On the one hand, there is music for record collectors (linked to a demand arising from the "growth in the number of listeners and the disappearance of practitioners"), an expressive, dramatic, sentimentally clear art of communication, of understanding: "This culture . . . wants art, wants music, provided they be clear, that they 'translate' an emotion and represent a signified (the 'meaning' of a poem): an art that inoculates pleasure (by reducing it to a known, coded emotion) and reconciles the subject to what in music can be said: what is said about it by Institution, Criticism, Opinion." (Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice) On the other hand, there is an art which prefers the sensible to sense, which hates eloquence, grandiloquence, pathos and the pathetic, the expressive and the dramatic. This is French melodie, Duparc, the later Faure, Debussy, everything that in another age would have been called pure music, the intimism of the piano, the maternal instrument, and the intimacy of the bourgeois salon. In this antithesis between two relations to music which are always defined, more unconsciously than consciously, in relation to each other -- the taste of the artists of the past, Panzera or Cortot, loved even for their imperfections which evoke the the freedom of the amateur, implies a distaste for modern performers and their impeccable recordings for mass production -- one again finds the old opposition between the docte, who is bound to the code (in every sense), the rules, and therefore the Institution and Criticism, and the hedonistic mondain, who, being on the side of nature, the "natural," is content to feel and enjoy, and who expels all trace of intellectualism, didacticism, pedantry from his experience.
― toothy philanthropist, Friday, 28 January 2005 18:53 (twenty-one years ago)
Be all that as it may, the fact remains that the art-lover's sense of cultural investment which leads him to love what is lovable, and only that, and always sincerely, can be supported by unconscious deciphering of the countless signs which at every moment say what is to be loved and what is not, what is or is not to be seen, without ever being explicitly oriented by pursuit of the associated symbolic profits. The specific competence (in classical music or jazz, hip hop or indie rock, etc.) depends on the chances which the different markets, domestic, scholastic, or occupational, together offer for accumulating, applying, and exploiting it, i.e., the degree to which they encourage acquisition of this competence by promising or guaranteeing it profits which will reinforce it and induce new investments. The chances of using cultural competence profitably in the different markets play a part, in particular, in defining the propensity to make "critical" investments and also the investments in extra-curricular "general culture" which seem to owe nothing to the constraints or incentives of the official sub-generic codes. In any event, the more legitimate a given area, the more necessary and "profitable" it is to be competent in it, and the more damaging and "costly" to be incompetent. Or at least that's what I think Barthes would say. back to my studies
― toothy philanthropist, Friday, 28 January 2005 19:11 (twenty-one years ago)
xpost
Hold on a sec, that joke didn't go well, Hari completely fouled it up - I call
bullshit― Frogman Henry, Friday, 28 January 2005 20:09 (twenty-one years ago)
the best bit is you can see my thought process.
"hmm, that didn't work, i'll just stick a 'www.' infront of the last thing."
― Hari A$hur$t (Toaster), Friday, 28 January 2005 20:26 (twenty-one years ago)