Cool Revisited
A lot of the programming that orchestras do these days is kind of erratic, and while they like to promote the work of young composers, they sandwich it in between more popular works. It made me think about the way that we look at art these days: it’s not curated, everything we look at is on a screen, it’s on some social media platform, and everything is thrown together. I don’t like looking at art that way. What I prefer is to see work that’s curated and has some kind of relationship with each other. I know it’s been tried before, where curators have placed disparate works against each other, and it hasn’t worked. Kirk Varnedoe tried it back in the 90s at MoMA with the High and Low exhibit. The critics hated it, and most of the public didn’t like it because it was too jarring. That’s the way the internet is now; that’s the way social media exhibits work to us. They’re essentially chronological or run by algorithms. There’s really no way of pulling what you want because it’s in the stream in front of you. Yet people’s minds are changing, and they’re okay with it. Who knows how long the pandemic’s going to go on and how it’s going to affect museums and galleries, so people are already adapting, and consequently, viewing habits are changing, and they’re okay with it. Generally speaking, there has to be some kind of continuity between different things, and you don’t want them to be too far apart; there has to be some thread between them, but even then, I don’t think people need the threads anymore. It seems like young people don’t even want them. I always do–I want to know the history. If there’s a musician that I like, I want to know what they listen to and the books that they read, and so on.
Soon we’ll wake up in a world where it’ll be totally different, and older musicians and artists will have to adapt. I think I’m pretty adaptable but who knows, maybe I’m not.
***
Another point Mauceri made [in The Love of Music book] was that classical music doesn’t necessarily have to be “cool” in the same way that the Taj Mahal is not “cool” and that cathedrals are not “cool”, but I think it’s okay for those things to be cool. It’s how you define cool. There’s the cool in America (and probably other countries as well) that’s just fun and light–we’re not going to take it seriously. You want to have a good time and be entertained and not have to think about things, but it’s also possible to engage with things that are a little more “serious”. Back in my teens, when I first started going to museums, the surrealist paintings were the coolest thing for me. I loved Dali. There’s a certain connection between surrealism and lots of other contemporary and modern art with rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not hard to make a correlation between what bands were doing in the 60s, 70s, and 80s with surrealism–especially in music videos. Music videos are like art films from the 40s and 50s, but who would sit around and watch Maya Deren films? That vibe got incorporated into music videos. Music videos were a way to abstract what was going on in the music as opposed to something literal. A bad music video would be one that was too literal or Mickey-moused the music. This surrealist approach is borrowed from the art world, unwittingly.
As far as I’m concerned, anything in an art museum or gallery (depending on the exhibit) is cool. It’s cool that an artist made just figurative paintings, cool that an artist is making minimal sculpture, cool that there’s a piece that’s totally abstract, and I don’t understand it, and I accept it for what it is. It’s a matter of tolerance. To be tolerant is to be cool, and it’s cool to be tolerant. Art isn’t speaking down to you; it’s your interpretation that it is. You can say, “It’s cool the way the artist did that. I don’t get it right now, but I’m not going to dismiss it because I don’t get it”, or “This artist is being snooty.”
The thing about rock ‘n’ roll and cool is that it totally removes high-art arrogance. But ironically, rock ‘n’ roll has become high art because it’s “vintage” as jazz became more of a “serious” art form of art. A popular sentiment a few decades ago was that rock from the 60s and 70s would become classical music. It hasn’t happened that way–I don’t know if we can make that assertion anymore. But in terms of classical music, I always thought that they could get younger audiences if they made going to a concert a cooler experience, not one where you had to conform or couldn’t tap your feet or move your body. I remember when I first started getting into classical music in the 1980s, I became a Beethoven fan and wanted to hear all the symphonies, bought all the study scores, and went home and cranked the music. Those Beethoven symphonies were the thing for me for a while. It was cool.
3/21/2021
***
[3/21/2025: I think I’ve already adapted to AI-generated music, and I’m integrating it into the other things that I’m doing and not giving up the old ways of working. I think that’s a pretty good adaptation at this point. I don’t think I’ll ever stop doing any of the things that I’ve done before just because time marches on.]
Comments