How many of us, observing or listening to a work of art as a painting or a sculpture have wondered how has it been possible that all this beauty was born from nothing?
This is both a question and an answer.
A definition of work of art for me could be the following:
"an object or a recorded session of sound that ,regardless of whether it is magnificent or minimal, pleasant or irritating, exciting or chilling, has at the same time so many enigmatic and accessible features to be accepted by our perception as something that has always existed, within our memory or in the outside world."
One of the reasons for this to happen, is that usually artists produce their works using recognizable elements or compositional "norms", that we already known, .
If a piece contains styles, techniques, lexical forms or sound jargon that are part of a wider stylistic by one or more formal paths as a cultural movement , a music genre, a traditions, a philosophical way to approach the reality, a slang, do not affect the individual features of the artists, but, in most of cases, it allow them to be better and faster be introduced in the processes of integration of our memory as an identified object, an IRA: Identified Recording Artists. Don't search it in Google .
I've just made up it to highlight the fundamental role that I believe has the ability of the audience to identify an artists, despite all their personal qualities.
One of the current trends of the music market, both from the public and from the recording industry, is to hold in great consideration those who propose a genre of all or in part innovative. As if being part of a stylistic current is more and more something that belongs to a past, even if close.
I think that the assumption that in music cinema or painting everything has already been said has, on one hand some reasons to be true, but on other one it is true because we believe that it is so. The art of convincing ourselves and others is not based on the lies. But on acceptable and convenient ideas and concept. But, suppose that it is so. That the loops of cyclical nature of the art proposals and therefore of the audience's tastes have both come to an ending spiral and every kind of efforts to resume the golden ages of arts and entertainment is as warming a frozen soup, why who has success before us found people and commentator that use to think in this way ?
To affirm that the historical cycle of any form of expression has a predetermined duration ,a year, a decade a century, and that therefore the current popular music such as cinema are destined to become entangled until it is extinguished is a legacy, wrong, a concept that was born long ago, when patronage determined the life and death of artistic currents.
Popular music needs patrons like other arts, but often feels the need to develop for the biggest of producers and critics: the audience.
Although it needs a lot of money to be produced and distributed popular music to be born, it needs a people that requires it, a set of suspended, hidden instances, social issues, or a desire for ephemeral that only artists can smell.
The artist is the one who has a filter with which he sifts the information of an environment.
Whatever it is. It can be an house, a sound, a country, like Dylan, a whole planet like the Beatles, or other planets like the Hawkwind, or the universe itself like the Pink Floyd.
It doesn’t even matter what the author describes.
It is important that he knows how to remove from himself the unfiltered judgment of those who are living that moment and in that environment.
I often hear that only those who have experienced it can speak or write about something.
Very true. But only those who have lived and then passed or tried to overcome the moment can tell something lucidly. Both in writing and in music.
Repeating a style means repeating it, pushing it to the extreme. But it can lead to great results or true masterpieces only if the content is really important or the technique is really high.
Trying to create a style for the simple desire to do so does not mean experimenting.
It means escape.
Those who experiment, therefore those who really seek a new world, do not necessarily start from what does not exist. Experimentation can be extreme and useful. But several existing genres synthesized in a new expression often give results far above expectations. Mc Luhan said that a new way to create media contents or arts must have in its body at least twenty percent of what was the latter one to be available to the audience.
What happens to us when we create in this way?
I think it’s something very similar to what happens when we talk to a psychoanalyst or a friend about our fears or our feelings. Or when we write them without a rule.
Thoughts do not born in the moment that we perceive them.
They do exist before. Or rather, they before were scattered here and there in our memory, isolated from each other, devoid of any apparent meaning. And often created in us paranoia, frustrations, phobias, excesses of feeling or excitement.
When these scattered meteors take the form of a sentence, our mind does not simply chain thoughts, but generates a greater meaning that was unknown to us as well.
Inaccessible until they are turned in to words or written in form of compositions.
Psychoanalysis has been developed on this basic principle. On the strength of the language of the senders and not on the solutions that come from the receivers.
The therapist must not give answers but make the patient talk.
Which evokes memories, generates connections, juxtapositions of meanings, contradictions that he had never noticed.
According to the novelist Jonathan Franzen said , communicating for an author means to create thousands, millions of channel from the "solitary writer" to the "solitary reader".
A perceived one to one to encrypted channel or friendship zone, where the author talks about themselves privately.
Expressed thoughts in others creates new unexpressed thoughts and so on. A castle of new thoughts until this or collapses. Because they had no more reason to exist or because they create irrational phobias. In psychoanalysis as in music or other abandoned arts nothing can be born or be the seat of our future because is the past that create the future, and the past exist anyway, even if not anyone think in this way.
Paul Busellato
EML Author
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