What is art?

September 19, 2001 9:16 AM

What is art? A German composer describes the WTC bombings as "the greatest work of art one can imagine." (Then he apologized after four concerts were cancelled.) Perhaps he should have lunch with Jerry Falwell -- they'll have a lot to talk about.
posted by Steven Den Beste (27 comments total)

Each of us is, as you know, a person with many levels -- there are after all whole cultures which have differentiated them. I have a sexual center, three vital centers, two mental centers and a suprapersonal center. If I can perceive that, I have come far enough to have awoken seven different centers in myself. And with different things I can bring each center into vibration. I can set my sexual center in vibration with a certain sort of music, but with another music I can set my supranatural center in vibration. And I will add to that: have you perhaps gone far enough yet to discover which parts of a type of music, or which pieces of music, set which of your centers especially in vibration?

Oh, now I understand.

Those wacky Germans! Some would describe Stockhausen's music as "the greatest work of terrorism one can imagine," so I'm not terribly outraged.
posted by Skot at 9:27 AM on September 19, 2001

Of course, Stockhausen maintains the line was taken out of context. I must admit I was beyond appalled when I read the article, but in context (as detailed on Stockhausen's website) It seems believable he has been misrepresented. I am now a little miffed that reporters are still using such sensationalism to sell their craft. Hmmmph.
posted by skittles at 9:31 AM on September 19, 2001

Yellow Journalism? Naaa - not im America!
posted by Nauip at 9:36 AM on September 19, 2001

if one is familar with stockhausen's work, this quote is not at all unusual or surprising. just unfortunate. and yes, out of context -- even on the front page here it says "german composer", and i'm thinking some man who typically arranges strings or piano or something. upon clicking and finding that it's stockhausen, it makes a hell of a lot of sense.

fishfucjek.
posted by fishfucker at 9:36 AM on September 19, 2001

Stockhausen declares that he has called the attacks 'Lucifer's greatest work of art'.

I tend to believe Stockhausen. A lot of journalists seem to be obsessed with the question who is good and who is bad at this moment.
posted by tsja at 9:37 AM on September 19, 2001

in fact: this other frontpage post which got deleted (as a double) seemed to have much more perspective (sorry if there's any faux pas regarding the repost of this, but i thought it was rather descriptive):

Stockhausen Calls Attacks Works of Art: The pioneering electronic composer stated that, "Characters [that] can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of, that people practice madly for 10 years, completely, fanatically, for a concert and then die. That is the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos. I could not do that. Against that, we, composers, are nothing." He then apologized. (posted by ryanshepard)
posted by fishfucker at 9:39 AM on September 19, 2001

I've always believed that anything can be a work of art, in the right context. So: my bed that I sleep on is not a work of art, but Tracy Emin's "My Bed" in a gallery *is* a work of art. If the WTC terrorists, like clichéd villains from Superman, had planned for their atrocity to be "the most abominable and infamous work of art of the 21st Century", and had made that clear after the event, then perhaps, yes, we could be having some conversation about the legitimacy of their statement.

Certainly I have to concur with Stockhausen to the extent that the terrorists' actions have had more effect on humanity this year than any painting or music composition. And if, as Stockhausen claims, he in fact said "Lucifer's greatest work of art", it would be hard to disagree.

But I think the context of the WTC tragedy was not art, but terrorism, plain and simple. And that's how we have to view the awful events.
posted by skylar at 9:45 AM on September 19, 2001

Here's the thing. I remember when Challenger blew up that a friend of mine (a curmudgeonly sort, and ordinarily not given to deep artistic thought) pointed out that the picture of the vapor trail and explosion, splitting off into two plumes, was "beautiful". I then placed a full-page color newspaper page of the photo on my dorm door for several weeks, realizing he was making a point about media presentation of the imagery and that we are both drawn to such images and repelled by them. (This is a concept which has intrigued many artists over time; consider a lush, gorgeous Renaissance painting of Christ on the cross, for example.)
posted by dhartung at 9:51 AM on September 19, 2001

Some people, in the aftermath of the attacks, quoted Yeats' The Second Coming: "All is changed, changed utterly." Not all of them quoted the line which follows: "A terrible beauty is born." And though it makes me queasy to say it, there was something about those images of the planes being swallowed up by the buildings which bypassed the rational response of horror, or even the instinctive response of fear. Yes, it was witnessing death; but the sublime is always likened to the taste of mortality.

So, the attacks weren't "works of art" or "performances", but that they carried an aesthetic capacity makes them all the more troubling. It reminds me of the crowds who gathered to watch public executions in the 1700s, all the while analysing their own conflicting responses.
posted by holgate at 9:53 AM on September 19, 2001

Does every idiot in the world that makes a stupid comment about WTC now get to be front page news?
posted by spilon at 9:54 AM on September 19, 2001

His use of the word "art" in describing it was definitely a bad choice,

It was, but it shouldn't have been. The word "art" often means something quite different to an artist than to a non-artist. A "work of art" has a moral connotation to many people. Something has to be "good" to be considered a work of art. Artists, I think, often consider "bad" art to be "art" nonetheless.
posted by jpoulos at 9:57 AM on September 19, 2001

Really, the problem here is what Stockhausen means by art -- and for an electronic composer, this could mean quite a lot of things. Once one starts to delve into the meanings of "art," it's realized that there's no easy answer. Artists on the his scale are also given to speaking grandiosely -- his comment was so ambiguous that I doubt anyone should be reading any meaning whatsoever into it. (However, it was still ill-timed and badly thought out.)
posted by tweebiscuit at 10:04 AM on September 19, 2001

I thought it was well timed and perfectly thought out since it was preceded by lucifer's, placing it in a context of intelligent destruction. It's not like he said we deserved it because it was god's wrath, divine destruction.

