In Love With Harmony

At least at the moment.

Firstly, R.I.P. Jon Hassell.

"Hassell regards his processes as a composer as quite basic. “I keep asking the central question: What is it [that] I really like? What is it that I really want to hear? It comes down to shockingly simple things: “I love lush sensual atmospheres. I love beautiful chords. I’m in love with harmony.”

Yesterday, I was thinking a lot about architecture for some reason, particularly 80’s architecture, and what was happening in other parts of culture at the time, and how the Florida building collapse became a didactic metaphor.

In the late 1980s, I had an office that overlooked the Chicago Loop. For 18 months, I watched the postmodernist AT&T tower being built. I still love that building, even with its glut of decoration. I love a lot of the postmodern buildings--even the parodic postmodern buildings by Philip Johnson, particularly the pastiche-y 190 South LaSalle. He also was a collector of modern and contemporary art, something I admired him for. But in retrospect, did he really take architecture seriously? Was he more interested in populist politics and Father Coughlin? 

In the recent book by Louis Menand, The Free World, Art and Thought in the Cold War, he referenced Alexandrianism in a comment about the avant-garde expressed by art critic Clement Greenberg:

“When a society becomes less and less able to justify the inevitability of its particular forms, the artist loses contact with the audience. In earlier periods of historical crises, artists responded with Alexandrianism, a retreat to technical virtuosity and creative stasis. But in the 19th century, the response produced something new and unprecedented: the avant-garde….The reason avant-gardism appeared instead of Alexandriamism, Greenberg believed, was because 19th century artists had a superior consciousness of history. That is, they saw that the creation and destruction of social formations is how history works, that all structures of assumptions and expectations are temporary."

Recently, I have been avoiding doing things for the sake of political correctness, or simply doing things because culture wants it: Do I have to make digital art and sell it as an NFT?  Do I have to make music with AI?  Once you've done that a few times, it becomes a joyless activity. Perhaps I'm practicing Alexandrianism, or Stuckism--a retreat to technical virtuosity and creative stasis, or per Jon Hassell, a love of harmony.