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Re: [microsound] Re: microsound Digest 16 Sep 2000 06:24:23 -0000 Issue 163




From: sroden@xxxxxxxxxxxx (steve roden) 

i would say this is quite true and quite an interesting and prevelant
situation at the moment - and to push it further - there is a kind of
pseudo academic attitude that seems to be pushing a lot of work in this
direction (i have a theory, therefore my work is good ) - i would tend to
further add that the balance between theory and practice is extremely out
of balance and that doesn't even consider the screwed up relationship
between theory, work practice, and ... ta da.. the actual finished product!
(which seems to be suffering the most) i would be curious to know what some
of you think about this. i for one see a proliferation of lifeless mediocre
cd's that depend upon their 'important' theory to give them any relevance -
problem is that they really suck to listen to. of course, this is a grand
and general statement, but i think a serious problem. i don't agree that a
good idea equals a good work, or worse, that i good idea excuses a lame
result.

It depends upon what one means by "theory" here. Are we talking about music theory or are we talking about this recent academic development called "theory," which at first seems philosophical but also wants to divest itself from the problematics that have absorbed philosophy for a long time? If we are discussing the latter, then the whole question of the difference between theory and practice goes out the door--they are one and the same, unless one wants to insist on a vulgar distinction of the sort that a musical recording is the practice, and the ideas that motivated the recording are the theory as such. Of course, this is an "idealist" distinction. As to whether theoretically motivated works "suck" or not, this depends on a category of "judgment" that is equally problematic, which I will get to below.




as artists how can
we not judge things on our own terms - honestly without expecting them to
be 'similar' to our own work - yet surely as serious in approach, and as
vulnerable and honest in the results. i can't say that i think a work is
bad because it has too much talking ( of course, my expectations would be
that it wouldn't have talking since i HATE talking through audio work
unless it is a book on tape, which i have never listened to) but i can say
that it destroy's the experience that i am looking for when i approach a
piece of music - it destroy's the abstraction and i seek abstraction in my
listening experience. I AM THE LISTENER (sorry for the caps :-) if we look
at it from duchamp's point of view (as well as my own), we know that the
listener is the one who determines whether or not a work works for him or
her on many levels - we are the final piece in the puzzle that make it art.
can any of us on this list judge things like styxx or men at work without
expectations? - probably not (i can hear you all smirking); can any of us
judge something by someone we have never heard before without seeing cover
art, song titles, names, etc. possibly - but not all of us with the same
results - everyone's ratio of good and bad is personal and based upon the
levels of our own meters.


People are programmed to make judgments about artistic works. It's a form of "critical desire," a desire to be critical or a desire to become a critic, one who is respectable and has good taste. In these times, we continually fail to become "postcritical" and instead respond in reactive ways to aesthetic products according to very old Enlightenment-era responses, even though most of us have very little understanding about the mysteries of why we cathect with particular works or not, a matter that is far more personal and idiosyncratic than we wish to admit. What is in fact "good" or "bad" in a work has a lot more to do with what a community of persons decides based on personal preferences rather than whether a work is "intrinsically" bad or good. If I prefer Vladislav Delay to Madonna, it's not because Madonna is "bad." It's because Delay's music provides more emotive resonances with my experience and it's because I can "sense" (in all senses of the word) the theory that inhabits the work. Whereas, with Madonna, my experiences do not cathect in the same way. For the one who connects with Madonna, the experience may be just as rich and provocative. In terms of the distinction though, what bothers me about Madonna is the strength of the "commodity" and how capital expediently promotes it to the expense of everything else, including my own preferred commodity. Avant aesthetes of our type reactively think the solution to this problem is to reinvoke "aesthetic quality" to save ourselves from pop and the dominance of the capitalized tropologies. In doing so, however, we simply allow ourselves to be dominated by the category of art once again and in the process reinvigorate the predominance of the commodity we would want to abhor. The solution, apropos Deleuze, would be to "take a line of flight" away from the entire question of the "good" and the "bad" altogether and honestly and frankly assess our phenomenological relations with aesthetic works.
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