We know well what he means by art, planned (or unplanned but appropriated) symbolic performance, what composers do.
posted by mblandi at 10:34 AM on September 19, 2001

In our televisual age, 'art' (whatever that means) is a cute anarchronism.

Assuming the "anarchronism" is just a typo and not the topic of an obscure manifesto, why would you say this? I mean, I know it's been fashionable to blame TV for the Death of Art for about fifty years now, but for those of us who actually try and create it, it gets kind of tiresome. Enduring snob appeal notwithstanding, the meme is elitist and fatalistic. On the other hand, if you've already given up on art, it is immensely comforting to think this.

In the past, art was a way of participating in writing history, but we live currently in an endless now-ever (Hakim Bey's term), and art has become dependent upon its enemy - the written word - in order to shore itself up against the ruins of history.

After countless attempts to understand this string of words (well, three times, and then I got tired), I have failed. Little help?
posted by Skot at 10:51 AM on September 19, 2001

Whatever else can be said about modern television, I think it is worth reflecting upon the fact that after years of being served rehashed "rats-in-a-maze" type programs under the guise of "reality programming" we were violently shocked by last week's unending display of genuine reality on television.

Unfortunately the superabundance of this reality has lead to a great backlash whereby we now wish to make examples of everyone and anyone who happens to say not only things we disagree with but are part of reality, but even things which merely sound like something we would disagree with.
posted by clevershark at 11:21 AM on September 19, 2001

Ack: slap me down for conflating my Yeats. Easter, 1916, not The Second Coming.
posted by holgate at 11:27 AM on September 19, 2001

"Terrorists are the only true avant-garde artists because they're the only ones who are still capable of really surprising people."
      -Laurie Anderson
posted by matthew at 12:10 PM on September 19, 2001

I had conflated yeats once. Very painful. One yeat swelled up to the size of a football.
posted by Grangousier at 12:24 PM on September 19, 2001

It could be said that the early dada artists were "cultural terrorists."
posted by mkn at 1:48 PM on September 19, 2001

Stockhausen's answer machine message is reputed to simply consist of one word: "NOW!" As of 11.9 a more apt phrase would surely be "NOW, WHAT?"
posted by feelinglistless at 3:48 PM on September 19, 2001

Obviously a langauge issue. Sounds like a better version would have been "one of evil's greatest achievements". He needs to learn to put the subject closer to the comment so a sound-byte, or the written equivalent, can't sensationalise it.
posted by krisjohn at 5:54 PM on September 19, 2001

I think it's a shame that when someone besides a political pundit opens his mouth, the result is sensationalism. In following coverage of the horror of 9/11, I have especially appreciated it when a different kind of thoughtful voice is heard. On one level, this can be ordinary people calling in to talk to Scott Simon on NPR. But it's important to hear from artists too. How about Richard Serra, the sculptor, who lives in TriBeCa and remarked, "To see people fall off those buildings like feathers, to watch the fire companies march in and know that they weren't going to march out — you try to assume a normal life, that you can work yourself back into." This is obviously an "aesthetic" experience on one level, but I did not find it offensive. And on NPR, Terry Gross had a very moving interview with a NYT/New Yorker architecture critic, who didn't slight the human disaster while reflecting on the role of the WTC buildings (which he'd originally hated) in the city's personality and psychology. What are some other atypical but appropriate and insightful responses MeFiers have seen from artists or thinking people whose domain isn't anti-terrorism intelligence?
posted by Zurishaddai at 7:53 PM on September 19, 2001

What holgate said. Except more, and I don't find it disturbing.

The human mind can dual-process. That's all its is. Sometimes, the emotional response to a scene conflicts with the emotional response appropriate to the scene's greater (or lesser?) reality. dhartung pointed out another great example - the space shuttle tragedy. The visuals generated by that terrible phenomena were excruciatingly beautiful. We would all be healthier and less touchy if we would just admit our ability to see more than one thing at a time, and recognize that our interpretation of the individual layers of an event need not bend to an overriding theme.

I can imagine that a Robert Duval-like character in Vietnam really did love the smell of napalm in the morning. Noting that one shouldn't like it, since it involves incendiary jelly and melting skin, is an intellectual process unrelated to the initial processing of sensory input. Some of the night-time-fireworks during Desert Storm were hauntingly compelling. Volcanoes, fantastical lightning storms, tidal waves - all manner of the catastrophic offer up their own moments of breathtaking beauty. We process on different levels, and our real-time integration of the resultant data streams is a little tardy. It's the way we work. No point in apologizing for it.
posted by Opus Dark at 9:47 PM on September 19, 2001

Matthew, Laurie Anderson paraphrased that line from Mao II, the book by Don DeLillo. He was talking about novelists. The concept is introduced on page 41 and clarified on pages 156-7.

Another Laurie Anderson quote comes to mind to describe the origin of this thread, it's from "Maria Teresa Teresa Maria", track 13 of "The Ugly One with The Jewels":

"A very sincere Swede who had never recovered from reading Siddartha..."

Change "Swede" to "German" and "Siddatha" to "Mao II".
posted by joemaller at 1:09 AM on September 20, 2001