Read on: John Cage: Searching for Silence

JohnJ started us off with a quick overview of artistic movements in the last 140 years, with an emphasis toward trying to explain how we got to the present moment, not just in terms of movements and periods, but in terms of the modern way art works: galleries, openings, agents, etc. It wasn’t always this way, but there is a pattern. Certain “tastemakers” – those with money or influence – determine what is relevant and what gets promoted, and these people are not all artists. They are curators and patrons and customers, from Lorenzo d’Medici to modern hedge fund collectors.

But that is the “art world,” separate from art itself, where an artist must make a living using his work – and often himself – as a commodity. When did art become a path to celebrity? Some argued that it was with Picasso and other painters around the turn of the 20th century – essentially that celebrity came with the rise of the mass media. But wasn’t Shakespeare’s name known throughout England in his day? Well, yes, but he had a technological boost as well; he wrote in the wake of the invention of the printing press.

There were some interesting sidenotes about writing, with the question being raised whether it should be included in a discussion about “art.” Of course! said I, and some others, although a painter disagreed and it was painting that dominated the conversation. What about poetry, does anyone still write it? Yes, said a poet who was with us, and brought up Mary Oliver, who is indeed prolific, but who is also part of an earlier generation (b. 1935). I pointed out that Twain grew massively wealthy and famous by his writing (although he died a pauper), and until recently it was still possible to become a celebrity by writing (although if it’s fame you’re after, you’d better stick with crime or romance novels and skip the poetry.)

Damien Hirst is “the first billionaire artist.” Which is absurd on its face, but it brings up good questions about authenticity. If Hirst puts a shark in a glass case full of formaldehyde, what makes it different from you or I doing the same? DC wanted to know why a urinal, when placed behind a “velvet rope” by DuChamp, suddenly became art. The question becomes one of context: the place where one views the art, the background of the artist and how much of it is written next to the piece, and of course the title of the piece can change interpretations easily. DuChamp called the urinal Fountain.

DuChamp said that anyone could be an artist; that anything could be art. This was the precursor to Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame, and today it is really happening. Art is life, art is expression, art is commodity. The thing and the representation of the thing now overlap so heavily as to be nearly the same thing. In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy DeBord wrote “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.” That was 37 years before Facebook. Today it presents a paradox: if everything is art, then nothing is art. So how do we know what’s good or bad?

We have to learn for ourselves what feels authentic and original. And those tastemakers are important. They perform a real function, by paying constant close attention. They watch the ticker of the art world go by, and from the great flow deduce the zeitgeist. Only over time do patterns emerge. But like Jeff*, a painter in attendance, said, “You come to New York as a young person painting still-lifes, with a traditional background, and you see what’s happening here, and you stop doing that, because what you’re doing could have been done 300 years ago.” When John Cage wrote “4:33″ it was revolutionary. But writing a silent song today is not relevant, because it’s not moving the needle.

Towards the end, we spoke of art which lives but is not commoditized – the work of the undiscovered or unappreciated. Henry Darger lived alone in a small apartment, having little social interaction, yet was busy producing lengthy novels and paintings. Van Gogh was never famous in his lifetime and died penniless. And for some, dressing up like superman is a path for “fame and fortune.”

Like JohnJ said, “We could talk about this all night, and no one is going to leave here saying, ‘Yes, we’ve got it figured out now.’” With that in mind, I’ll end here and say thanks again to everyone who came out. It was a great night. Look for the next Junta to gather near the end of May…

* I originally attributed this to Sam. Apologies.

Now the article which formed a basis for Josh’s talk has been published in Harper’s: “Last Man Standing: The aquisitive music of John Zorn“. It is behind a subscription firewall, so you’ll have to pony up $16.97 for the year – or go out and buy a paper issue. I think they’re six bucks at newsstands. Subscribing really is the better deal.

The beginning of the discussion centered on musician John Zorn, his life and work. There was the mention of a specific piece he did with one of his groups which covers some numbers of musical genres all in about a minute – I’ve lost my notes from the evening but some basic research suggests that it may be Speedfreaks, performed here with Naked City. Someone please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong.

Speaking of genres, we spoke of how names like jazz, rock, reggae, techno, emo, etc are basically the marketing creations of record companies, designed to move units. The rise of music journalism helped accelerate the trend, but before any of that, music existed for thousands of years without such labels. Josh cited an internal memo at Sony Records from a few years ago which directed the marketing division to concentrate less on genres, as they were becoming too divisive (and therefore not broad enough for the mass audiences needed to support their business model). The new directive was to focus on the artist as brand – to create superstars out of everyone. When genre was mentioned at all, the memo instructed marketers to define any individual artist with “at least four genres.”

