Seeing Anew

After Apollo 11, artists used the experience as a new way of seeing, one of them the Overview Effect. Bowie did it with Space Oddity at the start of his career (then at the end), land artists Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer made their major overview-inspired works soon thereafter in the early 70s.

Our perspective also changes when the Sun becomes merely a star in a black sky, not something you see as sun-rising and sun-setting. It is interesting to refer to the Sun not by the name we gave it but by a number, "Groombridge 34 B", "G 208-44 B", "Gliese 440". This is totally unromantic, but that is one of the things art is for.

1/14/2025:

The value of music (or other art forms) does not arise from the instrument of the composer, but rather the seed ideas or emotions that get shaped through the oral tradition, or in today’s terms, social media. Context is of supreme importance. In architecture, banal buildings become more interesting over time by the value of the buildings and spaces around them that the people use. The World Trade Center was not considered great architecture in the 1970s but was all changed by the sharp turn of history. Likewise, in music: what may seem ordinary, simple, or overdone may connect with people in ways we can’t predict. As I watched the documentary Young at Heart and saw the old people singing that old Talking Heads song Road to Nowhere (that I thought I never really liked) I realized it had new power and I liked it more. I don’t care how it was made or what instrument David Byrne used to write it. (Funny, according to the Wikipedia entry on this song, Byrne thought it was ‘embarrassingly simplistic and monotonous’)

Very often it isn’t until much later that we reach an “access point” where things finally make sense. It’s because of the coupling or triggering effect, or the Overview Effect.