotion? They are not emotions themselves. How can we know a given artist is not just acting or that his or her feelings are generally comparable to those of any one of us?
And what about all the imaginative fiction, poems and lyrics whose authors have deliberately taken on personas or viewpoints removed from themselves? (The British writer GK Chesterton wrote a famous poem from the point of view of a donkey. Can this be art?) What about lyrics sung by people who have not written them?
And what if somebody is not
receptive to the emotion supposedly 'contained' (somehow) in a given performance or piece of music? Does the fact that many, many people find a technically brilliant Indian 'raga' recital or the music of Mozart boring mean that either is not art?
What about the composer Rimsky-Korsakov's technique of shaping some aspects of his music according to mathematical formulae, etc. Is that artistic? Anti-artistic? Neither?
Both?
It's not good enough to say that all music is art and just leave it at that, because on the one hand the nature of art is in question here, and on the other, I would challenge anybody here to tell me what music is, or even what a single song is. What we are dealing with here is, in part, the philosophy of art, and that is no picnic.