Tim spoke up at one point about the longer history of music. We look at avant-garde music of the twentieth century, he said, some of which is atonal, and see it as a rejection of what we consider traditional music: melody, harmony, etc. But he said that tradition only goes back 500 years or less – the music that dominated the medieval era was more similar to today’s avant-garde music than to popular music.

Later we ventured into government support of the arts. The genesis was one of the articles Josh cited as reading, in which a musician points to European public financing of his craft. Tim, who is a touring musician, agreed that he could live an easier life in Europe, where he would have more help from the government. Josh argued that the government should play a role in making sure that art, even so-called avant-garde art, isn’t overwhelmed by market forces. Others weren’t convinced that America should give up its current philosophy, which is to support the arts to a limited extent, but certainly not to interrupt the gentrification of neighborhoods just because art is being lost. Noah, a banker, was particularly adamant about letting artists survive on their own – either by living poor, making some concessions to mass culture by, say, writing commercial jingles, or a combination of the two. As he put it, avant-garde means anti-establishment; to directly support it with public funds (at least on a mass scale) would be contradictory.

Towards the end of the evening, we did an informal survey and found that – no surprise – most were perfectly comfortable downloading copyrighted music off the internet for free. An argument was put forward that record sales were never a viable business model for artists, but only for record companies. The labels would give an artist an advance, provide the resources to cut the album, and then pay the artist a minimal cut of the profits; meanwhile, the artist could use the marketing machine to generate revenue for himself through touring. According to this argument, aside from maybe the 100 top-selling bands in the world (Metallica), no artist is being financially impaired by this activity. Well, perhaps. What’s definitely true is that the record companies will not survive without coming up with a new business model.

Look for the next Junta to convene around late January/early February. Josh’s piece should appear in Harper’s this spring – we’ll be sure to note it here when it’s published.

B-Side

I’m currently writing a compressed history of New York City’s late-20th century avant-garde movements, in music, in the visual arts, theater, dance, and in their nexus in “performance art,” but approached through an idiosyncratic admixture of geography, or urban planning, and money, or economics. Altogether, I’m writing about what’s become called “Downtown,” that stretch of artistic-minded Lower Manhattan located between Union Square, or, alternatively, Washington Square Park, and Wall Street. I’m trying to trace a particular type of cultural displacement — a displacement of the residences of cultural figures, and also of cultural venues, including music clubs, and galleries, etc. — in the interests of defining Downtown, or “a downtown.”

Briefly, I begin after the Second World War. Subjects, dates, landmarks covered include, in rough chronological order: Greenwich Village in the 1940s and 50s; Marcel Duchamp; “Abstract Expressionism”; the creation of the suburbs, the concomitant exurbanation of white ethnic populations (Irish, Italian, Jewish); the declines of two generations of American Youth: the “Beat Generation,” and the counterculture of the 1960s, and early 70s; more particularly: the Fluxus happenings centered around Yoko Ono’s Soho loft in the early 1960s; Andy Warhol; the “loft-jazz scene”; the rise of “Minimalism”; the origins of “punk rock”; the history of Downtown venues from The Kitchen through, more popularly, CBGB’s; the passing of the 1974 “Loft Law,” which provided a legal framework for so-called “warehouse-to-loft-conversions”; the cleaning up of the East Village drug scene, begun in earnest in 1984, with Operation Pressure Point, led by ambitious federal attorney Rudolph Giuliani; the growth of New York University throughout the late 1980s; the 1990s’ real-estate-boom; the rise of the Chelsea art district, and its supremacy over Soho; the shuttering of musical venue Tonic; the demise of another venue, The Knitting Factory; the closing of CBGB’s, followed by its conversion into an upscale men’s fashion store, in 2006; this brief history, before it goes on toward prognostication, culminates with two Downtown events of just last month (11/08): Christie’s first auction of “punk rock” memorabilia; and the enshrining of a CBGB’s urinal in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex NYC, newly opened in Tribeca.

Suggested reading (Internet-only):

Peter Cherches’ overview of Downtown Music, compiled for NYU

Kyle Gann, on Downtown Music

Marc Ribot, “The Care and Feeding of a Musical Margin,” from All About Jazz, 6/5/2007

Doree Ashton’s “Implications of Nationalism for Abstract Expressionism,” from Abstract Expressionism, ed. Marter

Fluxus resources

“Art and Commodity,” from Andy Warhol, Priest, by Peter Kattenberg

“Going Cold Turkey in Alphabetville,” an article from The New York Times, 2/19/1984

John Jay College of Criminal Justice Report, “We Deliver: The Gentrification of Drug Markets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Final Report”

“Law on Tenancies in Lofts Unsettled,” an article from The New York Law Journal

Also, (nonmusical) listening:

Kathy Acker